The calendar turned to September, school is back, and the fall junior tournament season in Sarasota is officially underway. After a full summer of training volume, this is the stretch where players finally get to test what they built. And every year, watching juniors compete this time of year, Michael Boothman notices the same thing: the players who improve fastest in the fall aren’t necessarily the ones with the prettiest forehand. They’re the ones who have learned to manage the twenty seconds between points.
That gap — after a point ends and before the next one starts — is where most junior matches are actually decided. A player misses an easy ball, mutters at themselves, stews about it, and walks to the baseline still carrying the last mistake into the next point. Two errors become four. A close set slips away, not because the strokes broke down, but because the head did. If you have ever watched your child play a match and thought “they looked fine in practice,” this is usually why.
Why the fall exposes it
Summer training is mostly cooperative. Rallies are built to keep the ball in play, drills reward rhythm, and there is no scoreboard. Competition is the opposite. The score creates pressure, pressure creates frustration, and frustration — left unmanaged — leaks into the very next swing. That is not a character flaw. It is a skill that simply hasn’t been trained yet, because it rarely gets trained in a normal practice.
This is exactly what the sixth of the Six Pillars, Channel the Fire, is built to address. The premise is simple: competitive frustration is not the enemy. A junior who gets angry after a missed shot cares, and that fire is fuel. The job of coaching is not to stamp it out with “just relax” or “it’s fine.” The job is to give the player a reliable place to put that energy so the next point starts clean.
The Between-Point Routine
The tool we teach for this is the Between-Point Routine, or BPR. It is a short, repeatable sequence a player runs after every single point, win or lose, so the emotional reset happens automatically instead of relying on willpower in the moment. It has five beats:
- Breathe — one slow breath to drop the heart rate and release the last point.
- Cue — a physical reset, usually turning to the back fence and adjusting the strings, a small ritual that signals “that point is over.”
- Target — decide the plan for the next point. Where is the serve going? What is the first-ball intention?
- Visualize — a one-second picture of executing that plan.
- Go — step to the line and play.
None of this is complicated, and that is the point. Under pressure, players do not rise to the occasion; they fall to the level of their habits. A routine that has been rehearsed hundreds of times in practice is what a junior can actually reach for when a match gets tight. A vague instruction like “stay positive” is not something you can execute when your hands are shaking.
The research backs this up. Sport psychologists have studied pre-performance and between-point routines for decades, and the USTA’s player development resources consistently emphasize consistent routines as one of the most trainable mental-game skills in junior tennis. It is not personality. It is practice.
How we train it, not just talk about it
The mistake most programs make is treating the mental game as a pre-match pep talk instead of a rehearsed skill. In our sessions, the BPR gets reps like any stroke. During live-ball games we will occasionally pause and ask a player what their plan is for the next point before they are allowed to start it. We keep score in practice specifically so frustration shows up in a place where we can coach it, rather than saving its first appearance for a real tournament where the player is alone.
That connects to the way we structure everything, which you can read more about on our coaching page: the majority of court time is spent in live, game-like conditions rather than fed-ball drills, because a routine that only works while a coach is feeding balls is not a routine that will survive a fall match on Court 4 with a tight score and nobody watching but a nervous parent.
What parents can do this fall
If your junior is competing this season, the single most useful thing you can do is protect the routine rather than the result. After a match, resist the urge to review every missed shot in the car. Instead, ask one question: “Did you run your routine between points?” That keeps the focus on the process the player can control, and it quietly reinforces that the reset — not the outcome of any single point — is the real skill being built this fall.
You will also want to watch for the tell. A player who is losing the between-point battle usually shows it physically: shoulders drop, racquet gets tossed lightly, they rush to the line to “get it over with.” A player who is winning it moves deliberately, uses the full time, and looks the same after a lost point as after a won one. That steadiness is not natural calm. It is a trained routine doing its job.
The long game
Here is the honest part. A player will not master this in September. The BPR takes a full competitive season, sometimes two, before it becomes automatic under real pressure. But fall is the ideal time to start, because the matches are finally there to train against. Every tournament, every practice set, every tight game is a rep.
Thirty-plus years of coaching in Sarasota has taught me that strokes get juniors into matches, but routines are what let them win the ones that are close. This fall, if a player builds nothing else, building the twenty seconds between points will do more for their record than another month of forehands.
If you have a junior heading into the fall season and want to see how this fits into a bigger development plan, reach out — michael@srq.tennis or 941-239-4703. Watching a young player learn to channel the fire instead of being run by it is one of the best parts of this season.
— Coach Michael