As coaching and teaching organizations in most developed countries around the world move toward the concept of games-based teaching and practice, one message is loud and clear — outside of the U.S., dead-ball drilling as a primary component of lessons or practices is a thing of the past.

What does this mean to your coaching?

While dead-ball drilling (fed-ball drills where the point stops after a player hits one ball) can help with short-term learning of a new skill, live-ball drilling is the only realistic way for your players to improve their playing skills.

Start with Tactics
Identify those four or five tactical situations which will occur over and over in your players’ singles and doubles matches and discuss them with your team.

In singles, these will be the serve, return of serve, baseline rallies, playing through the mid-court, and net play.

The most common doubles situations include the serve, return of serve, one-up/one-back rallies, a two-back formation, playing through the mid-court, net play and lobs.

Create drills which simulate these situations and use these drills to help your singles and doubles players identify and recognize situations they will see over and over during their matches. Drilling in these situations will allow your players to see their strengths and weaknesses and to experiment and improve.

Using the concepts presented in the article Build Tactics into Practices, you can run effective practices which allow your team to become players, rather than hitters by providing both tactical and technical practice.

Additionally, handicapped match play is also an excellent way to force players to work on certain playing skills. For example, having players play a set of doubles with no lobs will force players to develop more control over their groundstrokes and allow them to become more aggressive at net.

Have players play a set or tie-breaks with only second serves. This will let them see how effective their second serves are and how effective they are at taking advantage of weak second serves.

Of course, technical work is important and some dead-ball drilling is built into workouts described in Build Tactics into Practices.

If you do not have the ability to practice four to a court, you can still allow your players to practice match situations by using two-on-two, live-ball drills.

This season, consider how much time you want to devote to technical work, and how much time you want your players practicing match situations. If your players are great during practice but choke under match pressure, you probably haven’t simulated that match pressure for them during your practices.

Remember, if you don’t practice like you play, you’ll play like you practice!

Below are suggested tactical drills from our Articles & Drills Database

Suggested Live-Ball Tactical Drills

Second-Ball Passing Shots
Build Tactics into Practices
Producing & Playing Short Balls
Deep-Ball Rally
Singles Depth and Direction
Four-Player Attack
Serve & Volley
Grand Slam Series
Doubles as Easy as 1, 2, 3
Rally Poaching
Trifecta
Mid-Court Volley

Suggested Dead-Ball Tactical Drills

Attacking Return
Short Crosscourt Return