Search for basic tennis drills for beginners and you will normally find a familiar collection of ideas. Drop-feed a forehand, practise throwing and catching, run around cones, hit ten balls from a basket, work on the serve without a returner and eventually, once enough of the “fundamentals” have been learned, allow the beginner to play some points.
I coached beginners in variations of that way for many years because it seems completely logical. Tennis looks complicated, so surely we should break it into simple parts first, teach those parts individually and gradually build the game back together.
The longer I have studied skill acquisition and reflected on my own coaching, the less convinced I have become by that starting point.
A beginner’s biggest problem is not that they haven’t learned the correct forehand yet. Their biggest problem is that they have almost no meaningful relationship with tennis. They don’t yet understand the space, they don’t know what information matters, they have very little experience judging the flight of the ball and they haven’t learned how their actions influence an opponent. The only way they can begin developing those relationships is by actually interacting with them.
That means my answer to “What are some basic tennis drills for beginners?” is probably slightly different to most.
I would start with scaled points, games that encourage players to hit away from an opponent, simplified serve-and-return practices, games that provide repeated opportunities to use a forehand without prescribing the stroke, and activities that help beginners recognise when they can move forward. The common thread is that the player is still playing tennis throughout.
The game gets simpler.
It doesn’t disappear.
Beginners Need Experience Before They Need Perfection
One of the biggest assumptions in tennis coaching is that beginners need to “learn the basics” before they can play.
The difficulty is deciding what those basics actually are.
If somebody is learning tennis because they eventually want to play tennis, surely understanding the game itself has to be pretty fundamental. They need to begin learning how to score, how to start a point, how to protect space, how to recognise an opportunity and, most importantly, how to put the ball somewhere that creates a problem for the person standing at the other end.
I don’t describe tennis to beginners as a game of rallying because I think that immediately creates the wrong intention. Rallying suggests that our shared objective is to keep the ball going. Competitive tennis is different. I am trying to place the ball somewhere that makes your next action difficult, while you are simultaneously trying to do exactly the same thing to me.
This does not mean beginners should be encouraged to smash every ball for a winner. It means they should understand why the court has space and why an opponent’s position matters.
Rather than spending the opening lesson teaching a predetermined forehand technique, I generally want to see the beginner play first. The court and equipment might be dramatically scaled, but we start with points because I need to understand how that particular person behaves when faced with the actual problem of tennis.
What do they find difficult?
Can they start the point?
Do they continually hit straight back to me?
Are they frightened of missing?
Do they avoid moving forwards?
Do they understand where to recover?
Those observations give me somewhere useful to begin coaching.
I now think of this as working from the match court backwards. Instead of building strokes on the practice court and hoping they eventually appear in a match, I first identify the problems that appear when the player actually plays and then design practices that give them better opportunities to explore solutions.
Beginner Tennis Drill 1: Play a Scaled Game First
The most basic beginner tennis drill I use is hardly a drill at all.
Play tennis.
The important word, however, is scaled.
Putting a complete beginner onto a full-sized court with a normal yellow ball and expecting meaningful tennis would be ridiculous. Tennis is a demanding sport. The court is large, the ball travels relatively quickly and players have very little time to organise themselves.
We already have brilliant ways of solving that problem.
The International Tennis Federation’s Red, Orange and Green system deliberately scales the game. Red balls are substantially slower than standard yellow balls, while orange balls are estimated at around 50% slower, and both are paired with smaller playing environments.
There is no reason that scaling should be reserved exclusively for children.
If I have an adult beginner who is struggling on a full court, we might play on an orange-sized court with an orange ball. If that is still too difficult, we can make the space smaller again. A player does not somehow stop playing tennis because the baseline has moved.
In fact, research into beginning tennis has found that scaled courts and equipment can create more hitting opportunities, greater success and a more positive experience compared with immediately using adult-sized constraints. Research with children has also found benefits from combining smaller rackets with lower-compression balls, although the precise effects depend on the task and outcome being measured.
That is the principle I care about.
Scale the game to the player rather than expecting the player to immediately fit the adult game.
Beginner Tennis Drill 2: Learn to Stretch the Opponent
One of the first behaviours I see with beginners is incredibly understandable.
They hit the ball straight back to the opponent.
The beginner has already been told that success means getting the ball over the net and inside the court, so the safest available solution is usually somewhere through the middle. Unfortunately, the middle is also where their opponent happens to be standing.
A very simple beginner tennis game is therefore based around one intention: can you stretch your opponent?
With a complete beginner, I might deliberately give the player who is learning this skill a larger space to hit into. Their opponent might play within a narrower court while the beginner has access to more width on the other side. This creates an asymmetrical game, but that is intentional because I want to shine a spotlight on the opportunities available away from the opponent.
If they need more encouragement, I can manipulate the scoring. Perhaps forcing the opponent to miss outside a marked wide area earns additional points, or placing the ball into particular spaces produces a bonus.
Notice what I haven’t done.
I haven’t prescribed the movement.
I haven’t demonstrated my version of a forehand and asked the beginner to reproduce it.
I have changed the environment so that a useful intention becomes easier to explore.
How they solve the problem is allowed to vary.
That is a very simple example of using constraints with beginners without making the session complicated.
Beginner Tennis Drill 3: Create Forehand Repetition Without Basket Feeding
Another misconception about ecological approaches to coaching is that repetition somehow doesn’t matter.
Of course it matters.
Beginners need enormous amounts of experience because their ability to detect useful information and coordinate movement around it is still developing. The difference is that I don’t necessarily want fifty identical repetitions produced from fifty identical feeds.
Bernstein’s famous idea of “repetition without repetition” is useful here. We can repeatedly solve a similar problem while the exact movement used to solve it changes because the ball, position, timing and relationship with the opponent are never completely identical.
Imagine a beginner who needs significantly more experience on their forehand side.
Rather than standing beside a basket and feeding the same forehand repeatedly, I can create a game where their opponent is constrained to play predominantly into the forehand side. The beginner still receives different speeds, heights and trajectories because another person is producing the ball, but the practice environment increases the probability that the problem I want them to experience keeps appearing.
If the exchanges are too short to generate enough volume, the first thing I would consider changing is not the technique.
I would simplify the environment.
Change the yellow ball for an orange ball.
Reduce the court dimensions.
Give the opponent a more manageable area to hit into.
Research on scaling tennis environments supports this broader principle. Modified balls and court sizes can change hitting success and the opportunities players receive to interact with the ball, which is exactly why scaling is so useful for beginners.
The aim is not identical repetition.
The aim is lots of opportunities to solve a similar tennis problem in slightly different ways.
Beginner Tennis Drill 4: Serve and Return From the Beginning
The serve often disappears from beginner lessons because coaches are frightened that it will stop the session.
I understand why.
If every point ends because the beginner cannot get a serve into a regulation service box, nobody gets much experience and frustration rises very quickly. The traditional answer has therefore been to remove the serve from most of the lesson and practise it separately, usually during the final ten minutes with a basket of balls.
I would rather simplify the serve without removing its relationship with the return.
Why does a complete beginner immediately need to serve into the regulation service box?
Allow them to serve into the full half of the opponent’s court.
If the returner cannot control enough returns for the game to continue, allow two touches or two bounces temporarily. If that still doesn’t work, slow the ball down or reduce the space.
We have been using this kind of thinking in inclusive sport for years through the STEP principle: space, task, equipment and people. Instead of immediately changing the player, ask whether you can change something around them.
The space can become larger, smaller, wider or shorter.
The task can have different rules.
The equipment can change.
The people involved can change too, which is why I would not automatically pair every beginner with another beginner. Sometimes an experienced player who can regulate the ball gives a beginner far more useful opportunities to play.
The serve and return are fundamental interactions within tennis, so I want beginners experiencing them early. I would rather change the rules temporarily than spend weeks developing a serve in isolation and introduce the returner later as though nothing has changed.
Representative Learning Design provides a useful theoretical reason for thinking this way because practice environments should preserve important information and functionality from the performance environment where possible.
This is also somewhere my Tennis Practice Assessment Scorecard can be helpful. If your beginner serve drill contains a server, fifty balls and an empty service box, run the practice through the scorecard and look at what information is absent. Sometimes introducing a returner and a simple consequence is enough to change the nature of the task considerably.
Beginner Tennis Drill 5: Discover When to Move Forward
Beginners often stand in slightly unusual places on a tennis court.
One common position is somewhere inside the baseline because they are frightened of being caught out by a short ball. When two beginners both behave this way, we often get the classic beginner exchange where both players gently tap the ball backwards and forwards without creating much pressure.
Traditional coaching might solve this with a predictable sequence.
The coach feeds a short ball.
The beginner approaches.
The coach feeds a volley.
The beginner volleys.
They can certainly practise the actions, but there is one very important thing missing: recognising when the opportunity actually exists.
In a match, nobody announces that a short ball is about to arrive.
The information emerges from the interaction.
A simple beginner practice is therefore to create a game that rewards hitting the ball before it bounces, without prescribing exactly when that has to happen. Juniors might receive additional points for winning through a volley. With adults, who sometimes find bonus-point systems slightly artificial, I might mark a zone close to the net and make the rule that the ball cannot bounce inside that area on their side.
Now the opponent has an incentive to find that space and the player has a reason to recognise the danger and move forwards.
I am guiding their intention and attention without telling them in advance exactly which ball will be short.
That is a much closer representation of the problem they eventually need to solve.
What About Throwing, Catching and Coordination Drills?
Walk past almost any beginner tennis programme and you will probably see throwing, catching, balancing, ladders, cones and generic coordination activities.
There is nothing inherently wrong with those activities.
Physical development matters because a stronger, quicker and more adaptable body may provide a player with a larger range of potential actions. What I question is the assumption that performing a generic movement automatically develops a specific tennis skill.
Throwing and serving may share some broad movement characteristics, but they are not the same task.
Catching a ball and striking an incoming tennis ball with a racket are not the same task either.
The information is different and the action required is different.
Contemporary ideas around representative learning ask us to think about the relationship between the information available to a performer and the movement they organise in response to that information, rather than assuming that superficially similar movements will automatically transfer.
If a beginner sees me once a week for an hour, I therefore want as much of that hour as possible spent experiencing tennis.
They can run, throw, catch, develop strength and improve general physical capacities elsewhere.
Tennis time is valuable.
Use it to help them become better at tennis.
Missing Is Not a Problem We Need to Remove
One of the most damaging things we can accidentally communicate to a beginner is that success means not missing.
Beginners miss all the time because they are beginners.
They are calibrating.
If the ball goes long, that provides information about the relationship between the action and the outcome. If the ball goes into the net, that provides different information. The player now has another opportunity to organise themselves around what happened.
I rarely find the words mistake or error particularly helpful in this context.
The player lost the point.
Now what?
A beginner is still trying to organise an enormous number of movement possibilities while simultaneously learning what information matters. Early movement therefore often looks stiff, awkward and robotic. That should not surprise us.
Our job is not to make that variability disappear as quickly as possible so the player looks technically tidy.
Our job is to create an environment where they can progressively become more sensitive to useful information and discover more functional movement solutions.
This is also why beginners sometimes return a week later and appear to have gone backwards. They probably haven’t forgotten a forehand that was somehow stored inside them seven days earlier. They are recalibrating to today’s environment after potentially having no meaningful tennis experience since their previous lesson.
Experienced coaches and players do the same thing.
We all have days when the ball feels different, our timing feels strange or we need twenty minutes before we feel comfortable. The difference is that years of experience allow an expert to recalibrate far more quickly.
Beginners need patience because they don’t have that experience yet.
Does This Mean We Never Give Beginners Technical Instruction?
No, and this is one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding ecological coaching.
Coaches can absolutely instruct.
The difference is that I am less interested in immediately prescribing a supposedly ideal movement and more interested in using language to encourage exploration.
Imagine a beginner who continually taps or bunts the ball because they are frightened of missing.
A traditional response might be to demonstrate a larger forehand, give them a technical checkpoint for the backswing and tell them where the racket should finish.
I might ask something different.
Have you tried swinging a little bigger?
What happens if you swing faster?
What happens if you swing slower?
Those questions are still influencing behaviour. Language itself acts as a constraint, but the player retains some ownership over finding the solution.
I can also manipulate the environment.
If the player keeps tapping the ball and producing something very short, I might increase the distance they need to cover and ask, “How can you get the ball into that space?”
Now there is a reason for the movement to change.
This does not mean biomechanics are irrelevant. It means I want movement to be understood in relation to the problem the player is trying to solve rather than judged solely against a predetermined picture of what a beginner forehand should look like.
Don’t Teach a Beginner to Play Professional Tennis
This might be the biggest mistake we make.
We look at professional tennis and work backwards.
We see the movement patterns, speeds, tactics and techniques of players who have spent thousands upon thousands of hours interacting with tennis, and then we build a pathway designed to make the beginner eventually look like that.
Why?
The adult arriving for their first lesson might never compete outside their local club.
The eight-year-old beginning tennis might simply want to enjoy playing with friends.
Neither needs to play professional tennis badly.
They need to become good at beginner tennis.
This changes how we think about equipment too. An adult is not obliged to use a 27-inch racket simply because they have reached adulthood. If a slightly shorter racket and slower ball make interaction with the game easier while they develop experience, there is nothing particularly sacred about using full-sized equipment immediately. Research with children has shown that scaling racket size and ball compression can influence how successfully learners interact with tennis, reinforcing the wider principle that equipment should fit the performer rather than tradition.
The same applies to the court.
Change it.
Scale it.
Let the beginner become successful within the game they can currently play.
The demands can evolve as they do.
So, What Should a Beginner Tennis Lesson Actually Contain?
A good beginner tennis lesson should contain the basics of tennis, rather than simply the basics of tennis technique.
The player should gradually understand scoring and consequences, learn that the purpose of their shot is connected to an opponent, explore how space can be attacked and protected, experience opportunities to serve and return, discover what happens when the ball becomes short and receive enough volume to start becoming more sensitive to useful information.
There should be lots of experience.
Lots of different ball flights.
Lots of interaction.
Lots of recalibration.
That does not require chaos beyond the beginner’s capabilities because the coach can continually scale the space, task, equipment and people to keep the challenge appropriate.
What I would keep to a minimum are long periods where the beginner is removed from the game and asked to perfect isolated movements before being allowed to play. Those activities may occasionally have a role, but they should not become the beginner’s entire experience of tennis.
If you are unsure how representative your current beginner drills are, take one of them and run it through my Tennis Practice Assessment Scorecard. Rather than immediately throwing away your practice plan, look at where important information might be missing and change one thing. Perhaps introduce an opponent, add a consequence, change the ball, loosen a rule or scale the court.
Then watch the player.
Good practice design is not about finding the perfect drill on Instagram and copying it forever. It is about understanding the player in front of you and continually adjusting the environment so they have better opportunities to learn.
There is one idea I would want every coach or parent to take away from this article.
Don’t try to make a beginner play advanced tennis before they are ready. Help them become really good at being a beginner today.
Give them a version of the game they can actually interact with, and then allow their tennis to grow as their experience grows.
If you would like to look more closely at the practices you currently use, you can download my free Tennis Practice Assessment Scorecard and assess one of your own beginner sessions. It takes you through ten simple questions designed to help you identify what information from the game is present, what might be missing and where a small change could potentially create a more meaningful learning environment.
