How to Coach tennis to a Group of 3-4 Year Olds

I recently put a video on you tube showing some tennis exercises for 3-4 year olds. This was a one-to-one session and somebody asked the question “how can you do this for a group”. This post is an answer to that question. Here’s the

But before I answer, I want to address another question: Do 3-4 year olds actually need tennis lessons? Well, I don’t think they need tennis lessons. My opinion is that children who start tennis at 5-6 years old can be just as good as or better than children who start at 3-4, and vice versa. It just doesn’t build a big difference. I’ve seen children who could hit the ball at 2.5 years old, but by 6 hadn’t progressed much.

Teaching Tennis Lessons for 4 Year Olds Near Me, But as there is a demand in my area for this age collection to do tennis, I provide the sessions. If the children enjoy the sessions and the parents are happy to pay, then it doesn’t do any harm. I’m always open with the parents and happy to tell them that everything we do in the sessions are things that the parents could do themselves – if they want to!

We don’t really teach tennis technique in these session – the children are just too young to learn it. The focus is on building all the skills which form the foundations of tennis (and pretty much all other sports). So running, jumping, twisting, turning, hopping, balancing, receiving, sending, co-ordination, quickness…….all that good stuff.

So to answer the question. How to do these exercises with a group:

1. I would suggest a ratio of 4 children to 1 adult. This doesn’t mean you need 2 coaches. You can have one coach running the session and a parent or two helping. Or a teenage helper.

2. You can do the warm up as a group. Something likes ‘race cars’ where the children are running in different directions using a cone as a steering wheel.

3. You can try having them in pairs for most of the exercises shown in the video, but many children of this age are just too young to work in pairs. If it doesn’t work, just abandon!

4. As you have a ratio of 1:4 you can do all the exercises with you and your assistant feeding to the children one at a time. With that ratio, there is not too much waiting time. If you had a ratio of 1:8 the children would be waiting for ages, get bored, mess around and the parents might not be too happy with it.

5. There are some exercises which you can have all the children doing on their own. For instance, I use traffic cones – each child has a traffic cone with a ball on top. They hit the ball off the cone at the fence. Every time they hit the fence, they run to get a little cone – this is like scoring a point.

Here are some other good YouTube vids with exercises for this age. Remember you can use bean bags / balloons / big balls instead of tennis balls this one’s great! Little kids will love this.

This one’s good, but too difficult for 3-4 year olds. Here’s how you might change it:

1) Use bean bags instead of balls. When you say bungee, the kids jump, trying to keep bean bag on racket.

2) Use a ball, but placed in the throat of the racket.

3) When coach says ‘drop’, the kids drop the ball from the racket & trap the ball under the racket.

And another one which will work for 3-4 year olds

There is a lot more you can do with 3-4 year olds in a group – a bit too much to detail in this post – but here’s a few more quick ideas:Over arm throwing. I often do this with bean bags as you can make it a competition – as the bean bags are different colours and stop where they land, you can see whose bean bag went the furthest. I also have a game where the group is all standing in a line and the coach runs past – all the kids try to throw their bean bag at the coach.

Flipping pancakes – bean bags on rackets, trying to flip them over.

Hula hoops – kids try to throw their bean bag into partner’s hoop – or flip it from their racket into partner’s hoop. Or there is another exercise where you roll the hula hoop along the ground and the child runs after it and tries to throw a ball through. This needs coach / assistant feeding of path.

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