Sooner or later, most tennis parents hear it: “I don’t want to go today.” Sometimes it’s said quietly in the car. Sometimes it’s a full stand-off in the driveway. Either way, it stops you cold, because you’re not sure whether you’re looking at a passing mood or a real message.
I’m Michael Boothman, and in 30-plus years of coaching juniors here in Sarasota, I’ve watched a lot of kids hit this wall — including plenty who went on to love the game for years afterward. The moment feels bigger than it usually is. What follows is how I’d think it through if it were your kid, and how to respond without either steamrolling them or folding at the first sign of resistance.
First, separate the rough patch from the real signal
Wanting to quit and having a bad week look almost identical from the outside. The difference is in the pattern, not the volume of the complaint.
A rough patch is usually tied to something specific and recent: a lost match, a friend who switched sports, a growth spurt that’s made their timing feel off, a coach who pushed on a weak spot that day. It flares up, and it fades within a session or two once the specific thing passes. A real signal is quieter and more consistent. The child stops talking about tennis entirely. The dread shows up before every session, not just the hard ones. They’ve genuinely moved their interest somewhere else and tennis has become the thing standing in the way.
Both are valid. But they call for different responses, and you can’t tell which one you have from a single “I don’t want to go.” You find out by watching the next two or three sessions and, more importantly, by asking — without an agenda attached to the answer.
Ask the question you actually want answered
Most of us, when a kid resists, ask a question that’s really a nudge: “You don’t want to let your team down, do you?” That’s not a question, it’s a lever. Kids hear it instantly and either shut down or comply for the wrong reason.
Try the plain version instead. “What part is feeling bad right now?” Then stop talking. The answer is usually more specific and more solvable than “tennis” — it’s a particular drill that embarrasses them, a kid in the group who’s faster, a serve that’s fallen apart, the feeling of being watched. A ten-year-old rarely hates tennis. They hate a feeling that happens to be attached to tennis this month.
Once you know the actual complaint, you have something to work with. A collapsing serve is a coaching problem, and a coach can fix it. Feeling slow next to a groupmate is a confidence problem, and confidence has a known fix.
Confidence Is Built, Not Given
That fix is one of the six pillars I coach by, and it’s the one that matters most here. Confidence Is Built, Not Given means we don’t paper over a slump with “you’re doing great, buddy” — kids see straight through empty praise, and it makes them trust you less, not more. Confidence gets rebuilt with evidence: real numbers on a small, specific task, tracked over a couple of weeks so the child can watch the line move.
When a junior tells me they’re the worst in the group, I don’t argue with the feeling. I hand them a target and a count. Eight out of ten forehands to a cone in a live drill, tracked each session. Two weeks later they’re not guessing whether they’ve improved — they can see it. A kid who was ready to quit because they felt stuck often just needed proof that they weren’t. The wanting-to-quit was a confidence problem wearing a motivation costume.
This is also why the “just push through it” advice so often backfires. Pushing a child through a slump they have no evidence of escaping teaches them that tennis is a place where you feel bad and get told to feel bad longer. Give them a measurable win first, and the pushing takes care of itself.
When it’s a real signal, respect it
Sometimes you do the watching and the asking, and the answer holds steady: they’re done, and it isn’t about a fixable feeling. That happens, and it’s not a failure — yours or theirs.
Youth sport dropout is common and well studied; the research from groups like the Aspen Institute’s Project Play consistently finds that kids leave sports mostly when they stop being fun, and that pressure from adults accelerates the exit. A child who’s allowed to leave a sport on decent terms is far more likely to come back to it later, or to carry a good relationship with exercise into adulthood. A child who’s forced to grind through months of resentment usually doesn’t.
If you land here, my suggestion is to negotiate an honest finish line rather than an abrupt stop. Finish the current session block. Play the tournament they already committed to. Then reassess in the spring. That protects the child from quitting on a bad day they’ll regret, and protects you from wondering whether one more month would have turned it around.
What I’d do this week
If your Sarasota junior hit you with “I want to quit” recently, here’s the short version. Don’t decide anything today. Watch the next two or three sessions for whether the dread is specific or constant. Ask the plain question and listen without steering. If it’s a fixable feeling, tell their coach the exact complaint so we can put a number on it and rebuild the confidence with evidence. If it’s a real signal, negotiate a decent ending instead of a hard stop.
And loop the coach in early either way. A good coach would much rather hear “she’s talking about quitting” now than find out after she’s gone. Half the time it’s a serve we can fix in a week. If you want to talk it through, that’s exactly the kind of conversation I like having with parents — you can find how I work on the coaching page, or just bring it up at the next drop-off.
Wanting to quit isn’t the end of anything. Usually it’s just a kid asking, in the only words they have, for the game to feel good again.