How to Choose a Tennis Camp

Most tennis camps photograph beautifully. The drills look crisp, the courts catch the light, and somewhere in the brochure a coach is mid-sentence with one finger raised. None of that tells you whether you will leave hitting the ball better than you arrived. The week that moves your game is decided by a handful of unglamorous details, and they are easy to ask about before you book.

Here is how we read a camp on your behalf.

Ratios and court time are the whole game

Two numbers do more work than anything else: how many players share a coach, and how many hours you actually spend on court. A camp advertising “six hours of tennis a day” might mean three hours of fed balls, an hour of fitness, a long lunch, and a doubles social you could skip. Ask for the structure hour by hour.

On ratios, four players to one coach is a sensible ceiling for genuine technical work. Beyond six and you are queuing more than hitting. Smaller is not automatically better, though — a good group of four gives you rest between points, time to watch and absorb, and a partner to rally with when the coach steps away. What you want is a coach who can see your patterns over a week, not a different face each morning reading from the same script.

Court time is the one thing a camp cannot fake. Count the minutes the ball is actually in play, not the minutes you are standing on a court.

The honest test: by Wednesday, does the coach know your habits? If they are still correcting the same grip they flagged on Monday, the ratio is wrong or the attention is spread too thin.

”All levels” usually means “no levels”

The phrase “all levels welcome” is a marketing convenience, not a teaching method. What matters is how the camp sorts players once everyone is on site. The good ones hit with you on the first morning and regroup people by feel — not by a self-reported rating, which almost nobody fills in honestly. The weak ones leave the groupings to chance and hope the strong players are patient.

Ask directly: how do you assign groups, and can they change mid-week? A camp confident in its coaching will move you up or down without ceremony once it sees you play. That flexibility is the clearest sign the staff are actually watching.

Be honest with yourself here, too. An improver dropped into a fast group spends the week chasing balls and learning nothing; a strong club player parked among beginners gets bored and sloppy. The right level is the one where roughly a third of the rallies feel slightly beyond you.

Surface, intensity, and the point of the week

Surface shapes what you will practice. A week on clay rewards patience, footwork, and the slow construction of a point — ideal if you want to rebuild technique without the ball rushing you. Hard courts ask for sharper timing and reward a flatter, more aggressive game. Pick the surface that matches what you came to fix, not simply the one with the better view.

Then decide, plainly, what you want from the week. Some camps run on intensity — early starts, video review, fitness blocks, the works. Others build in long lunches and afternoons free. Neither is wrong, but they suit different trips. A group of friends improving together wants room to enjoy the place; a player with a specific flaw to iron out wants the harder, narrower week.

The camps worth your time will tell you which they are before you ask. The ones that promise to be everything to everyone rarely move anyone’s game at all. Know what you came for, ask the two or three questions above, and the right week becomes obvious.