The overhead is the shot that looks easy on TV and falls apart on a Tuesday afternoon in Sarasota. A junior is at the net, the opponent throws up a lob, and you can watch the whole thing unravel in slow motion—late footwork, a cramped swing, and a ball that either sails long or gets shanked into the fence. I’ve coached this shot for more than thirty years, and I can tell you the fix almost never lives in the swing itself.
I’m Michael Boothman, a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota. When a parent tells me their kid “can’t hit an overhead,” I don’t start with the arm. I start with the ball flight and the feet, because that’s where the shot is actually won or lost. The drill I lean on for this is what my players call the lob-and-smash drill, and it’s built entirely on live ball—one of the reasons it transfers to real matches instead of just looking good in a warm-up.
Why the overhead breaks down
Here’s what usually happens. A coach feeds ten overheads from a basket, all landing in the same spot, at the same height, at the same speed. The player looks great. Then a match arrives, the lob comes off a real racquet with real spin and an unpredictable arc, and the whole thing collapses. The skill never transferred because the practice never asked the player to read anything.
That’s the heart of the second of our Six Pillars: Live Ball Is the Method. The majority of court time should be spent on real, reacting rallies—not fed balls and not a machine spitting out identical shots. A lob in a match is a problem to be solved: How deep is it? How much spin? Am I taking this out of the air or letting it bounce? A basket feed removes every one of those questions, so it can’t teach a player to answer them. Live ball keeps the questions in.
The overhead also fails for a boring, physical reason: the feet stop moving. Juniors tend to backpedal—which is slow and dangerous—instead of turning sideways and shuffling back. By the time they’re under the ball, they’re off balance, reaching, and the swing has to rescue a bad position. No swing is that good.
The lob-and-smash drill, step by step
You need two players (or a coach and a player) and about fifteen minutes. It runs in three progressive stages, and you don’t move to the next stage until the current one holds up.
Stage one — read and position, no finish. The feeder stands at the baseline and lobs to the player at the net. The player’s only job is to turn sideways immediately, shuffle back with the racquet already up in the “trophy” position, and get behind the ball—then catch it in the non-hitting hand or let it bounce. No swing yet. We’re isolating the read and the footwork. I want to see the first move be a shoulder turn, not a backpedal. Run this until the player is consistently set up early with time to spare.
Stage two — smash to a target, still cooperative. Now the player finishes the overhead, but the feeder is still cooperating with catchable lobs. Put a target down—a cone or a towel in the deep corner of the opposite service box or deeper. The player calls out before they hit whether they’re taking it in the air or on the bounce. Deep, high lobs bounce; shorter ones get taken out of the air. We track it: eight out of ten to the target zone before we advance. That number matters more than how hard the ball is hit.
Stage three — live point off the lob. This is where it becomes real tennis. The feeder now tries to lob the player—varying depth, spin, and disguise—and the point is live from there. If the smash comes back, play it out. Suddenly the player has to read a lob they didn’t know was coming, choose air or bounce, recover, and stay in the point. That’s a match, compressed into a drill.
The coaching cues that actually help
I keep the talk minimal here, because the third pillar, Technique Is Geometry, tells me the swing mostly takes care of itself once the position is right. If the player is behind the ball with a square racquet face at contact, the overhead works. So I coach the setup, not the choreography.
The two cues I use most:
- “Turn and point.” The instant the lob goes up, turn sideways and point at the ball with the non-hitting hand. That hand is a rangefinder—it keeps the eyes tracking and the shoulders loaded.
- “Contact out in front, above your hitting shoulder.” Not behind the head. If the ball drifts behind you, you didn’t move back far enough—which sends us right back to the footwork.
Notice what I’m not saying: I’m not breaking the swing into six pieces. Research on motor learning and attentional focus—the USTA has good, accessible material on this in its player development resources—consistently shows that an external focus (the target, the ball, the contact point) produces better results than an internal focus on body parts. “Point at the ball and finish to the cone” beats “pronate your forearm” almost every time with a junior.
What good looks like
A player who owns this drill doesn’t look rushed on lobs anymore. The first move is a clean shoulder turn. They’re set up early enough that they can choose to take it in the air or let it bounce, and they call it before it happens. The smash finds the deep corner more often than not, and—this is the real tell—when the lob is nasty and disguised in stage three, they still handle it, because they’ve practiced reading lobs, not just hitting fed ones.
That’s the whole point of building practice that looks like a match. If you want more on how we structure live-ball work across a session, that’s the backbone of how we coach at SRQ Tennis, and it’s the same principle whether we’re on the overhead, the return, or a baseline rally.
Give the lob-and-smash drill fifteen minutes twice a week for a few weeks. The overhead that used to fall apart on Tuesday afternoons starts holding up—and it holds up in matches, which is the only place the scoreboard cares about.
See you on the court!
Coach Michael