Tennis Soccer

Tennis Soccer is a simple but effective activity for your youngest beginners. You will need four cones or spots to mark the 'goals'.

Two players, or a player and a coach, face each other on the same side of a 36-foot court. If you are using a full size court, have the cones at the net and the service line. Each has a goal marked by two cones. Make the goal about 10 feet across. One goal is at net. The other is at baseline. Players take turn rolling the ball back and forth to each other with their racquets, trying to get it past opponent and in between cones for a goal. First to 7 points (goals) wins.

Here's a video of the activity in case this description doesn't do the job.

Hurray for Hula Hoops

Hula hoops were a thing in the 1950s. Click here for
more great pictures from that craze. 

I have mentioned hula hoops in previous blog posts. I love them but had not purchased any because frankly I thought they were overpriced for a bit of extruded plastic. But spring is in the air, which means hula hoops are at the local dollar stores, so get them while you can! I purchased four small hoops recently and put them right to work with my Red Ball students. Here are a few suggestions. I bet you can think of plenty more.

Vanilla - just use them as nature intended. Can your students hula? If not, have them try it around their arm/wrist first.
Target practice - hoops singly or in groups make great targets for games like Black Hole or Target Practice. Let the students place the targets. This is an interesting exercise in where they think the easiest spot to hit is. Guarantee you they will first place the hoops up close to the net. After trying in vain to hit those, they will move them farther back!
Relay/warm-ups -

• Variation on Ball Thief: Place one hoop in the middle of the court. Place X number of hoops around the edges of the court, either one per player or one per team. Players must run to center hoop, retrieve one ball at a time and place it in their own hoop. When center hoop is empty, whoever has the most balls in their own hoop wins. 
• For even more of a workout, place two hoops per team or player across the court from each other on the doubles sidelines. Hoops on one side of court have X number of balls in them. Make sure all hoops on this side of court have same number of balls per hoop. Hoops on opposite side of court are empty at start of game. Teams/players run from empty hoop to full hoop, retrieve one ball, run back and place it in empty hoop. First team/player to move all balls wins. 

Black Hole 2 - Serve and Return

If you are a USTA member and you receive their 15-30 digital magazine, you may have seen this game in their most recent issue. In the video explaining the game, host John Evert didn't give it a name, so I did. It is similar to the Black Hole game, where hitting various locations on the court determine how points are awarded. We are modifying Black Hole to make it a serve/return of serve activity.

Two players play out singles points. Part of the server's side is marked with stripes or small cones. If the returner's ball lands behind the marked area, the returner gets one point. If the returner's ball does not land in the marked area, the server gets a point. So in this example, the Black Hole is where we do NOT want the return of serve to land. It is the returner's job to hit a quality return. It is the server's job to hit such a nice serve as to make the returner's job very difficult. First to XX points wins, depending on how you want to structure the game.

Ignore the Play arrow from this screen capture. If you want to see
 the full video, click here. Inside the yellow cones is the
Black Hole. No bueno!

As for which part of the court is marked off, in the video, the goal was to return the ball deep, behind the halfway point of the back court (midway between the service line and the baseline) as well as in the  2-3 foot 'alley' adjacent to the singles sideline. So ideally the returner is returning deep cross court, or deep down the line. Even in the middle of the court is okay as long as it is deep. This may be too challenging for younger players, so consider asking them to aim for a large square deep and cross court, or just anywhere deep.

Tennis Night in America

Is your facility planning a Tennis Night in America event this month? We had ours on the actual TNA date of March 4. We got lucky with the weather. Could have been warmer, but at least no precip. We had about 27 kids come out for the event which was a good group. More than half of these were new to our facility.

I thought I would talk a little about the format so that if you are planning on holding an event, you can avoid reinventing the wheel. Initially we had planned to have 'stations' on various courts and let the players roam freely, coming and going to whatever courts they chose. But as the date approached and our list of volunteers was starting to look like it might be a little thin, I decided to change the format. We needed something that would be the most fun for the kids yet required the fewest amount of volunteers. So we scrapped the station idea. Last time we did an event with stations and the kids we able to wander about on their own whim, here's the problem I observed: we had some courts overflowing with players who didn't want to change to a different station, and we had some courts with zero or very few players because either they were too hard to find or were activities the kids weren't that interested in.

Instead I plugged in an idea fresh from the PTR 10 and Under Conference last month. I used Mike Barrell's World Cup rotation and format strategy. We even handed out colored bracelets to create different 'teams'. Tickets were accumulated by team and a winner was declared the following day on our Facebook page. There was no wandering from station to station. Players stayed on their designated courts (8 and under on the 36-foot courts, 9+ on the 60- and 78-foot courts). We broke the 2 hour event into four 30 minute segments. Each segment had a different game format. At the end of each segment we met at a central location for drinks, snacks, and to talk about the next game format. This worked well IMO. Here's the formats we used:

First to 4
Roll the Dice
Tag Team Singles/Escalator
Hot Seat

These have all been covered in detail in previous blog posts so I won't bore you with that here. First to 4 and Roll the Dice went pretty smoothly. Tag Team took some time for the kids to figure out. They kept wanting to play it like relay tennis. I will also say the Hot Seat format needed tweaking for such a large group. My intention was to have at least one format where all players were together. There were too many kids for a single line (a good problem to have!) so we ended up having two lines going at the same time which worked a little better. But it went on too long. Next time I think I will have at least two different big group events, adding maybe Roller Derby or Singles Shootout.

Overall it was a great time and we hope it will result in getting lots more kids out there on the courts this year.

Tennis Jump Rope

Jump ropes are handy in theory
as well as in practice

In our ongoing challenge to create a tennis activity from ANY existing children's game, I present to you Tennis Jump Rope. Before yesterday, if you had asked me how to convert jump rope to a tennis activity, I probably would have wasted a lot of time trying to do something with the actual rope. As usual, one of my students was smarter than me and inspired a simpler solution.

I have recently added inexpensive jump ropes to my tennis bag of goodies to use both as a warm-up activity as well as a reward activity at the end of class. My students love it. So jump rope has been on my mind recently more than usual. Yesterday during a Red Ball class, one of my students mentioned how well she had done that day in her school P.E. class, getting 27 boyfriends in the jump rope game. Considering she is 6, I had to know more! The answer was the prelude to our new tennis game.

Her P.E. class was using this old jump rope rhyme:

Ice cream, ice cream

Cherry on top

How many boyfriends

Do you have*? 

And voila, there we have our new tennis game. We used the jump rope rhyme to track our rallies. We sped up the spoken words a little bit so that Ice cream, ice cream went with one rally, Cherry on top went with the next, etc. so we could get to the counting quicker. It worked beautifully. I also taught them the Cinderella jump rope rhyme so that we had two to practice with.

Cinderella dressed in yellow

Went upstairs to kiss her fellow

Made a mistake and kissed a snake

How many doctors did it take?

Fun day!

*probably used to be 'got' instead of 'have' to rhyme better, but thank you teachers everywhere for opting for proper grammar!

Out Wide Forehands

It is a little hard to see in this picture, but the player
has a small tan weight in his left hand

This is an interesting concept from the nice folks at ITUSATennis.com. A picture is worth many thousands of my words, so watch the video here if my description is confusing.

Coach tosses forehands out wide to player. Player goes out to hit ball and then recovers toward center of court. Very basic. EXCEPT - in their non-dominant hand, player should be holding a very light weight or perhaps even a water bottle. The idea is not to recover too quickly to the middle, before the forehand has been completed. The weight or water bottle in the off hand should help remind the player to stay centered in position to hit the ball before heading back to the recovery spot.

Two and Out

Two and Out is a fun activity presented by Tito Perez Rios at the recent PTR 10 and Under Tennis Conference in Hilton Head. He didn't give it a name so I am taking the liberty. It was part of a group of activities he showed us that are done on a mini court or within the service boxes of a full court. Works for all ages and abilities.

This is tag team singles, coach on one side of the net and all other players on the other. One at a time, they take on the coach. Win or lose, they return to the end of the line after they finish the point. After two losses, they are Out. Tito had them do a medium jog around the court once they were out. I am not a huge fan of the jog around the court but I do agree with Tito that it is very motivating to avoid the jog and not lose twice!

Last player standing becomes the new coach. Note the 'coach' is not affected by the Two and Out rule - they stay the coach no matter what until there is a winner on the other side.