Every fall I have the same conversation with a parent. Their junior plays beautifully in practice — clean strokes, good decisions, a real feel for the ball — and then loses the first three games of a match before they’ve hit a single shot the way they can. The parent wants to know what’s wrong. Usually nothing is wrong. Their child is nervous, and nobody has taught them what to do about it.
I’m Michael Boothman, and I’ve coached tennis in Sarasota for more than thirty years. Competition nerves are one of the most common things parents ask me about, and one of the most misunderstood. So here is how I explain it to families at SRQ Tennis, and what you can actually do the next time your junior is pacing the fence before a match.
Nerves are not the enemy
The first thing worth saying: a racing heart before a match is not a malfunction. It’s your child’s body getting ready to perform. Elevated heart rate, quick breathing, a little adrenaline — that’s the physiological signature of a body preparing to move fast and pay attention. The exact same signals show up before a player has the best match of their life.
The problem isn’t the arousal. The problem is the story a young player tells themselves about it. When a junior interprets a pounding heart as “I’m about to fail,” the tension climbs, the grip tightens, the feet stop moving, and the strokes they own in practice fall apart. When they interpret the same pounding heart as “I’m fired up and ready,” the body stays loose and the tennis shows up.
This isn’t a pep-talk idea. Researchers have studied what they call “arousal reappraisal” — teaching people to read their stress signals as helpful rather than harmful — and found it measurably improves performance under pressure (Jamieson and colleagues, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology). The nerves don’t go away. The meaning attached to them changes, and that changes the result.
Channel the Fire
At SRQ Tennis, this is one of our Six Pillars, and we call it Channel the Fire. The idea is simple: competitive intensity — nerves, frustration, the desire to win — is fuel. Trying to make a junior “calm down” wastes that fuel. The job is to point it in the right direction.
The tool we teach for this is the Between-Point Routine, or BPR. Tennis is a game of small resets. There are only a few seconds between points, and what a player does with those seconds decides whether the fire helps them or burns them. Our routine has five steps, and a ten-year-old can learn it in one session:
- Breathe — one deliberate exhale to settle the body.
- Cue — a single word or thought for the next point (“split,” “cross-court,” “high and heavy”).
- Target — pick the actual spot on the court you’re aiming for.
- Visualize — see the shot for half a second before you hit it.
- Go — commit, no hesitation.
Notice what the routine does. It gives the nervous energy a job. Instead of standing there thinking “don’t double fault,” the player is breathing, choosing a cue, and picking a target. The fire now has somewhere to go.
What this looks like at the court
Here’s the part parents don’t always see. A junior who has a Between-Point Routine looks different between points. They’re not staring at their racquet strings replaying the last error. They turn away from the net, take their breath, walk to the baseline with a plan, and step in. It’s a small piece of choreography, and it’s the difference between a player who spirals after a bad game and one who resets.
We build this in practice, on purpose, under conditions that look like a match — because a routine you’ve only tried in a calm lesson vanishes the moment the score matters. That’s another of our pillars: Live Ball Is the Method. We don’t rehearse the BPR by feeding balls from a basket. We rehearse it inside real rallies, with a score, with something on the line, so that by the time your junior is at a Sarasota fall tournament the routine is a habit and not a hope.
What parents can actually do
You don’t need to coach the strokes. But you have real influence over the nerves, and most of it happens away from the court.
Normalize the feeling. Before the match, don’t say “just relax” — it doesn’t work, and it quietly tells your child their nerves are a problem. Try “feeling those butterflies means you care, and your body’s getting ready.” You’re handing them the reappraisal.
Praise the routine, not the result. After the match, resist the urge to review the score. Ask, “Did you take your breath and pick your target between points?” When you praise the process, you teach your child that the parts they control are what matter — which is exactly what lowers the pressure next time. This connects to another pillar we lean on hard, Confidence Is Built, Not Given: confidence comes from evidence a player collects about themselves, not from a parent insisting they’re great.
Keep the ride home light. The car after a loss is where a lot of young players quietly decide tennis isn’t fun anymore. Let them bring it up. If they don’t, talk about anything else. The debrief can happen at the next lesson.
Model it yourself. Juniors read their parents’ body language on the fence better than we like to admit. If you’re visibly tightening up on every point, your child feels it. Take your own breath.
The long game
I’ve watched a lot of talented Sarasota juniors over three decades, and the ones who last aren’t the ones who never get nervous. They’re the ones who learned early that nerves are just energy, and that they have a routine to spend it well. That’s a skill, and like any skill it’s built with reps, not born.
If your junior is playing well in practice and shrinking in matches, that’s not a talent ceiling — it’s a missing tool. It’s one of the most fixable things in the sport, and it’s one of my favorite things to teach, because the change is often fast and it spills over into everything else they do under pressure.
Want to see how we build this into a young player’s development? Take a look at how we coach at SRQ Tennis, or reach out. I’m always glad to talk through where your junior is and what would help.
See you on the court!
Coach Michael