Cone drills teach you to run to places nobody hits

Court coverage practice keeps rehearsing symmetrical patterns that no real opponent has ever produced in a rally.

Spider drills, four corner runs, the ladder at the start of the session. All of it looks like work and most of it is rehearsing a distribution of ball placement that does not exist. Real rallies are not symmetrical. They cluster, heavily, in a band around the middle of the baseline and they arrive with a bias that depends on who is serving and which wing is under attack. A drill that sends you evenly to every corner is training a movement budget you will never be asked to spend.

The more honest version is simpler and less photogenic. Feed from one side only. Make the player defend the same wing eight times in a row, because that is what actually happens when an opponent has found a weakness and has no reason to stop. The fatigue pattern is different, the recovery angle is different, and the decision is different too, because on the eighth ball the temptation to gamble and change direction becomes overwhelming and that is the skill you want to train.

There is also the matter of what happens after the shot. Most coverage drills end at contact. The player hits, the coach feeds the next ball, and the recovery step is never really loaded because the next ball is already in the air. In a match the recovery is the movement that decides the following three shots, and it is the one thing nobody times. If I could measure one thing about a player's movement, it would not be their sprint over five metres. It would be how long they stand still after they hit.

I would push it further. The most valuable running in tennis is the running you do towards the middle, not away from it, and it happens while your brain is still processing the shot you just hit. Players who are slow to start that are not slow players. They are players who are watching their own ball.

Watch a top defender and you notice they hardly ever admire anything.

The other reason cone work persists is that it is easy to see effort in it, and effort is comforting to everyone involved. Coaches feel useful. Players feel virtuous.

Neither of those is the same as being in the right place on the eleventh shot.