Summer ‘25 Week three

Building on last week’s work to develop a basic forehand, the coaches focused on forehand variance—that is to say that the coaches centered their sessions around hitting cross-court and down-the-line. On Monday we spent the majority of our sessions reviewing the work we made last week, ensuring that the children did not forget/lose their progress over the weekend. Because they had retained most of their newly acquired skills, we rewarded them with a few games at the end of Monday’s sessions.

For the rest of the week we focused on varying forehand shots. On Tuesday, we worked on cross-court forehands. Specifically, we instructed the kids to aim to contact the outside of the ball in order to hit it cross court. We also worked with them to hit cross-court shots with significant net clearance (about 1.5 feet). Moreover, we enticed the kids to hit the ball beyond the service line by setting up various targets for them to hit. We repeated the same process on Wednesday, but focused on down-the-line shots, instead of cross courts. Then, to end the week, we combined the two in a four ball drill, during which kids alternated between cross-court and down-the-line forehands. With moderate success in directing the balls, we incorporated some short balls into the drills. Overall, we are proud of the children’s efforts to complete the relatively difficult drill and look forward to seeing similar success with their backhands in the coming weeks.