Every September, the same thing happens on my courts in Sarasota. The US Open wraps up, a two-week stretch of the best tennis on the planet beamed into living rooms, and the next junior who walks onto the court is trying something new. A bigger backswing. A jump on the forehand. A grunt they did not have in August. They watched the pros, and they want to look like them.
I am Michael Boothman, and after thirty years of coaching I have learned not to squash that instinct. A kid who just watched a great match and shows up fired up to work is a gift. The job is not to tell them to stop copying. The job is to help them copy the right things — because most juniors copy the parts that are visible on a broadcast and miss the parts that actually win points.
The broadcast hides the real work
Television rewards the dramatic. The camera catches the enormous windmill takeback, the leap off the ground, the follow-through that finishes behind the head. Those are the frames that make the highlight reel. So that is what a ten-year-old goes home and practices in the driveway.
Here is the problem. The swing a junior sees on TV is the end product of a body that is already moving perfectly, balanced perfectly, and meeting the ball in exactly the right spot. The pro earned the right to that big finish by doing a hundred invisible things first. When a junior imports the finish without the foundation, they get a swing that looks impressive and produces a ball that lands in the back fence.
This is where one of our coaching principles at SRQ Tennis does a lot of quiet work. We call it Technique Is Geometry — the idea that a good shot comes down to two things you can actually see and measure: a centered contact point on the strings, and a square racquet face at the moment of contact. We coach the contact, not the choreography. The windmill swing is choreography. The clean, centered strike is geometry. One is decoration; the other is the shot.
What I tell the fired-up September junior
When a kid comes in wanting to hit like the player they watched, I do not lecture them about the foundation. I give them something concrete to look for. I ask them to watch the same match again, but this time to ignore the arm and watch two things: where the player’s feet are a split second before they hit, and where the ball meets the strings.
It changes what they see. Suddenly they notice the pro is almost always balanced and set early, contact out in front, weight already moving forward. The flashy finish is just what happens after a well-struck ball — not the cause of it. Once a junior sees that, we can get to work on the parts that matter, and they stop chasing the parts that do not.
Then we measure. If a player tells me they want a forehand like the one they saw, fine — let us find out how clean yours is right now. We set a target and count. Eight out of ten balls landing in a cross-court zone under a live rally, not off a gentle feed, is a real standard. We call it the 85/100 Rule: you do not own a shot until it holds up under game-like conditions, not just when a coach is dropping balls into your strike zone. A kid who can hit eight of ten to a target has something the highlight reel cannot give them. A kid with a beautiful empty backswing and two of ten does not.
Copying is learning — when it is aimed
I want to be careful here, because copying good tennis is one of the oldest and best ways to learn a sport. Watching skilled players and imitating them is a real mechanism; motor-learning researchers call it observational learning, and it works. The USTA’s player development resources are full of material built on exactly this idea — showing young players strong models and letting them absorb the movement. You can find a lot of it free on the USTA’s player development site.
The trick is aiming the imitation. Point a junior at the right detail and imitation accelerates their learning. Leave it unaimed and they imitate the most dramatic thing on screen, which is almost never the most important thing. My job in September is to be the one pointing.
A simple fall drill for the TV-inspired junior
If you have a junior who came home from the US Open ready to reinvent their game, here is something you can do with them that channels the excitement into something useful.
Stand them at the baseline and feed a live rally — you hitting real balls back, not dropping them. Put a cone or a towel in the cross-court corner as a target. Tell them one rule: the only thing that matters this round is hitting the target, and they can swing however they want to get there. Count how many out of ten land in the zone.
Then run it again, but this time add one cue — “catch the ball out in front” or “balanced before you swing.” Count again. Most kids improve immediately, and they feel it. What you have done is shown them, with numbers they can see, that the small foundation cue moved the result more than the big swing ever did. That is a lesson that sticks far longer than anything I could say.
This matters because of how confidence actually gets built. It is not built by praise and it is not built by looking the part. It is built by evidence — by a junior watching their own number climb from four of ten to seven of ten and knowing they earned it. A kid who has proof they are getting better walks into a fall tournament differently than a kid who just hopes they look good.
The fall ahead in Sarasota
September is a good moment for this conversation because the fall junior season is just getting going around Sarasota, the courts at places like Potter Park and Pineview are busy again after the summer, and motivation is high. Use it. The enthusiasm a junior brings home from watching great tennis is fuel. Our job — mine as a coach, yours as a parent — is to point it at the things that will still matter in November, long after the highlights have scrolled past.
If your junior wants to hit like the players they watched, that is a great place to start. Just help them copy the contact, not the costume. You can read more about how we approach development at SRQ Tennis on our coaching page, or come find me on a court in Sarasota this fall.
See you on the court!
Coach Michael