Our Story... Tennis Drills TV

Hi, I'm Jorge Capestany and for more than 4 decades I have been teaching tennis. I have taught more than 64,000 hours on the tennis courts. It's no surprise that I was always looking for new tennis drills.

Years ago, I realized that there simply wasn't a great place to find a lot of tennis drills.

I looked all over the Internet, but all I could find were diagrams of drills, and most of the time I couldn't figure out how to use the drill.

What I really wanted was videos so I could be sure to understand the drill perfectly. But the truth was it was super difficult to find anything good. I tried YouTube thinking I would find some tennis drills there, but most of those were unimpressive and not usable for me and my students.

So... my journey began.

Some history... I've gone to the USPTA World Conference for 32 years in a row and more than 20 PTR Tennis International Symposium conferences. Every year I went with the same goal in mind, to bring home some new tennis drills that I could use at my club.

In some years at these conferences I got some great tennis drills, but many times I didn't get ANY new drills that I could use. So, I started to ask the leaders of those organizations to offer more presentations on tennis drills. As a matter of fact, I became quite a pest for them asking them year after year for more tennis drills.

Here's what would happen. I would see the names of some very famous tennis coaches as speakers at these conferences. I inspected the seminar agenda looking to see if they had the word “tennis drills” in their presentation title.

Often they would, so I would show up with a pencil in hand ready to take notes and learn some new drills, BUT after they spoke for an hour, I often didn't have any USABLE tennis drills I could bring back and use at my club... Bummer.

My goal was always to have something I could use on the court the first day after I returned from a conference, but it didn't always happen.

Maybe I Should Just Do It

Well, after years of complaining to event organizers for more presentations on drills, they finally challenged ME to do a tennis drills presentation. I said I would be happy to, but that wasn't going to help ME get new drills, but I decided to do it because I knew so many of my fellow pros were desperately looking for new tennis drills.

In 2002, I made my first tennis drills presentation with a not-so-creative title... “Drills, Drills, Drills” and it was that day when I had an epiphany.

... other pros really liked MY drills! There was an overwhelming response and within the hour I was asked to speak at 15 other tennis conventions! That was the first day that I got an inkling that my fellow tennis pros were desperate for new tennis drills... just like I was!

The Decision to Launch

Fast forward a couple of years and the incredible Jim Baugh personally asked me to be one of the original members of the Cardio Tennis speakers team. I spent two summers traveling the country with Jim conducting Cardio Tennis workshops for Pros.

That's when I had a light bulb moment. You see, one of the parts of those workshops required pros to demonstrate their favorite tennis drill. After watching what most pros did, I realize that most tennis pros were using very ineffective and uninspiring drills.

This experience is what gave me the confidence to launch the TennisDrills.tv website. I had no experience with filming or editing and definitely not with website development.

But I knew one thing… my fellow tennis pros were desperate for new tennis drills. So, we launched the site in 2007 with 400 videos all in standard definition. You see back then everybody told me that if I was going to stream video over the internet I did NOT want the videos to be in HD.

I also had no clue that the site should be mobile-friendly. Back then that wasn't a big deal. So, we launched the site, and grew steadily. Then within a few years, I got more and more requests for the site to be mobile-friendly. Pros wanted to be able to use the website on the court which I could understand.

The Original Version

Then in 2012, we launched TennisDrills.tv 2.0 where the site became mobile-friendly but still had mostly standard-definition videos. We continued to grow and get supporters and coaches in more than 65 countries.

Then something unexpected happened. I started getting a lot of requests to speak at tennis conferences all over the world. In the past several years I have been able to travel the world and speak at the PTR International Tennis Symposium, the USPTA World Conference on Tennis, the USTA’s Tennis Teachers Conference at the US Open in New York, the PTR Asia Tennis Symposium in Shanghai China, and the ITF worldwide coaches conference in Cancun Mexico, the Norwegian Tennis Conference in Oslo, Norway, the Tennis Canada coaches road tour throughout Canada, the PTR Wimbledon coaches conference in London, the Grand Slam Coaches Conference at the Australian Open in Melbourne, and many regional and national conferences around the US.

Turns out I REALLY love traveling!

Improving the Site

But there was still another major upgrade that our site needed. In 2014, people started asking me for lesson plans. The tennis drills were great, but now folks wanted me to put them in order inside of an actual lesson plan.

So, in 2016 I decided to launch version 3.0 of TennisDrills.tv. The new site included lesson plans, much-improved navigation, a new ball machine drills section, AND an entire library of lesson plans.

Now our subscribers could follow the step-by-step lesson plans that I used at my club. These have been a huge hit with our subscribers and I am glad I did it.

We also re-filmed over 1,000 of the original tennis drills from standard def to Hi-Def. This was a major undertaking, but the streaming restrictions we had in the past were no longer an issue and people are now expecting to see Hi-Def videos when they are online.

In 2017, we finished off the remaining videos so the ENTIRE tennis drills library of over 2,000 tennis drills now has 100% Hi-Def videos. It’s a far cry from where we started back in 2007.

Skip forward to 2018... I started hearing again from our subscribers that they wanted MORE than just tennis drills, they were looking for how to be a better coach and run a more successful tennis business.

Creating the Lab

And because I'm obsessed with making the site the best it can be, in March of 2018 we launched the Lab.

This area of the site is NOT about drills. Instead, we have the categories listed below: