Building a junior tennis training plan.

The training plan a junior usually ends up with is a list of drills pulled from YouTube videos and coach handouts. It is generic — built for "improving your tennis" rather than improving your tennis. It has no targets, no dates, no feedback loop. After two weeks the plan is forgotten and the junior is back to whatever the coach decides on the day.

A plan that survives the season has four properties:

• It starts from a real diagnosis of where the player stands.
• It is scheduled on real dates against the next set of matches.
• Every drill carries a measurable target — you either hit it or you don't.
• It re-tunes when matches reveal that the gaps have moved.

The rest of this guide is how to build one.

You cannot train what you have not measured. Before you write a single session, take an honest look at the seven pillars of your game: serve, return, forehand, backhand, movement, tactical, mental. For each pillar, rate where you are right now — beginner, working, competent, sharp — and where the next level demands you to be.

Two or three pillars will jump out as the live edges. These are the focus. Not all seven — three is already a lot to work on in a four-week block. Pick the ones where the gap between current and required is largest and where the next set of matches is most likely to expose them.

Honest is the operative word. The most common mistake juniors make is grading themselves on the rare best version of a shot rather than the average match version. The forehand you hit beautifully when warmed up and relaxed is not the forehand that shows up at 4-all in a third set. Grade the second one.

A training block is typically four to six weeks. Long enough for technical work to take, short enough that the matches inside it stay relevant. At the start of a block, write down two things:

• The two or three focus areas for this block — chosen from step 1.
• The matches this block is preparing for — the tournament, league dates, the next ladder match. The plan is for these. Without them the plan drifts.

Now lay the block out on a calendar. Anchor it on the matches. The two weeks before a tournament look different from the four weeks before; the days after a tough loss look different from the days after a confident win.

A useful weekly shape for a serious junior, assuming roughly four court sessions a week plus fitness:

• 1× Technical day. Slow, deliberate work on the block's primary focus area. Reps, video, coach feedback. Heart rate low; attention high.
• 1× Live-ball day. Drills that simulate match patterns — return and one, serve plus one, deep-cross to short-line. Still in the focus area but now with movement and decision.
• 1× Match-play day. Sets played for score. The week's work tested under competition load. Notes after.
• 1× Conditioning + mobility day. Not optional. The serve and the late-set movement depend on the body holding up.

Adjust to your reality. The structure matters more than the exact count. Every session covers footwork and a piece of the mental game alongside whatever technical focus is on for the day — these are not separate workouts.

This is the difference between practice that transfers and practice that fills time."Hit some forehands" is not a drill. "Hit ten forehands cross-court past the service line, scoring one point per landing, restart at zero on a miss, must reach seven within fifty attempts" is a drill. The first one feels productive. The second one tells you something.

Every drill in the plan needs a measurable target — and the drills guide goes deeper on what good targets look like by pillar. The rule of thumb: if a junior who is being honest could leave the drill in doubt about whether they hit it, the target needs to be sharper.

The plan is a hypothesis: these are the gaps; close them with this work; the next match will go better. The match tests the hypothesis. The plan re-tunes accordingly:

• The gap closed. The skill held up under match pressure. Move it from "training" to "protect"; pick a new focus.
• The gap partly closed. Stay on it; tighten the targets; consider whether the drills are too far from the live-ball version of the skill.
• The gap is wider than you thought. The plan was wrong about cause. Re-diagnose. New focus area, possibly new drills.
• A new gap surfaced. A skill you thought was sharp slipped. Add it to the watch list; do not panic-pivot the whole block.

The match notes you take are how this re-tuning happens — without honest notes the plan drifts back to "what we usually do."

Forge does the back-office of this. The pillar assessment runs the diagnosis; the training plan composer builds the block from the gaps and the next match dates; every drill in the catalog is pre-tagged with measurable targets; the match log and reflection loop feed the re-tune. The plan that walks out is yours — built from your game, scheduled on your dates, re-tuned by your matches.

But the structure above is the structure either way. If you build it in a notebook, build it like this. If you build it in Forge, this is what you'll get.