A parent watched her daughter miss six forehands in a row during a Sarasota practice last week and quietly asked me if something was wrong. Nothing was wrong. The girl had just been given a harder feed, a moving target, and a rule that changed every third ball. She was missing because she was learning. I’m Michael Boothman, and after 30-plus years of coaching in Sarasota, one of the hardest ideas to get across is also one of the most useful: a practice court that produces zero mistakes is usually a practice court where nobody is getting better.
That runs against instinct. We watch a clean, tidy drill — ball, hit, ball, hit, everything landing in — and it looks like progress. It feels like progress. But research on motor learning has been clear for decades that the smoothness of a practice session is a poor predictor of how much a player actually retains. What looks messy today often holds up better next week, and what looks polished today often falls apart the moment conditions change.
The difference between performance and learning
There’s a distinction I lean on constantly, and it’s worth every parent understanding it. Performance is how someone plays right now, in this drill, this afternoon. Learning is what sticks — what shows up next week, in a different drill, or in a real match against a real opponent. They are not the same thing, and sometimes they pull in opposite directions.
If I feed a junior 50 identical forehands to the same spot, their performance in that drill will look great by ball 30. The stroke grooves, the misses drop, everyone feels good. But hand that same player a live ball that’s short one time and deep the next, and the polished stroke often disappears, because it was built for one situation only. The tidy drill trained a narrow skill. It didn’t train the reading, adjusting, and problem-solving that tennis actually demands.
Cognitive scientists call the useful version of this “desirable difficulties” — challenges introduced on purpose because they slow down today’s performance while improving tomorrow’s retention. You can read the research behind the term at the UCLA Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab, which has spent years documenting why the harder practice is often the one that lasts. When I make a Sarasota junior work at the edge of what they can do, I’m not trying to frustrate them. I’m trying to build something durable.
This is Pillar Four in action
One of the Six Pillars of the SRQ Tennis system is Confidence Is Built, Not Given. Confidence doesn’t come from a coach saying “great job” after an easy rep. It comes from evidence — real numbers, earned against real difficulty. And here’s the part that connects to mistakes: you cannot generate honest evidence without also generating errors. A player who goes 8 out of 10 to a target under live, game-like pressure has confidence you can trust, precisely because they saw the two that missed and kept going. A player who went 10 for 10 against a soft feed learned nothing they can lean on when a match gets tight.
So when a junior misses in my practice, I’m not looking to erase the miss. I’m looking to read it. Was it a spacing problem — feet in the wrong place? A contact problem — off-center on the strings? A decision problem — right shot, wrong moment? Each miss is data. Treated that way, a mistake stops being a failure and becomes the most useful thing that happened all session.
How to tell a good mistake from a bad one
Not every error is the productive kind, and this is where a coach’s eye earns its keep. Broadly, I sort practice mistakes into two piles.
The first pile is learning errors — the ones that happen because a player is being asked to do something slightly beyond their current comfort. A junior stretched wide to a ball they’d normally let go, a returner reading a serve a half-second faster than last week, a kid trying to hit with more margin over the net and overcooking a few. These misses trend in the right direction. I want more of them, not fewer.
The second pile is breakdown errors — the ones that signal a player is overwhelmed, fatigued, or missing a piece they genuinely don’t have yet. If a junior is missing everything, shoulders dropping, effort collapsing, that’s not desirable difficulty. That’s too much, too soon. The skill of coaching is keeping a player in the first pile and out of the second — hovering right at the edge where it’s hard enough to matter but not so hard it stops being useful.
What this means for parents this fall
School is back in Sarasota, tournament season is picking up, and I know the temptation is to want every practice to look sharp and every match to go well. Here’s what I’d gently push back on.
First, judge a practice by how much your child was challenged, not by how clean it looked. A session with visible struggle and a few frustrated misses is often the session that moved the needle. Ask your junior what was hard, not whether they won the drill.
Second, be careful about the ride home. A kid who just spent an hour at the edge of their ability doesn’t need a debrief of everything they missed. The misses were the point. If you want one question that helps, try “what got a little easier today?” rather than “why did you keep missing that backhand?”
Third, trust the arc, not the afternoon. Real development is bumpy. The weeks where your child seems to plateau or even slide backward are frequently the weeks a bigger change is being built underneath. I’ve watched it play out hundreds of times over three decades here, and the players who improved most were almost never the ones with the tidiest Tuesday practices.
A mistake on a Sarasota practice court, made for the right reason, isn’t a problem to be fixed. It’s a sign the work is real. If you want to talk through how your junior is progressing — or you’re weighing whether our approach fits your family — you can reach me directly at 941-239-4703 or michael@srq.tennis, or read more about how I coach on the about page.
See you on the court.
— Coach Michael