Most junior players treat defense like an apology. They get pushed wide, they panic, and they either try a low-percentage winner off a ball they had no business attacking, or they flick something short that hands the point right back. What almost nobody teaches them is that defense is a skill with its own technique, its own targets, and its own numbers. That’s what the defensive lob-and-recover drill is built to fix.
I’m Michael Boothman, and after thirty years of coaching here in Sarasota, I’ve watched more points get thrown away by bad defense than by bad offense. A junior who can turn a losing position into a neutral one — who can buy two seconds and get back to the middle of the court — wins a surprising number of matches against players who hit harder. This drill teaches exactly that, and it does it the only way skills actually transfer: inside live rallies.
Why the defensive lob is a real shot, not a bailout
When a player is stretched wide and moving away from the court, they have two honest options. They can try to redirect the ball with pace, which is hard because they’re off balance and out of position, or they can hit a high, deep ball that gives them time to recover. The second option — a controlled defensive lob or a high, heavy topspin ball — is the smart play far more often than juniors realize.
Here’s the geometry. If you’re pulled ten feet off the doubles alley and you hit a flat, waist-high ball, it travels fast and lands short, and your opponent steps in and ends the point while you’re still scrambling. If you hit that same ball high and deep, it takes longer to reach your opponent, it pushes them back behind the baseline, and it gives you the one thing you desperately need: time to get back to a neutral position. You didn’t win the point with the lob. You just refused to lose it, and you reset the rally to even.
That distinction matters. This drill trains a shot that keeps players in points they’d otherwise concede.
The drill, step by step
This is a live-ball drill, which is the point. Live Ball Is the Method — one of the six pillars I coach every session at SRQ Tennis — means the majority of court time is spent in real, unpredictable rallies rather than hitting fed balls off a basket or a machine. A defensive skill only counts if it holds up when a real ball is coming at a real angle at real speed. You can’t groove defense off a comfortable feed, because comfortable feeds never create the pressure that defense exists to solve.
Set it up like this:
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The coach or a partner plays offense from the middle of the court. Their job is to move the defending player wide — first to the forehand corner, then to the backhand corner, alternating so the player never knows which side is coming.
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The defender starts at the center hash mark. Every ball is going to pull them off the court, and after every ball they must recover back toward the middle before the next one arrives.
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The defender’s only job on the wide ball is to hit it high and deep. We’re looking for a ball that clears the net by at least eight to ten feet and lands in the back third of the court. Height buys time; depth buys space.
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After the defensive ball, the point plays out live. If the defender recovers well and the offensive player’s next ball is weak, the roles can flip — now the defender attacks. That’s the whole lesson: good defense creates the chance to stop defending.
Run it in blocks of ten to fifteen balls, then rest. The recovery sprint back to center is the physically demanding part, and tired legs teach sloppy footwork, so keep the work-to-rest honest.
Put a number on it
Vague coaching produces vague players. Instead of telling a junior to “lob better,” I give them a target they can measure: out of ten defensive balls hit from a wide position, how many landed deep — in the back third of the court — and were followed by a full recovery back to the center third before the next ball? That’s a two-part standard, placement plus position, and it mirrors what the point actually demands.
Early on, a lot of juniors sit around three or four out of ten. They either hit the deep ball and forget to recover, or they recover in a hurry and shank the lob into the fence. Within a few weeks of running this inside live rallies, I want to see six or seven. When a player can consistently reset from a losing position most of the time, their whole match temperament changes — they stop treating a wide ball as a crisis. That’s confidence built on evidence, not on a coach telling them they’re doing great. You can read more about how I structure this kind of measurable coaching on my coaching page.
What parents will notice
If your junior has been losing points in bunches — getting run side to side and then coughing up an error — this is often the fix. Ask them after a match how many times they got pulled wide and still managed to stay in the point. A player who’s absorbed this drill will actually have an answer, because they’ve been counting something like it in practice.
The research backs the approach, too. The USTA’s player development materials consistently emphasize that defensive skills and court recovery are trainable competencies, not just athletic gifts — see the USTA’s coaching resources for how they frame movement and recovery in junior development. The players who commit to defense as a skill, rather than an admission of failure, tend to be the ones still standing in the third set.
Buying time isn’t glamorous. But in a long Sarasota fall season of tight junior matches, the kid who can reset a losing point one more time than their opponent is usually the kid holding the trophy. Defense wins more of those than anyone wants to admit.
See you on the court.
Coach Michael