Learning the overhead stroke for young beginners

For young children, learning the overhead stroke is a key early step in their development.

Some kids are fairly active or athletic, and pick up the general motion of the stroke fairly intuitively. With them, the conventional approach works very well: demonstrate the stroke, go over a few key points for grip (forehand grip), body position (side on to net) and contact point (above the shoulder and in front).

However, there are many kids, either very young children (5-9 years old) or older kids without much athletic experience that have trouble learning the overhead stroke. They have a lack of general athletic coordination that hampers their learning using the conventional method. Learning the overhead stroke right away could be too big of a jump in terms of difficulty. What may be necessary is to take a step back and work on some precursor skills to the stroke:

Throwing motion: overhead throws of the bird
Swinging motion: shadow swings of the racquet
Stroke footwork: shadow swing with stroke footwork (e.g. scissor kick)
Grip and racquet control: various service types, bird bouncing
Hand eye coordination: basic defensive shots (learn to react to bird's trajectory)

A sample progression might look like this:
1. Underhand throw, FH and BH
2. FH Grip, FH Serve into box
3. BH Grip, BH Serve into box
4. Overhead throw
5. Overhead throw with footwork back & scissor kick
6. Overhead swing
7. Overhead swing with footwork back & scissor kick
8. Overhead stroke from hand toss
9. Overhead stroke from serve
10. Overhead strokes (continuous)

Modified Doubles Games - Opening Situation

Same server, serve returner (Doubles)

In this version of doubles, the same service situation is repeated each rally rather than using the usual rotation of serves and sides. This allows for the same plays and situations to come up at a higher frequency, which subsequently gives more opportunities to make corrections and adjustments for those plays.

Can be further modified to either repeat the same service location and/or service return to force a specific 2nd or 3rd shot situation.

Advantages:

• focuses on the opening situation for doubles in which most rallies are decided
  
• allows for repetition of standard opening plays and their variations

Disadvantages:

• requires relatively level opponents/training partners

Notes:

• Be sure to have sufficient repetitions of a given situation to explore all the possibilities