Watch a strong 14-year-old return a serve and it can look like reflexes. The ball leaves the server’s racquet and the returner is already moving to the right spot, racquet back, balanced. Parents often tell me their kid “just has fast hands.” After thirty years coaching in Sarasota, I can tell you the hands are rarely the story. What you’re actually watching is anticipation — the player read the server’s body and the toss before the ball was ever struck, and bought themselves an extra fraction of a second. I’m Michael Boothman, founder of SRQ Tennis, and anticipation is one of the most misunderstood skills in junior development. It’s also one of the most trainable, if you train it the right way.
Reaction time has a ceiling. Anticipation doesn’t.
A first serve in high-level junior tennis can arrive in well under half a second. Pure reaction — see the ball, then decide, then move — is too slow to cover that. Simple reaction time in humans sits around 200 milliseconds and it barely improves no matter how much you drill it. So if a player is only reacting to the ball after it’s struck, they will always feel rushed against a good server, no matter how quick their feet are.
The players who look unhurried aren’t reacting faster. They’re deciding earlier. They pick up information before contact — the tilt of the tossing arm, where the toss is placed relative to the server’s head, the shoulder line, the depth of the knee bend. Researchers studying this use occlusion studies, where skilled players watch video of an opponent that cuts to black at the moment of contact. Expert players still predict where the ball is going, because they were never relying on the ball in the first place. Governing bodies like the USTA build this perceptual side of the game into their player-development framework for exactly that reason: it separates good juniors from great ones.
Anticipation is Pillar Two in action
This connects directly to one of our Six Pillars: Live Ball Is the Method. The pillar says the majority of court time should be spent hitting real, live rallies against a person — not fed balls from a basket and not a ball machine. Most people read that pillar as being about shot-making under pressure, and it is. But it’s also the only way anticipation ever develops.
Here’s the problem with a ball machine: it gives no cues. It’s a black box. The ball just appears, launched from a fixed point with no arm, no shoulder, no toss to read. A junior can hit a thousand forehands off a machine and never once practice the skill of reading where a ball is going before it’s hit — because there is nothing to read. The machine has its place for grooving a specific contact point, and I use one. But a player raised primarily on machine feeds will step onto a match court and feel late on everything, because they’ve trained their strokes and starved their eyes.
Live ball is the opposite. Every rally is a repetition of reading a human being. Where are their feet? How early is their racquet back? Are their shoulders coiled to rip it, or are they stretched and defending? A junior playing live ball is running thousands of these tiny prediction reps without even naming them. That’s why our courts stay loud with real rallies instead of quiet with basket feeds.
How we actually train it in Sarasota
Anticipation sounds abstract until you turn it into something a 12-year-old can do on a Tuesday. A few of the ways we build it:
Early-call drills. During a live rally, the returning player has to call “cross” or “line” out loud before the hitter makes contact. At first they’re wrong a lot, and that’s fine — being wrong is the data. Within a couple of weeks most juniors are reading the hitting shoulder and getting the call right well over half the time. The number climbs, and they can see it climbing, which matters (that’s Pillar Four, Confidence Is Built, Not Given — evidence, not empty praise).
Constrained returns. On serve return we sometimes tell the returner to watch only the toss and the tossing arm, nothing else, and just move to a spot — no swing required. Strip the task down to the read, and the read gets sharper.
Live-ball point play with a reading focus. Most of a session is just points, but with one perceptual cue we’re hunting that day. The strokes take care of themselves when the eyes are in the right place early.
None of this works off a machine. All of it requires a live opponent giving off honest cues, which is the whole point of the pillar.
What this means for parents
If you’re evaluating a program for your junior here in Sarasota, watch how the court is being used. A court where kids stand in line and hit ball after ball off a basket or a machine looks organized and busy — but a lot of that time isn’t building the reading skill that decides real matches. A court full of live rallies looks messier and it’s doing more. You want your child learning to read a human being across the net, because that’s what a match is.
Anticipation is also patient work. A junior won’t suddenly “get fast.” They’ll get early — a week at a time, one accurate pre-contact call at a time — and one day you’ll notice they’re not rushed against a kid who used to overpower them. That’s not new hand speed. That’s a year of reading players instead of chasing balls.
If you want to see how the Six Pillars shape the way we run every session, you can read more about our approach on the coaching page. And if your junior has been living on a ball machine and feeling late in matches, that gap is fixable — it just takes live ball, and a little patience.
See you on the court.
Coach Michael