The presented tennis agility drills can be used by beginners, kids and advanced athletes to improve agility, footwork, speed, dynamic balance and coordination.

Tennis Agility Drills

Alexander Ritschard

You can do the tennis agility drills right on the court. Ensure that the athletes perform the tennis agility drills in perfect form and technique before you speed up the action because that allows for:

  • efficient neural pattern development
  • enhanced kinetic chain efficiency
  • better overall performance on the tennis court

For more info on how to improve kinetic chain efficiency and why it is important take a look at Why Core Training for Tennis Players is Important and Why Weight Training for Tennis Players Makes Sense.

Tennis Agility Drills Progression


In order to get the most benefits out of the tennis agility drills and reach the ultimate goal of better on-court performance the athletes need to progress through the various drills in the following order:

  1. Use visual data: look at where you are moving (e.g. eyes on the ground)
  2. Become reflexive: move without visual data (e.g. eyes look forward)
  3. Become sport-specific: move without visual data while hitting tennis balls

For advanced or professional athletes, who are already proficient in the drill dynamics, you can incorporate the tennis agility drills into your tennis training session to emulate match-like situation thus allowing you to develop tennis-specific agility.

Here is an example:

Download chapter 7, SAQ Training: Developing Speed, Agility and Quickness, and start developing all aspects of speed, agility and quickness for athletes and understand the components of speed training, how to improve agility and how strengths training benefits power.

Tennis Agility Drills Diagram

Here are some tennis agility drill diagrams so you can visualize and better understand how to execute the respective drills.

Two of the tennis agility drills, the 7 Deuce Drill and the Lateral Fast Feet to Ball Drop & React, can eventually be incorporated into your tennis training whereas the 8 Way Ring drill purely focuses on change of direction and footwork improvements.


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