Tennis drills with measurable targets.

Watch a casual junior practice. The drill is "hit some cross-court forehands." The pace is comfortable, the rallies are pretty, both players are loose. After twenty minutes the drill ends and everyone feels good about the practice. Now watch the match the next weekend. The first three forehand cross-courts under pressure land short of the service line.

The drill did not transfer. Not because the player hit the wrong shot — but because the drill had no standard. "Some forehands" does not tell the player whether the practice version of their forehand is good enough. It does not separate the version that survives a third-set rally from the version that doesn't.

A measurable target fixes that. The drill is now "ten forehands cross-court past the service line, scored one each landing, restart at zero on a miss, hit seven within fifty attempts." Same drill, completely different practice. The player now knows whether their forehand is at standard or not — and they cannot fake it.

Three properties:

• Binary. The ball was past the service line, or it wasn't. There is no "kind of." Honest scoring requires a yes/no per rep.
• Calibrated. The target should be hit ~70% of the time at current level. Lower and the player gives up; higher and the drill becomes warm-up. The right target stretches without breaking.
• Match-shaped. The target maps to something that decides matches. "Past the service line" maps to "the opponent cannot step in." "Six inches inside the line" maps to "winner."

A target that fails any of these is decorative. A drill scored on "felt good" isn't being scored.

Serve

• First serve placement: 7 of 10 into the deuce-side wide quadrant from the deuce side; restart on a miss.
• Second serve depth: 8 of 10 second serves landing past the service line, in the box. Below the service line is a miss.
• Second serve under pressure: Same depth target but with the coach calling out a 30-30 or 4-all situation each rep. Track separately.

Return

• First-serve return depth: Coach (or partner) serves at 75% first-serve pace; 6 of 10 returns land past the service line.
• Second-serve return aggression: Coach feeds a kick second serve; 5 of 10 returns land in the back third of the court with the player's feet inside the baseline.

Groundstrokes

• Forehand cross-court rally: 20 consecutive balls past the service line. Reset at zero on a short ball.
• Backhand down-the-line: 6 of 10 backhand DTLs land in the singles alley plus a one-meter wide band.
• Inside-out forehand: Coach feeds to backhand corner; 6 of 10 inside-out forehands land in the deuce-side back third.

Movement

• Recovery footwork: Coach feeds wide forehand, then short backhand; player hits forehand, recovers to the center of angles before the short ball lands. Pass/fail per pair, 8 of 10.
• Split-step timing: Drill scored on split-step occurring at opponent contact. 9 of 10 over a 30-second rally.

Tactical

• Serve-plus-one pattern: Player calls the pattern before serving (e.g. "wide serve, forehand to open court"). Scored 1 per pattern executed correctly through ball one. 6 of 10.
• Return-plus-one pattern: Same idea, return side.

Mental

• Between-point routine: Same routine every point of a tiebreak. Scored pass/fail per point. 7 of 10.
• Closing: Player serves out a set from 5-3 in match-play sessions. Tracked separately from regular service games.

Targets answer a per-drill question. A training block answers a per-month question: which targets are the focus right now? A useful rule: pick three to five primary targets per block. They become the spine of every week. Everything else — the warm-ups, the live-ball games, the match play — happens around them, not instead of them.

The matches inside the block are the real test. Did the second-serve depth target carry into match play? If yes, retire it and pick a new one. If no, keep it — but ask whether the drill is too far from the match version of the skill (too clean, too predictable, no movement). Often the fix is not "more reps" but "tougher drill" — the same target with added movement, decision, or scoreboard pressure.

Where this gets hard solo: tracking targets over time. "I hit 6 of 10 backhand down-the-lines today" is useful for one practice. "I've hit the backhand DTL target 6/10 four sessions running, and now we're at 8/10 on session five" is where the target becomes a story of training that actually moved the skill. Without the running record, every drill resets to "felt about the same as last time."

Forge's drill catalog is built around this — every drill carries a target by default, and the practice log tracks performance score per drill across sessions. The aggregate shows up in the drill effectiveness ranking: which drills are actually moving the score, and which ones aren't? That's the question that tells you what to keep doing.