Watch a junior match on any public court in Sarasota and you will see the same point end the same way. A ball floats deep and high to the backhand, the player backs up, gets jammed, and shovels a weak reply into the middle of the court. The next ball is a putaway. It is one of the most common gaps I see, and after thirty years of coaching I can tell you it is almost never a technique problem. It is a decision-and-position problem, and it responds well to the right kind of practice.
My name is Michael Boothman, and I run SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota. This week I want to walk through a drill I use constantly with juniors who freeze on the high backhand. It is built around one of the Six Pillars I coach by: Live Ball Is the Method. You cannot learn to read a heavy, arcing ball off a machine that sends the same feed every time. You learn it by facing real rallies, where the height, the depth, and the spin change on every shot. So the drill lives in live ball from the very first minute.
Why the high backhand is so hard
A high ball to the backhand sits in an awkward window. It is above the comfortable contact zone, it is often deep, and for a one-handed player it is above the shoulder where leverage disappears. The instinct is to retreat and let it drop, but by then the player has surrendered court position and time. The better answer is usually to meet the ball earlier, take it around shoulder height, and drive through it with the legs rather than the arm. That is a hard thing to teach with words. It is much easier to teach by building a situation where the player has to solve it over and over.
The drill: three-ball high backhand ladder
Here is the structure. It takes about fifteen minutes and works with a single player or a small group rotating in.
Phase one — the feed becomes a rally. I start each point with one deliberately high, deep ball to the player’s backhand. Not a slam, just a heavy loop that lands around the service line and kicks up toward the shoulder. But here is the key: after that first ball, the point is live. I play it out. The junior is not hitting a target off a dead feed; they are solving a real ball and then defending or attacking whatever comes back.
Phase two — the target rule. On that first backhand, the player has to land the ball past the service line and into the back third of the court. We are not chasing winners. We are chasing depth and control under a real, awkward condition. This is where another pillar, Accuracy Inside Representative Conditions, does the work. I am not asking for a perfect ball on a perfect feed. I am asking for eight out of ten backhands landing deep when the ball is high and the player is under a little pressure. The 85 percent standard tells us when the skill has actually transferred.
Phase three — score it. We play games to eleven. The player earns a point for winning the rally, and a bonus point any time they take that first high backhand early, at or above shoulder height, instead of backing up and letting it drop. Now the reward is tied to the behavior I actually want, not just the outcome.
What to watch for as a coach or parent
The first thing that changes is footwork, not the swing. Players who used to drift backward start loading the outside leg and stepping in. When you see that shift, you know the read is improving. The second thing is quiet hands. A high ball tempts juniors to muscle it with the arm; the fix is to turn early, get the racquet up, and let the legs and rotation supply the drive. If the ball is sailing long, the contact is usually too late and too low, not too hard.
One warning from experience: do not over-coach this. When a player is learning to read a moving ball, a stream of instructions between shots actually slows the learning down. Give one cue, let them play three or four points, then talk. The reps teach more than the talking does. If you want a fuller picture of how I structure sessions around live ball and small-group reps, that is on my coaching page.
Why this beats hitting off a basket
I still use fed balls to warm up a motion, but I do not build match skills on them. Research on motor learning and skill transfer has been clear for years that practice conditions that resemble the real task produce skills that hold up in competition, while blocked, repetitive feeding tends to produce practice-court strokes that fall apart under match variability. The United States Tennis Association’s coaching resources make the same point in their player development materials: variable, game-based practice is where durable skills are built. A junior who has faced two hundred slightly different high backhands in live rallies will handle the two-hundred-and-first in a match. A junior who has grooved the same perfect feed will still panic the first time the ball behaves differently.
Try it this week
If you have a junior in Sarasota who dies on the high backhand, give them fifteen minutes of this drill and score it honestly. Count how many of those first backhands land in the back third of the court, and count how many they take early instead of retreating. Write the numbers down. Next week, run it again and compare. That number going up is the evidence, and evidence is what builds a player’s confidence far more than anything I could say to them.
Questions about your junior’s development, or want to see how we train small groups on the public courts here in town? You can reach me directly at michael@srq.tennis or 941-239-4703.
See you on the court!
Coach Michael