There is a moment in almost every lesson where a coach has to decide something small that turns out to matter a lot: do I say something right now, or do I wait? A junior hits a forehand that lands short, looks back over their shoulder, and there’s a half-second window where I could jump in with a fix. For most of my career I filled that window. I have spent the last few years, watching my Sarasota juniors closely, learning to leave it open instead.
I’m Michael Boothman, a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota. One of the shifts that has changed my lessons the most is a quiet one, and it doesn’t look like coaching at all from the outside. Instead of feeding a stream of corrections, I hand the player control over when they get feedback. They hit, they self-assess, and when they want my read, they ask. It sounds almost too simple to matter. The research says it matters a great deal.
What “self-controlled feedback” actually means
In motor-learning studies, researchers compare two groups practicing the same skill. One group gets feedback on a schedule the experimenter sets — after every rep, or every third rep. The other group gets feedback whenever they request it. The learner controls the tap. Across a long line of studies, the self-controlled group tends to learn better, and the gap usually shows up not during practice but on a later retention test, when the feedback is taken away and you find out what actually stuck. If you want to read the primary research, the work of Gabriele Wulf and colleagues on self-controlled practice and the OPTIMAL theory of motor learning is the clearest starting point.
Why would asking for less feedback produce more learning? A few reasons hold up. When the player decides when to ask, they have to evaluate their own shot first — they can’t outsource the judging to the coach. That self-evaluation is itself a rep. Players also tend to ask for feedback after a good attempt, not a bad one, which quietly builds a memory of what right feels like rather than a running tally of mistakes. And there’s a motivation piece: having a say in your own practice raises engagement, and engaged players work harder without being told to.
How this connects to the Six Pillars
This is not a gimmick I bolted on. It sits right inside Confidence Is Built, Not Given, the fourth of the Six Pillars I coach by. Confidence doesn’t come from a coach saying “good job.” It comes from evidence — from a player watching their own ball land where they aimed and knowing they read it correctly before anyone confirmed it. When a junior calls their own shot short before I say a word, that’s evidence they own. My confirmation is just a footnote to something they already knew.
The old instinct — narrate every error the instant it happens — actually works against confidence. A player who hears twenty corrections in ten minutes learns that they can’t trust their own read of the ball, that the truth always lives in the coach’s mouth. Take the feedback away at a match, where there is no coach, and that player is stranded. The self-controlled player has been practicing the exact skill a match demands: judge your own shot, decide what to fix, adjust. That’s the skill under the skill.
What it looks like on a Sarasota court
Here’s roughly how I run it with a developing junior. We set a clear target — say, eight of ten forehands landing past the service line and inside the doubles alley. The player hits a set of ten and calls their own result out loud: “that one was short,” “that one was long, too much wrist.” I stay quiet. When they want my eyes on something specific, they ask a specific question: “was my contact out front on the short one?” Then, and only then, I answer, and I answer only what they asked.
Two things happen almost immediately. First, the questions get sharper over a few weeks. A player who started with “was that good?” ends up asking “did my racquet face open at contact?” — which means they’ve built a real internal model of the stroke, not just a vague sense of good and bad. Second, the volume of feedback drops and the quality of practice goes up. Fewer words from me, more thinking from them.
It isn’t hands-off coaching. I still set the constraints, run live-ball rally games, and step in hard when a safety or a big geometry issue shows up. The difference is that inside those boundaries, the player is steering. My job shifts from correcting every rep to designing a practice worth steering through.
For parents watching from the fence
If you watch one of these lessons, it can look like the coach isn’t doing much. Long stretches go by where I’m quiet and your kid is hitting, missing, adjusting, hitting again. That quiet is the work. The player who has to figure out what went wrong — and only asks for help when they’ve hit the edge of what they can solve — is building something a running commentary can’t give them. You’ll hear it on the ride home, too: instead of “coach said my elbow was low,” you’ll start hearing “I figured out I was late on the short ones.” That shift, from repeating the coach to owning the read, is the whole point.
If you want to see how this fits into the larger way I develop players in Sarasota, take a look at how I coach. And if you’ve got a junior and you’re curious whether this kind of practice would suit them, I’m easy to reach — text me at 941-239-4703 or email michael@srq.tennis.
The best thing I can build in a young player isn’t a forehand. It’s a player who can coach themselves through the next thousand forehands I’ll never see. Handing them the feedback dial, one lesson at a time, is how that starts.
— Michael Boothman, SRQ Tennis, Sarasota FL