Building Point-Play Skills: Dynamic Small Group Workouts

All tennis players and teams want to achieve their maximum potential, but it's often a challenge to design practices that will help achieve that elusive goal.

In this video, 4x NCCA Championship coach Brian Boland, a 2x ITA National Coach of the Year, shows the type of drills his top-ranked NCAA teams have utilized to prepare for match play at the highest levels. Boland shows a complete practice from start to finish that works on every aspect of a tennis player's game in order to be prepared for singles and doubles matches.

While Boland's individual instruction sessions emphasize techniques to improve ball striking mechanics and movement on court, his small group workouts help players build point-play skills through a series of challenging situational games and drills that repeatedly require real-time decision making and dynamic court positioning.

Hitting Warm-Ups

By limiting their singles warm-ups to the center third of the court, Boland's players focus less on movement and more on positioning themselves for effective ball-striking, hitting with depth and varying net clearance. In the "Roll and Rip" drill, for example, two players challenge each other by alternating high topspin shots (defender) versus flatter drives (aggressor).

'Situational Strait-Jackets'

This series of exercises helps you expand your players' arsenal of singles skills by placing them in a series of 'situational strait-jackets'. In these, Coach Boland allows one player to hit shots anywhere on court during points, but requires their workout partner to hit every ball to the ad court. This simultaneously challenges - and strengthens - both players' consistency and versatility.

Situational Games

This segment helps you improve your players' decision-making skills and doubles court positioning during point play by repeatedly challenging them to play all the roles in short situational games:

• Where should the server send the first volley?
• Who covers the ball down the middle?
• How can we prevent getting burned down the line?

Coach Boland helps his players discover the answers to these questions as they play out in dynamic, real-time practice scenarios.

The 12 situational games and drills in this video readily lend themselves to variation based on your players' skill levels. The games and drills are fun, competitive, and simple to teach - creating a win/win scenario for coaches and players alike.

Coach Boland deliberately fills his small group sessions with repeated situational point-play to 'program' strategically sound shot-making and positioning choices into his players' brains. His players' sustained national success becomes less of a surprise when you see that how they perform on the Championship stage year after year, with uncommon poise and intuitive decision-making (coupled with incredible talent), is what is reinforced at practice day after day!

72 minutes. 2017.