Tennis Drill Diagrams Every Coach Should Have on Hand

Why a Diagram Beats a Verbal Explanation

Most players — especially juniors — pick up a cone pattern or a feed sequence far faster from a picture than from a sentence. Explaining "feed cross-court, player recovers to the center mark, then split-steps for the next ball" takes longer to say than it takes to understand once it's drawn. A drill diagram you can pull up on a phone also means new assistant coaches or parents running a station can run it correctly without you standing over their shoulder.

The goal isn't to draw something new every week. It's to build a small library of core drills once, on an accurate court, and reuse them — tweaking cone spacing or feed direction per group as needed.

The Core Drills Worth Diagramming

• Cross-court consistency feed. Coach or ball machine feeds from one side, player returns cross-court only, for a set number of reps before switching sides. Mark the feed point, the target zone, and the recovery position.
• Cone footwork pattern. Four to six cones around the baseline and service line for a split-step-and-recover drill. Diagram the exact cone order so any coach running the station gets it identical to how you designed it.
• Approach-and-volley progression. Short ball fed to the service line, player approaches, volleys to a target zone. Use CourtDraw's phase system to show the feed, the approach path, and the volley target as three separate steps.
• Doubles poach rotation. All four players' starting positions and the net player's poach path, drawn on the doubles court — this is the drill diagram that benefits most from being drawn rather than described, since four moving positions are hard to hold in your head.
• Serve target grid. Divide each service box into thirds (T, body, wide) with a target zone highlighted, so players can track which target they're working on that day.

Building the Set Once

Open the tennis tactics board, and for each drill above: place the player token(s), draw the feed or ball path as an arrow, mark cones or targets as small circles, and add a short text label. Save each one with a clear name — "Cross-Court Consistency," "Cone Footwork A" — so your library stays searchable as it grows.

For drills with progressions (easier version for beginners, harder for advanced), use phases: phase 1 shows the basic pattern, phase 2 adds a variation like a target zone or a second ball path. Step through phases live during the session instead of maintaining two separate diagrams for the same drill.

Getting the Diagram in Front of Players

Export as PNG and post it to the team group chat before the session, or pull it up on a tablet at the court for a station-based practice. If you coach at a club with several coaches running stations, a shared Club library means every coach draws from the same set of diagrams instead of everyone maintaining their own inconsistent versions.