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Tennis Training Log Template for Junior Players (Free)

A training log is a one-minute habit that turns a season of practice into something you can read back. It works on paper or in an app, and the value comes from filling it in often rather than filling it in perfectly. Here is a template you can copy, a filled-in example, and the research behind the two columns most people leave out.

What should a tennis training log include?

Keep it to fields a young player will happily complete in under a minute. Eight columns cover almost everything useful:

• Date: so you can line entries up over weeks.
• Session type: coaching, squad, match, or fitness.
• Duration: minutes on court, roughly.
• Surface: hard, clay, grass, or indoor.
• Focus areas: what the session was about, in a few words.
• Effort (1–5): how hard the whole session felt.
• One thing that improved: a small win to keep.
• Work on next: the single focus for next time.

The last two columns are what make a log worth keeping. They turn a record of what happened into a plan for what comes next, which is the part that actually helps a player improve.

The free weekly template

Print this out for the week, or copy the columns into a notebook. One row per session is all it takes.

How do you fill it in?

Fill it in soon after the session, while the details are fresh, and keep the words short. Here is a realistic row from a 12-year-old after a squad session:

Notice the focus and reflection columns are specific. "Second serve landing deeper" is more useful next week than "played well." If a coach gives a cue that clicks, write it down word for word. For the fuller version kept after matches rather than practice, see our guide to the junior tennis training journal.

Why track effort, not just hours?

Two players can hit for the same 90 minutes and do very different amounts of work. An effort score captures that difference in a single number. The approach behind the column is called session-RPE, developed by Carl Foster and colleagues in 2001. RPE stands for rating of perceived exertion, and the method is simple: about 30 minutes after the session ends, the player rates how hard the whole thing felt on a single scale. Foster's original method used a 0–10 scale; this template and the Junior Tennis Pro app use a compact 1–5 version of the same idea, which is easier for a young player to answer consistently. Rating it a little later, rather than in the moment, gives a more honest read of the session as a whole rather than of the hardest drill in it.

Foster's team showed that this one number tracks the physical demand of a session closely enough for coaches to monitor training without any special equipment. Multiply the effort score by the minutes and you get a rough training load, which is why the template records duration in the column next to it.

How much training is too much?

A log makes weekly totals visible, and one guideline is worth knowing. In a case-control study of young athletes led by Neeru Jayanthi and colleagues, players who trained more hours per week than their age in years had higher odds of a serious overuse injury. By that guideline, a 12-year-old training more than 12 hours a week would sit on the wrong side of the line.

Treat this as a flag rather than a verdict. It comes from population data, so it describes odds across a group rather than what will happen to one child, and it does not account for how the hours are structured or how a player is coping. Use the weekly total in your log as a starting point for a conversation, and talk to your child's coach or doctor about what is right for them specifically.

Printable page or app?

A printed sheet on the fridge is a good place to start, especially for younger players who like ticking a box. The limit shows up after a month, when a stack of paper is hard to read back for patterns like effort creeping up or the second serve stalling.

How Junior Tennis Pro helps

Junior Tennis Pro keeps this same log on a phone and does the tallying for you. The Training tab has quick fields for each session and, because it records duration and effort, it charts effort trends and weekly load automatically, so the patterns you would otherwise hunt for in a notebook are already drawn. It works offline and keeps entries private on the device.