If you had watched me coach fifteen or twenty years ago, you’d have heard me say a lot of words. Load the hip. Drop the racquet head. Brush up the back of the ball. Finish over the shoulder. Get the elbow out. I could narrate a forehand in eleven steps, and I was proud of it. Three decades in, I’ve cut almost all of it. On most strokes I now coach two things, and I want to explain why less turned out to be more.
I’m Michael Boothman, a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis in Sarasota. I’ve spent more than thirty years on public courts around this city, and the single biggest change in how I teach isn’t a new drill or a piece of technology. It’s that I stopped trying to build a stroke like an instruction manual and started coaching the two things that actually decide where the ball goes.
The two laws
Here’s the whole thing, and it fits on an index card. Where a tennis ball goes is decided at one moment — contact — by two factors: where on the strings you hit it, and where the racquet face is pointed. Hit it near the center of the strings, with the face square to your target, and the ball goes where you want with the energy you gave it. Miss the center, or leave the face open or closed, and no amount of picture-perfect follow-through will save the shot.
I call these the two laws of ball-striking, and they’re the core of the pillar I coach by called Technique Is Geometry. The name is the point. A stroke isn’t a dance you perform correctly or incorrectly. It’s a geometry problem the body solves at contact. My job is to help the player solve it, not to make them memorize the choreography around it.
That reframing changes everything about how a lesson feels. Instead of “your takeaway is too high,” I ask a junior where the ball actually went and why. Long? The face was probably a touch open at contact, or you caught it low on the strings. We fix the cause, not the cosmetic. The follow-through, the grip, the footwork — all of it exists to serve those two laws, and when a player understands that, the details start organizing themselves.
Why the manual was holding kids back
There’s real science behind this, and it lines up with what I saw on court for years without having the words for it. Motor-learning researchers have shown repeatedly that when you flood a learner with instructions about their own body parts — an internal focus of attention — you actually interfere with the automatic systems that produce a smooth, powerful swing. Direct attention outward instead, toward the effect the player wants to create on the ball, and performance improves. Coaching-education bodies like the USPTA have moved hard in this direction over the last decade, and it matches the research on external versus internal focus that’s been building since the early 2000s.
Translated to a Sarasota junior on a hot afternoon: “brush up the back of the ball to send it deep and heavy” beats “supinate your forearm and lag the racquet.” Both might be technically accurate. Only one of them the kid can actually use in a live rally without freezing up.
And freezing is the real cost of over-coaching. A player carrying eleven checklist items into a point can’t play tennis. They’re a computer with too many programs open. I’ve watched talented juniors get worse the more I told them, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize I was the problem. The stroke wasn’t broken. The instruction was crowding out the play.
What I actually do now
A typical technical fix at SRQ Tennis goes like this. The player hits a few balls. We look at where they landed — not at their body. If the pattern is off, I trace it back to contact: center or off-center, face square or not. Then I give one cue, aimed at the ball or the target, and we hit again. One change at a time, checked against results, not against how the swing looks on video.
This is also why I lean so hard on live ball rather than basket feeding. You can groove a beautiful-looking stroke against a fed ball and have it fall apart the moment a real rally makes the contact point move. The two laws have to hold when the ball is coming at you differently every time. That’s the only place they matter.
None of this means technique doesn’t count — it counts enormously. It means I’ve gotten specific about what technique is. It’s not the shape of the swing. It’s what happens in the few inches around contact. Coach that, and a surprising amount of the rest takes care of itself.
The thirty-year version of confidence
There’s a quieter benefit to coaching this way that took me years to appreciate. When a player understands the two laws, they can diagnose their own misses. A kid who knows a long ball usually means an open face doesn’t need me hovering over them — they can adjust on the next point. That’s independence, and independence is where real confidence comes from. Not from me telling them they’re doing great. From them knowing why the last ball went out and what to do about it. That’s another one of our pillars, Confidence Is Built, Not Given, and it starts with making the game simple enough to reason about.
If I could go back and give my younger coaching self one note, it would be short: talk less, and point at the ball. You can read more about how the rest of the system fits together on the coaching page. But if you remember nothing else, remember the index card — center contact, square face. Thirty years of coaching in Sarasota, and it still comes down to those two.
See you on the court.
— Coach Michael