Walk into most junior tennis programs in the United States and you will see a version of the same scene. A coach feeding balls to one player from a basket while the others wait in line. Drills that repeat the same pattern until everyone can execute it cleanly. A session that ends with a parent being quietly pulled aside to discuss how much more their child could benefit from some one-on-one time.
This is not coaching. It is a business model dressed up as one.
Across most of Europe and South America, the private lesson is a finishing tool. You use it to address something specific that group training has surfaced, once a player is ready to isolate and refine a particular detail. It is the exception, not the foundation. The real development happens in the group, in the competition, in the unpredictability of playing against other people who are also trying to win. That environment produces something no private lesson can replicate: the ability to think and adapt when the situation is not cooperative.
In the American junior system, this logic has been largely reversed. Group sessions are often underpowered by design, thin on competitive pressure and genuine decision-making, because the real money is in the private lessons that parents are quietly guided toward as the solution. The group session becomes the advertisement. The private becomes the product.
The tell is in the drills. When group training looks nothing like a tennis match, when players are hitting predetermined balls to predetermined targets in predetermined sequences, you are watching a program that is not interested in developing your child’s tennis intelligence. You are watching a program that is interested in demonstrating effort while creating dependency.
A group session designed well is demanding in a completely different way. It puts players in situations they have to solve. It tolerates failure because failure is information. It creates the kind of competitive pressure that makes the private lesson mostly unnecessary, because the player is already learning to think.
If your child’s coach cannot develop them in a group, they will not unlock something different one-on-one. They will just charge more per hour to do less.
The question worth asking is not how many private lessons your child is getting. It is what the group training is actually teaching them. And if the honest answer is not much, that is not your child’s problem to fix.