There is a moment in almost every junior practice where a player starts to look frustrated. The rally is a little faster than they are comfortable with, the target is a little smaller than they would like, and their success rate has dropped from the tidy 9-out-of-10 they were hitting a minute ago to something closer to 6-out-of-10. The natural instinct, for the player and often for the parent watching from the fence, is to think something has gone wrong.
After more than thirty years of coaching, I have come to believe the opposite is usually true. When practice gets a little harder and the numbers dip, that is often the exact moment real learning starts. I am Michael Boothman, founder of SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota, and one of the ideas I lean on most is a concept researchers call “desirable difficulties.” It is not a slogan. It is one of the most consistent findings in the science of how people actually learn motor skills.
What “desirable difficulty” actually means
The term comes from the work of psychologist Robert Bjork and his colleagues at UCLA’s Learning and Forgetting Lab, who spent decades studying the gap between how well we perform while practicing and how well we retain a skill later. Their finding, repeated across many studies, is counterintuitive: conditions that make practice feel harder and slower in the moment often produce better long-term learning, while conditions that make practice feel smooth and easy often produce learning that evaporates by the next session. You can read more about their research at the UCLA Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab.
The key word is desirable. Not every difficulty helps. Making a ten-year-old hit forehands with a broken grip while blindfolded is a difficulty, but it is not a desirable one, because it does not build anything transferable. A desirable difficulty is a struggle that forces the player to do more of the real work of the skill: reading the incoming ball, adjusting their feet, finding the target under a little pressure. Those are the exact demands they will face in a match. The difficulty is desirable precisely because it rehearses the thing that matters.
Why easy practice fools everyone
Here is the trap. If I feed a junior forty forehands from the same spot, at the same pace, to the same place on the court, they will start hitting beautifully within a few minutes. The parent sees clean contact and a high success rate. The player feels great. Everybody drives home happy.
Then the match comes, the ball arrives at a different height and angle every single time, and the stroke that looked so polished on Tuesday falls apart on Saturday. The practice was smooth, but it was smooth because it removed all the problems tennis actually asks a player to solve. Smoothness felt like progress. It was mostly an illusion.
This is why the second of my Six Pillars is Live Ball Is the Method. The majority of court time in our groups is spent in real, unpredictable rallies rather than fed balls or machine feeds. A live ball is inherently a desirable difficulty: it is never quite the same twice, so the player has to genuinely read and adjust every repetition instead of grooving one identical swing. It feels harder. It looks messier. It sticks better.
How I use it without breaking a kid’s confidence
The obvious worry is that harder practice will crush a young player’s confidence, and that is a real risk if you handle it carelessly. This is where another of the Six Pillars matters: Confidence Is Built, Not Given. Confidence does not come from empty praise or from an artificially easy drill that guarantees success. It comes from evidence — from a player watching their own real numbers climb under conditions that actually resemble a match.
So the difficulty has to be dialed to the right level, and I track it with numbers rather than guesswork. A useful benchmark I use is the 85/100 Rule: I want a player operating in a zone where they are succeeding often enough to stay engaged and learning, but not so often that the task has stopped teaching. If a junior is hitting 10-out-of-10 to a target, the target is too big or the feed is too kind, and I make it harder. If they are hitting 2-out-of-10, they are drowning, and I make it easier. The sweet spot — enough success to feel capable, enough failure to keep adapting — is exactly where desirable difficulty lives.
A few of the ways this shows up on our Sarasota courts:
- Shrinking the target. Instead of “hit it cross-court,” we hit to a cone or a taped zone, and we count. When the accuracy holds at the smaller target, we know something real improved.
- Adding a decision. Rather than telling a player where to hit, I make them read a cue and choose, so the difficulty is cognitive, not just physical. That decision-making is most of what wins matches.
- Raising the pace or depth gradually. We push the rally speed up in small steps, watching the numbers, backing off if the stroke starts to collapse.
- Introducing a little score. A short competitive game adds mild pressure, which is a desirable difficulty because pressure is part of the real test.
What this means for parents
If you are watching your child practice and their success rate looks lower than you expected, resist the urge to read that as a bad sign. Ask a different question: is the practice actually harder in a way that looks like tennis? A junior who is comfortably making every ball in a predictable drill may be learning less than one who is missing a few while solving real problems.
The dip in the moment is often the price of durability later. The player who struggles a little on Tuesday, working through live balls and shrinking targets and small competitive games, is frequently the one whose game holds together on Saturday. Smooth practice feels like progress. Slightly-harder-than-comfortable practice, aimed at the right things and measured with honest numbers, tends to be progress.
That is the whole reason I would rather see a good junior a little frustrated than a little bored. Frustration, handled well and pointed at the right challenge, is one of the best signs I know that a player is getting better.
If you want to see how we build this into our group and private sessions, you can read more about our approach on the SRQ Tennis coaching page. And if you have a junior in the Sarasota area and want to talk through where they are and where they could go, I am always happy to have that conversation.
See you on the court, Michael Boothman