Tennis Drills for Practice, Groups and Solo Work

The most common mistake in practice is drilling what already works. Players rally forehands cross-court because it feels good, and arrive at matches with the same weaknesses they had a season earlier. A drill earns its place only if it reproduces a decision the player actually faces in a match, which rules out most of what happens on a practice court.

What a drill has to contain

Three things, and the third is the one usually missing. A repeatable feed, so the pattern can be grooved. Enough repetitions to matter, which is mostly a question of group size rather than session length. And a decision, where to hit, whether to take the ball, when to move in, because a stroke that only works when the player already knows what is coming does not survive a match.

Drills that omit the decision still have a use, but a narrow one: grooving a change immediately after it has been made, before it can be tested. They are a stage, not a programme.

Group size decides how much a session is worth

Four or five players per coach is the practical ceiling. Beyond that the waiting exceeds the hitting, and the players who most need repetitions get fewest. This matters more for juniors, where attention is lost in the queue, but it applies to adult clinics too.

Solo work, and what it cannot train

A wall produces more repetitions per minute than any partner-fed drill, and the pace is self-limiting, which makes it the most efficient way to groove a volley or a service motion alone. What it cannot train is reading an opponent, because there is nothing to read. Players who practise exclusively alone develop strokes that are technically sound and tactically blank.

Games, for juniors specifically

Children need practice hard enough to hold attention but not so hard that they lose interest in the sport, and games are the mechanism for holding that line. The reason modified equipment matters so much in junior development is that it lets children rally at an age when a full court and a standard ball make rallying impossible, and rallying is what they actually enjoy.

Feeding, and why most practice is easier than a match

The gap between drilling well and playing well is usually the feed. A ball delivered at a consistent height, pace and position lets a player groove a stroke, which is the point early on, and it also removes every judgement a real ball demands. A player who looks fluent in a basket drill and falls apart in a rally has not lost the technique; they have never practised deciding.

The fix is to vary one thing at a time rather than everything. Feed the same shot to two different depths, or the same depth at two different heights, and the stroke has to adjust while remaining recognisable. Feeding randomly from the start produces flailing rather than learning.

Intensity is the other half. A drill run at a comfortable pace confirms what you can already do, and the specific quality tennis needs, repeating a stroke correctly while tired, only gets trained if the session gets hard enough to threaten it.

Practising alone, and the ceiling on it

Solo work covers more than most players assume. A wall trains groundstroke contact and volley reflexes; a basket of balls trains the serve, which needs no partner at all; shadow swings train preparation and recovery without a ball to distract from the feet. For a player who can only get on court alone, none of that is a compromise.

What it cannot train is timing against a real ball, and that limit is worth being explicit about. A wall returns the ball at a consistent height, pace and angle, so it rewards a groove and never asks for a judgement. A player who has spent months on a wall usually has a repeatable stroke and no ability to adjust it, which reads as nerves in a match and is really an absence of practice at deciding.

The serve is the exception that makes solo practice disproportionately valuable. It is the one stroke where no opponent influences anything, so a basket, a target and an hour alone is not a substitute for real practice. It is real practice.