 Hello, welcome back. So in our fourth video of our five in the mini series, I'm going to be talking through ways that I like to develop rallying skills in junior players in particular eight and under. So let's see how I develop rallying skills. Rallying can be super difficult, but once a child masters how to keep a ball going back and forth with a partner, it gives them endless opportunities. They'll be able to play tennis with their families, they'll be able to play tennis with their friends, and longer term, they're going to have a lot more enjoyment out of the sport. So it's really important that as soon as you can to get your children, your players to rally, even if it's on progression one, which I'll show you now. The way I like to introduce rallies in eight and under level is to start off with soft control. Now there's nothing worse than a child going onto a court and trying to rally but whacking the ball out the back of the court all the time. So this first one is called self rally and what you need to do is start with a nice knee bend, get your strings pointing up to the sky, we're going to drop the ball, bounce tap, bounce tap, bounce tap. Now try to encourage your players to bend their knees to get underneath the ball rather than just using their racket to do it and they'll lose a lot of control. So knee bend is crucial on this one. Once they're able to self rally, the next step is adding a partner and I'm lucky enough to have my younger brother here. Come on then bud, you come onto this side. So you can use a space on the court, we haven't got any markings, we're just going to try to do this as a pair just as I did before, just taking turns. So a nice knee bend getting the strings pointing upwards, one for me, one for you, one for me, one for you. Now we're making it look quite easy, it can be quite challenging. So if it is challenging for the younger players rather than doing one shot each, you could go for three so they get a bit of repetition and a little bit of rhythm. So I'll look a bit more like this, so I'll go one, two, three and then pass and buddy we'll go one and two and three and pass and so on. So as you can see now, we've introduced a line and we're just using the singles line on the tennis court. Now the aim of this progression is to try to rally over the line as if it's the net. So we're going to try and get to ten, so we've got a nice low position, strings pointing upwards, one, two, three, four, five, six, more close, seven, eight, nine, ten, excellent. Now that we can rally over a line, the next obvious progression is to rally over a net but it's not that easy, it's quite tricky, so I'm going to go through a couple of ways that I like to progress rallies once we get the net involved. So first of all, we're going to do step back rallies. Now these rallies we have a marker, so I have a marker, everybody has a marker as well. We're going to stand with our shoes inside and after each shot we've got to get back to this marker. Now for sake today we're going to go for four shot rallies, so we're going to go one, two, three and four. As we completed our mission we got four, we're going to use our tennis racket to measure one racket length back so Buddy will do the same and I will set up for the next one. So these are called step back rallies, we're going to try four again, so one, two, three and four. We completed the task so again we measure one racket length back, back to here. Now if you've got a group of multiple players you can use this as a bit of a competition and you can race against the other team on the court next door to you. If a child or a team fails to get to four they don't have to go back, they just start that rally again. Another way of progressing rallies, if they get to a stage where they patto and they've got to a certain level, let's say they get to here, these are called one, two, three rallies. Now depending on your age, the age of the children that you're coaching, you could use different times tables. So let's say Buddy's really good at maths and we're going to use the nine times tables, that's my favourite. So we're going to try to get nine shots in a row. Level two we're going to try to get 18 shots in a row and level three we're going to get 27. Okay let's see if we can do it. So ready positions, nine is the first level, one. So that's level one, level two we've got to get 18, here we go, five, six, seven, eight, nine, you get the gist. By the way those skills there we teach on progression 72. So they were some of the ways that I like to progress rallying skills in juniors, again they're not the only ways and there are plenty of other fun ways that you can do it, but they're just some of the ones that I like to use. I hope you found that useful, if you did click subscribe and check out my other videos in this series, the forehand, the backhand, the serve and match play skills. Take care.