People assume that after thirty years of coaching tennis, you stop learning. I’ve found the opposite. The longer I’ve worked on Sarasota’s public courts, the more I’ve had to unlearn — and the more I’ve come to trust that the game keeps teaching you if you let it.
I’m Michael Boothman. I founded SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota, and I’ve been a USPTA Elite Professional for most of my adult life. Thirty-plus years in, I still walk onto Potter Park or Pineview in the morning expecting to be surprised by something. That’s not humility for its own sake. It’s the only posture that has ever made me a better coach.
The trap of the confident coach
Early in my career I was certain. I had a method, I had drills, and I could explain a forehand in one clean paragraph. When a kid didn’t improve, my instinct was to explain it again — louder, slower, with more detail. I assumed the problem was that they hadn’t understood me yet.
It took me years to see the flaw. I was measuring my coaching by how good my explanation sounded, not by whether the player actually got better. Those are two completely different things, and confusing them is the single most common mistake I see in coaching — my younger self included.
The fix wasn’t a new drill. It was a new question: what does the evidence say? Not “did that look right,” but “how many balls out of ten landed where we aimed, under conditions that felt like a real point?” The moment I started keeping score of the things that actually matter, my certainty had to answer to reality. Sometimes reality disagreed with me. That’s the good part.
Confidence is built, not given — for coaches too
One of the Six Pillars I coach by is Confidence Is Built, Not Given. The idea is simple: a player’s belief in a shot should rest on evidence, not on a coach telling them “good job.” If a junior has hit eight out of ten backhands to a target in a live drill, they don’t need me to hand them confidence — they’ve earned it, and they can see it.
What I didn’t expect is that the same pillar applies to the person holding the basket. My confidence as a coach isn’t built by how long I’ve been doing this or how many certifications hang on the wall. It’s built the same way a player’s is: by watching real numbers move over weeks and months, and by being willing to change course when they don’t.
That’s why I write things down. Thirty years of notebooks tell me which approaches actually produced improvement and which ones just felt productive. The notebooks don’t care about my ego. When I look back at a player who plateaued for six weeks, the record shows me exactly when the numbers turned — and, more often than not, it was the week I stopped talking so much and let them play more live ball.
Staying a beginner on purpose
Here’s the strange thing about experience: it can make you worse if you let it calcify. The coach who has “seen it all” stops looking. And every player who walks onto the court is a genuinely new problem — a different body, a different learning style, a different relationship with pressure. The forehand that clicked for one ten-year-old will confuse the next.
So I try to stay a beginner on purpose. When a drill isn’t working, I assume I’m missing something about this player, not that the player is failing at my drill. When the research on motor learning shifts — and over three decades it has shifted a lot, toward more variability, more live-ball reps, and far less standing-and-explaining — I’d rather update than defend what I did in 1998.
Staying current is also just part of the job. My USPTA certification requires ongoing education, and I’ve never treated that as a box to check. The science of how people actually acquire skill is one of the most useful bodies of knowledge a coach can keep up with. You can read more about the professional standards behind that on the USPTA site. The certification isn’t the point; the habit of staying a student is.
What this means for the players in front of me
If you’re a parent watching from the fence in Sarasota, here’s the practical version of all this. A coach who is still learning will do a few recognizable things. They’ll measure progress with numbers instead of vague praise. They’ll change the plan when the plan isn’t working, rather than repeating it louder. They’ll spend most of the session on live ball, because that’s where skill actually transfers, and they’ll talk less than you might expect.
And they’ll be honest when something isn’t working yet. “Yet” is one of the most important words in coaching. A plateau isn’t a verdict — it’s information, and a coach who is paying attention treats it that way.
Thirty years in, the thing I’m most sure of is how much I still have to learn from the next kid who steps on court and does something I didn’t predict. That’s not a problem to solve. It’s the reason I still love the work. If you want to know more about how I got here and what SRQ Tennis is built on, my story is on the about page.
The game has been teaching me for three decades. My only real job is to keep showing up ready to listen.
— Coach Michael