Type “What are some good drills for tennis?” into Google and you will find thousands of ideas. Cross-court rallies, basket drills, target practices, consistency challenges, serving exercises and probably enough cones to cover every tennis court in the country. I completely understand why coaches and players search for them, because throughout most of my coaching career I did exactly the same thing. I collected drills, watched what successful coaches were doing, copied practices used with professional players and assumed that if the drill looked good, it probably was good.
After more than twenty years of coaching, I think we need to ask a slightly different question.
What makes a tennis drill good?
It all depends on the intention and purpose of the practice, because believe it or not, it is not the drill that creates the player. It is the player’s interaction with the drill that matters.
A well-designed tennis practice should start with a problem that exists on the match court and create an environment on the practice court in which the player can search for solutions. That might mean helping a player recognise when to change direction, improving their ability to defend under pressure, developing a more effective serve or encouraging a beginner to stop constantly hitting the ball straight back to their opponent.
The drill is simply the environment in which that exploration takes place.
One of the easiest ways I now explain Representative Learning Design to coaches is that we are trying to take a slice of the match court and bring it onto the practice court. We do not have to recreate an entire tennis match every time we coach, but we should think carefully about which pieces of information the player needs to keep if the learning developed in practice is going to have a reasonable opportunity to transfer into competition.
That distinction completely changed the way I design tennis drills.
Why a Tennis Drill Can Look Brilliant and Still Not Transfer
Take one of the most common tennis drills in British coaching, something we often call the cross-court battle. Two players rally cross court and the coach might ask them to make 10, 20 or even 50 consecutive balls. The intention is usually consistency, concentration and perhaps developing a repeatable groundstroke technique.
On the surface, it makes complete sense because cross-court tennis is incredibly important.
The problem starts when the practice creates a version of tennis that is far more predictable and cooperative than the game the player eventually has to play.
If two players successfully hit 50 balls cross court, it looks fantastic from the side of the court. The rhythm is good, the technique often appears beautifully consistent and everybody walks away believing that learning has taken place. Then we watch the same player compete and suddenly the movement is inconsistent, the rallies are shorter, direction constantly changes and the technique no longer looks anything like it did during the drill.
This is what I often describe as the illusion of learning.
The practice performance improved, but what exactly did the player become better at?
If they became extremely good at cooperating with another player to maintain a predictable cross-court rally, we should not automatically assume that means they have become better at recognising when an opponent is vulnerable, changing direction under pressure or finding space during competition.
Research examining common tennis practice tasks has found meaningful differences between practice and match play in shot and movement characteristics, with practice tending to promote more cooperative behaviour and fewer winners than competition. That does not mean cooperative practice has no value; it means we should be careful about assuming that looking successful in a drill automatically tells us how much will transfer to the match.
Tennis Isn’t Really a Game of Rallying
This is where I have probably moved furthest away from the way I coached twenty years ago.
I am not a huge fan of describing tennis as a rallying game because the word rally carries an assumption that the objective is to keep the ball going. Of course, players need the ability to tolerate long exchanges and play high-percentage tennis, but ultimately I am trying to put the ball somewhere that makes life difficult for you.
If we strip tennis back to something incredibly simple, I win by putting the ball into a position where you cannot get it back, or where the return you produce gives me an advantage.
That gives us a very different way of designing a tennis drill.
Instead of telling two players to rally until they reach 50 balls, I might introduce one very simple intention: get the ball to bounce twice on your opponent’s side of the court.
Perhaps the first time you achieve it you get ten bonus points. Perhaps you steal all of your opponent’s points. The scoring system is less important than the behaviour we are trying to encourage.
Suddenly the player starts searching.
They might move their opponent wide before attacking the open space. They might hit behind them. They might use a drop shot. They could move forward and volley. They might find an angle that they previously ignored.
I have not told them how to solve the problem, because there are multiple functional solutions available.
Something else normally happens as well. Players start chasing balls they might previously have given up on because they desperately do not want the ball to bounce twice on their side.
One small change to the intention has altered what both players attend to and how they behave.
That, to me, is a much more useful tennis drill.
What Makes a Good Tennis Drill Representative?
The most representative version of tennis is obviously tennis itself, but that does not mean the role of the coach is simply to stand back and tell everybody to play matches.
Tennis is incredibly variable, and coaching should involve some degree of specificity. If a player has a particular problem during competition, my role is to create an environment where that problem appears frequently enough for them to explore it.
The challenge is deciding what we can change without removing the information that makes the skill meaningful.
Representative Learning Design gives us a useful framework for thinking about this. Pinder and colleagues described the importance of preserving functionality and the relationship between information and movement in learning environments, while subsequent tennis research developed a specific assessment tool coaches could use to evaluate practice design.
When I look at a tennis practice, there are three things that I personally find very difficult to remove.
There should normally be an opponent, because tennis is played against somebody and that person provides an enormous amount of information. There should be some form of score, value or consequence, because our actions in tennis have consequences and score influences behaviour. There should also be a racket in the player’s hand, because throwing, catching and generic movement activities are not the same skill as interacting with a moving tennis ball using a racket.
That does not mean every tennis drill must score perfectly for representativeness, and this is where the conversation sometimes becomes too black and white.
The coach still has to coach.
Sometimes we deliberately manipulate the court, change the ball, alter the scoring system or simplify part of the task because we want to amplify a particular problem. The objective is not to achieve some mythical perfect practice; it is to understand what information we have removed and why.
This is exactly why I created my free Tennis Practice Assessment Scorecard. It takes the academic thinking behind Representative Learning Design and the tennis-specific RPAT work and turns it into ten simple questions that coaches can use when planning a session. You score each area red, amber or green and get a quick visual picture of how representative your practice might be.
The value is not in chasing a perfect score. The value is in making the invisible parts of practice design visible.
The Question That Changed My Coaching: Was It the Player or the Practice?
This is not something I arrived at because I read one research paper and decided everything I had previously done was wrong.
For more than twenty years I coached in a very traditional way.
I worked with beginners, club players, county players and national-level juniors, and I repeatedly experienced the same frustration. Players would look fantastic during lessons. They could reproduce sophisticated movements, perform complicated techniques and hit hundreds of balls successfully during practice.
Then I would put them into points at the end of the session and they looked different.
When I travelled to tournaments and watched them compete, sometimes they looked like a completely different player.
Their movement changed. Their technique changed. Their behaviour changed.
Players would sometimes travel away for several weeks of tournaments and come back appearing to have completely different strokes from the ones we had spent months developing.
I could not understand it.
Like many coaches, I blamed the player. Maybe they were not mentally strong enough. Perhaps they needed more repetition. Maybe we needed another lesson each week so that the technique became more automatic.
It was not until around 2019 that I started asking myself a much more uncomfortable question.
Was it actually the player, or was it the practice?
Unfortunately for my ego, I increasingly realised that the practice was a huge part of the problem.
My players had become highly skilled at the environments I had created. They were good at receiving predictable feeds, repeating movements and solving decomposed problems because that was what I repeatedly asked them to do. When they entered a competitive environment containing an opponent, score pressure, uncertainty, changing ball trajectories and genuine consequences, they had to adapt.
Skill is contextual.
Once I understood that, the gap between practice and competition suddenly made a lot more sense.
A Good Tennis Serve Drill for Beginners
Let’s make this practical.
A common problem when beginners learn to serve is racket-head deceleration. They become so concerned about getting the ball over the net and into the service box that they push the ball rather than exploring how to strike it.
Traditional coaching often responds by simplifying the serve through decomposition. We might remove the returner, stand beside the player with a basket of balls and work repeatedly on the movement.
I would simplify the problem differently.
I would keep the returner.
I would keep some form of score.
I would keep the rackets.
But I might dramatically increase the size of the service box.
Instead of asking the beginner to immediately serve into the regulation service box, perhaps the target extends towards the orange baseline or halfway between the service line and baseline. The player now has considerably more space in which to explore striking the ball without removing the opponent or the consequences of their action.
The larger target can reduce the perceived risk of missing while giving the player permission to generate more racket-head speed. As the player develops a more functional solution, the target can gradually change.
Is that practice perfectly representative of a tennis match?
No.
The service box is the wrong size.
That is deliberate.
The difference is that I know what information I have changed and why I have changed it.
This is the distinction between task decomposition and task simplification that I think coaches need to understand. Decomposition often removes major components of the performance environment, while simplification attempts to maintain important information but adjusts constraints so the problem becomes solvable for the learner.
Interestingly, tennis research comparing serving practice with different levels of representativeness has shown that different practice designs can result in different behaviours in match play, rather than there being a simple linear relationship where “more representative” automatically equals “more learning.” That is why coaches still need to individualise the task around the player in front of them.
A Good Groundstroke Drill for Beginners
We can apply exactly the same thinking to groundstrokes.
One of the first behaviours we often see in beginners is the tendency to hit everything through the middle of the court. That makes sense because they are initially concerned with getting the ball over the net and keeping it inside the lines.
Unfortunately, the middle of the court is also where their opponent is standing.
If our intention is to help beginners discover how to move their opponent and use space, I do not necessarily need to teach them a new technical model.
I can change the environment.
One very simple option with adult beginners is to make the tramlines part of the singles court, effectively increasing the amount of width available. I now want the players to explore using that space and recognise opportunities to hit away from their opponent.
If the game becomes too difficult, I do not necessarily have to remove the opponent or start feeding balls. I might keep the larger court and change from a yellow ball to a green or even orange low-compression ball.
The task has become easier without removing the problem we are trying to solve.
Again, this practice would not receive a perfect representativeness score because an adult competitive match is not played with an orange ball on an enlarged singles court. That does not worry me. I have intentionally manipulated those constraints to create an environment in which a beginner has more opportunity to explore the behaviour I want.
The purpose of coaching practice is not to recreate the match with absolute fidelity every second. It is to take a meaningful problem from competition and design an environment where players can interact with that problem while enough of the important information remains available.
Are Basket-Feeding Tennis Drills Bad?
This is normally where discussions around practice design become unnecessarily tribal.
Basket feeding has existed in tennis coaching for generations, and I do not believe it has absolutely no value.
An unopposed practice might occasionally help bring a player’s awareness towards a sensation. It might have a role during injury rehabilitation or recalibration. There may be situations where temporarily reducing complexity is useful.
The concern starts when these practices occupy enormous percentages of training time while coaches simultaneously expect the resulting behaviour to transfer directly into competition.
Remove the opponent and you remove information.
Remove the score and you remove consequence.
Make every feed predictable and you dramatically change the problem the player is solving.
When the opponent is eventually introduced again, we are not simply making exactly the same skill harder. The informational environment has changed, so the player has to organise their behaviour around different information.
Research using the tennis-specific RPAT supports being cautious here. Krause and colleagues developed the tool specifically to help coaches evaluate how closely practice preserves important features of competition and to improve the functional relationship between information and movement. Their subsequent work comparing common tennis practices with match play found clear differences in player behaviour.
So I would not tell coaches to throw their baskets in the bin.
I would ask them to think carefully about why they are using them, how long they are using them for and what they expect to transfer afterwards.
The Problem With Copying Professional Tennis Drills
Another reason the search for “good tennis drills” can become problematic is confirmation bias.
We see a professional player completing a drill on Instagram and assume that drill contributed to them becoming a professional player.
We see a famous international coach using a particular practice and assume the practice must therefore be effective.
The truth is that we have no idea what caused that player’s success simply from watching one video.
Highly skilled players bring years of experience, attunement, athletic ability and competitive exposure into every practice environment. They may be able to extract value from a task that is completely inappropriate for the beginner playing once a week at your local club.
The drill does not create the player.
The interaction between that player and that environment is what matters.
That is why I would much rather coaches assess their practice than copy mine.
How to Assess Whether Your Tennis Drill Is Actually Good
This is where the Tennis Practice Assessment Scorecard becomes useful.
Before your next session, take one of your favourite drills and score it honestly against the ten questions.
Nobody else needs to see the result.
That last point is important because coaches are just as vulnerable to confirmation bias as everybody else. We have invested years in developing our coaching methods, and it can be uncomfortable to consider that a practice we have used for a decade may not be as effective as we thought.
If your favourite drill scores several reds, you do not need to throw it away.
Pick one.
Perhaps there is no score or consequence in the practice. Introduce a very simple scoring system and see what happens.
Perhaps there is no opponent. Find a way to introduce one.
Perhaps the feed is completely predictable. Allow the feeder or opponent greater freedom.
Then take the practice onto court and observe the behaviour that emerges.
If the change helps, keep it. If it creates another problem, adapt it again.
That is Constraints-Led Coaching in a very practical sense, but I would also argue it is simply good coaching. The coach designs something, observes the player’s interaction with it and continually adjusts the environment as the player develops.
My scorecard uses a red, amber and green system precisely because representative practice should not become another rigid coaching doctrine. A green indicates the information is consistently present, amber suggests it appears inconsistently and red highlights something that is largely absent.
Generally speaking, a more representative practice should provide greater potential for relevant learning to transfer, but I use the word potential deliberately.
There are no guarantees.
Learning is complex, individual and nonlinear, and even research investigating increasingly representative tennis tasks has found that the relationship is not simply “higher score equals better learning.” The value of the scorecard is that it helps us make more informed practice-design decisions rather than blindly assuming that because a drill looks good, it must be good.
So, What Are Some Good Drills for Tennis?
Good tennis drills are practices that have a clear purpose, relate to a genuine problem from the match court and contain enough of the information the player will need when they compete.
A good drill for one player might be a poor drill for another because their problems are different.
A beginner struggling to strike their serve might benefit from an enlarged service target while serving to a returner. A player who constantly hits through the middle might benefit from an enlarged court that rewards the exploration of width. A player who cooperates too much might benefit from the simple challenge of making the ball bounce twice on their opponent’s side.
None of those practices is magical.
They work because we have started with the player and the problem rather than starting with the drill.
That is probably the biggest change I have made in my coaching over the past twenty-five years. I used to collect drills and then find players to put into them. Now I try to understand the problem the player is experiencing and design the practice around that problem.
It sounds like a small distinction, but it completely changes the role of the tennis coach.
The next time you find a brilliant tennis drill online, don’t immediately ask, “How can I use this with my players?”
Ask yourself, “What problem does this solve, what information does the player have available, and does that problem actually exist when my player competes?”
If you cannot answer those questions, the drill might still look fantastic.
It just might not be developing the tennis skill you think it is.
Download the Free Tennis Practice Assessment Scorecard
If you want a simple way to assess your own tennis drills, I have created a free Tennis Practice Assessment Scorecard inspired by the academic work on Representative Learning Design and the tennis-specific Representative Practice Assessment Tool developed by Krause and colleagues.
Take one practice from your next lesson, work through the ten questions and score it honestly using the red, amber and green system. Do not try to redesign the entire session immediately. Find one area that could become more representative, make one small change, take it onto court and observe what happens.
That process alone can completely change the way you think about tennis drills, practice design and skill transfer.
[Download the Tennis Practice Assessment Scorecard here]
Research behind this article
The research foundation for the ideas discussed here includes Pinder, Davids, Renshaw and Araújo’s work introducing Representative Learning Design in sport, and the subsequent tennis-specific work of Lyndon Krause and colleagues developing the Representative Practice Assessment Tool and investigating representative practice and skill transfer in tennis.
