Ten Ways to Get the Most Out of TennisDrills TV

By Jorge Capestany, USPTA Master Professional & PTR International Master Professional

The purpose of this article is to help you understand the many ways that you can leverage all the content on the TennisDrills TV website. We don't want our subscribers paying for something that they are not using.

Whether you're the only coach from your program who is a subscriber or if you're a corporate client with many coaches as subscribers, the list below has some great ways to get the most from your subscription to TennisDrills.tv.

Many of these ideas have come from the existing members and others came from a brainstorming session I did with current corporate clients.

1. Drill of the Week (club-wide)

This is as simple as it sounds, you just pick a certain drill from the website and send it to all your coaches with the goal being that they Implement that drill into their classes for that week or it could even be for the month.

2. Course of the Month (quarter) 

Here you can assign certain course(s) that you want your coaches to go through. As you know, there are more than 80 courses in the Lab section of the website. Over 30 of those courses have a quiz and if a coach passes the quiz, they can submit the certificate and get PTR and/or USPTA education credit.

This is a popular option and many of our clients are spending less money by sending their coaches to fewer in-person conferences where they have to miss their normal classes, have the expenses of travel and registration fees, and of course, the members don't get to take their normal lessons. Using the quizzes in these courses can actually save you more money than the cost of a subscription because you don't need to send your coaches to as many in-person education events.

3. Zoom Drill Reviews 

This is another option for clients. This is especially effective if you have coaches spread around a larger geographical area. All you do is simply have a Zoom meeting with your coaches and review some of the content/drills on the website. It could be as simple as reviewing a certain number of drills or going through a course or even a part of a course that you find helpful.

4. Pro Drill Exchange 

This is one of my favorite things to do at my own club. It's working well for other clubs too. Here's when you get your coaches together on the court and each coach demonstrates a drill from the website to the other coaches. Then the coaches can talk about what they like about each drill while getting practice in delivering the drill to their fellow coaches.

You may even want to invite some club members to be the "guinea pigs" and demo the drills with them as the players. This way you can charge your members and make money at the same time you are training your coaches.

5. On-court Training Sessions 

This is similar to #4 above, but now the focus is on learning how to modify drills better. Learning to modify drills is the art and includes the ability to make a drill easier (regression) or make it more difficult (progression). This is a very important skill that many coaches struggle with. The ability to effectively modify drills is what sets apart a world-class coach from an average coach.

When we use this method, we demonstrate the drill, and then we ask some of the coaches to come up with a way to make it easier (regression). Then another group of coaches finds a way to make the drill more difficult (progression). We do this with their own PTM students at Hope College; it is one of the best ways to spend time with them on the court. Learning these modification skills is excellent training for pros of any experience level.

6. Internal Certification 

We all know that the certification process for coaches in our country is more convoluted and confusing than ever. Many of our clients are considering doing in-house certifications. This means that they will go through all of our content and decide for themselves what is important for their coaches to know.

With our vast array of content including 2000+ drills and 100+ courses, case studies, there's more than enough content for each client to come up with a pathway that they can use as an internal certification. Remember, corporate clients can have private dashboards built for them. This is not an option for anyone, only our corporate clients can tap into this. We are currently doing these types of dashboards with Cliff Drysdale Tennis and the Peter Burwash International clubs.

7. Certificate Tracks 

This is a similar option to #6 above (internal certification). But this method allows each individual coach to customize their own certification pathway. This means that the coach himself decides which drills and courses he is interested in. Then he presents the idea to his supervisor who will give the final approval. Some clients may decide to use this extra education for giving raises to their coaches. Rather than just automatically giving a raise, you can give them only to those who are proving to better themselves through additional education.

Some clubs will do both, a normal raise and maybe a higher raise for those that have gone through more educational content. Each supervisor can decide how he will reward the coach for going through the extra training. This method has the advantage of allowing the coaches to customize their own education based on things that interest them. This also makes it way more likely that they will follow up and do the content as opposed to having to do content that has been assigned to them.

8. Fast Track Pathway 

Another option is to identify a series of content (drills, courses, or case studies) that you might want your coaches to go through. We call this the Fast Track. In this method, the supervisor picks several drills and courses from the website and identifies them as a Fast Track. If a Coach decides to go through all the content in a Fast Track, it should lead them to a specific job promotion (or raise) faster than normal.

The supervisor himself will know what the needs are at the club so he can handpick the types of courses and basically internally educate his own Pro Staff to develop the types of leaders that he knows his club needs. For example, if a club needs a director of the little kid's program, you could set up a Fast Track that has lots of kids drills and courses, and perhaps you can promote from within rather than having to do a national search.

9. Run Case Studies 

Without a doubt, one of the best features on the website is in the Lab under Case Studies. The Case Studies section was built because I wanted to show people that they could earn money using our proven turn-key event. Honestly, just doing ONE of these events typically pays way more than the investment you're making in the subscription to our website.

Plus it has the added benefit of keeping your members happy with cool and new special events. We have clients that have assigned their coaches to run one of the special events from our case studies section at least once a quarter. Some clubs have made over $5,000 running these events.

10. Continuing Education = Save Money 

As mentioned before, one of the major benefits of being a member of tennisdrills.tv as a corporate client is that you can actually save money by having your Pro’s continuing education happen directly on the website. With more than 30 courses that are available for USPTA and or PTR education credit, it's not hard to save money by having your coaches get their education from the comfort of their own computer screens.

Thanks for visiting our site, make sure you check out all our FREE tennis drills and courses at the links in the upper menu bar!

Want more from us? Start your $1 trial offer and get FULL ACCESS to our famous 2,000+ tennis drills library for 14 days - CLICK HERE.

Like this post? Please Share it!