Our Story… Building the Word’s Largest Tennis Drills Library
By Jorge Capestany, RSPA Master Professional & PTR International Master Professional.
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 there wasn’t a great place to find many tennis drills.
I looked all over the Internet, but all I could find were drill diagrams, and I couldn’t figure out how to use most of them.
What I really wanted were 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, but most were unimpressive and not useful for my students and me.
So… my journey began.
Some history… I’ve attended the RSPA World Conference for 38 years in a row and more than 25 PTR Tennis International Symposiums. 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 asking the leaders of those organizations to give more presentations on tennis drills. I kept asking them year after year for more tennis drills.
Here’s what would happen. I recommend inviting some very famous tennis coaches as speakers at these conferences. I reviewed the seminar agenda to see if they had the phrase “tennis drills” in their presentation title.
They would often, 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 to bring back and use at my club. Bummer.
My goal was always to have something I could use on the court the first day back from a conference, but it didn’t always happen.
Maybe I Should Do It
After years of requesting more presentations on drills, event organizers asked me to deliver a presentation on tennis drills. I agreed to do it because I knew many of my fellow pros were desperately looking for new tennis drills.
In 2002, I gave my first presentation on tennis drills 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 (version 1.0)
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 attendees to demonstrate their favorite tennis drill. After watching what most pros did, I realized 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 have no experience with filming, editing, or 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 use the website on the court, which I could understand.
The First Upgrade (version 2.0)
Then in 2012, we launched TennisDrills.TV 2.0, in which the site became mobile-friendly but still featured mostly standard-definition videos. We continued to grow, gaining supporters and coaches in more than 65 countries.
Then something unexpected happened. I started receiving many requests to speak at tennis conferences around the world.
For 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!
The Next Major Upgrade (version 3.0)
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 can follow the step-by-step lesson plans 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 online.
In 2017, we finished the remaining videos, so the ENTIRE tennis drills library of over 2,000 drills now has 100% Hi-Def videos.
It’s a far cry from where we started back in 2007.
The Next Upgrade – Creating the Lab (version 4.0)
Skip forward to 2018… I started hearing again from our subscribers that they wanted MORE than just drills: they were looking for how to be a better coach and run a more successful tennis business.
And because we’re committed to making the site the best it can be, we launched the Lab in March of 2018.
Content in the Lab is not about more drills. Instead, we added Courses in the various categories listed below:
