Welcome to the first “drill” post on the Hotspot blog.   In this post I have created a drill to train/coach/test elements of the “flow” step used in variety of situations within tennis.

The “flow” step is commonly used as a means of defending wide balls that have caused you to be on the run and over stretched.  The “flow” step allows you to hit the ball on the move and implement a braking method allowing quick and efficient recovery back into the court.  I am going to provide 3 variations of the drill and alongside each provide some coaching tips and analysis.

Hello again,  this will be a short post (maybe) about yet again a difficult question.  Just to give some background there are stages of tennis development (red/orange/green) and age groups associated with them.  Also in the mix is mini ratings that are competition based that suggest how a player is developing within the stage.  Just to really complicate things take the varying degrees that children develop and you are now in a pickle! Now to the question…when should children move up to the next stage?

The obvious answer is that it is at the discretion of the coach when he/she feels it is appropriate and that the child is demonstrating the relevant skill set.  Of course this differs from coach to coach so is there an answer?

Hi all.  This is a very interesting question about the importance of winning and it extends further into the relevance and purpose of competition at a young age.

Very young players are very much learning the game and in fact learning to play the game in a way that their coach wants them to.  What I mean is that if a coach is teaching hitting for depth then the coach would like to see this within matchplay at the expense of winning, right?  This past week my focus in training (mini red) has been using the forehand as a weapon in particular the run around or inside out forehand.  To my great pleasure my players tried to do this in their matches but with varying degrees of success sometimes resulting in losing.  Is this bad?