If you're looking for a great drill to improve the consistency and placement of your overhead, these are the drills that you should be working on. The reason why working on your overhead using drills is so important is because by having a solid overhead, it means you can end the point. 

And so many times if you really think about it, what's the last shot your opponent's going to hit after you do everything right? You've hit that approach shot, you've hit a good volley. They're going to probably throw that ball as an overhead. And if you can't finish it, oh, that's so painful. And so we want to make sure we have a strong and consistent overhead that we can place where we want to.

So the very first thing we want to start off and you can use a friend or a ball machine. It's just have someone feed balls in the middle of the court and you're going to focus on placing the ball to the forehand or backhand side. 

When we do this, we want to pick one side at a time. So let's say I'm going to just go to my opponent's forehand side by doing this, I'm going to set up and just continuously hit over. It's that side. What I recommend doing is trying to hit a number of overheads in a row.

The reason this is important is because the more you can train yourself to connect chains, meaning consistently hit the same shot over and over again, the better off you're going to be compared to hitting one good one missing one, hitting another good one, hitting another good one missing two.

 The more you can train, the consistency, the more consistency is going to show up in your matches. And so what I recommend going out and trying to hit the target, which is going to be at least halfway between the baseline and probably two or three feet away from the sideline on the forehand side with your overhead at least eight balls in a row and then try to do that three times. So it kind of three sets of eight balls.

 If you can do this type of drill with your overhead, you're going to have a lot more confidence that when the ball goes up bingo, you can hit at that spot. Now equally, we have to do the exact same thing to the backhand side to make sure that just in case it goes up, either way, let's say your opponents on your forehand side and they throw up a lob, you can equally hit the ball on the backhand side.

I recommend again having the ball go up in the middle of the court, and then you focus on hitting the backhand side eight times and then three sets each. Once you feel really comfortable, you can do it to either side. What I recommend is you actually alternating sides, meaning you hit one to the forehand and one to the backhand. This really puts you in a great position that you feel confident that the ball goes up. 

You can place the ball wherever you need to, whether you're playing singles or doubles, and you know that you can do it over and over again. The next drill I recommend you do for the overhead is that you're going to probably need a friend or a pro to feed your ball. What you want to do is have them feed you a little bit deeper ball where you have to go back and really kind of stretch you to hit that overhead. 

And when you go back for this overhead, you want to focus on placing the overhead. It doesn't mean it has to be a point ending crazy slam dunk overhead, but it needs to be a solid overhead. After that, they're going to feed you a short overhead and they're going to place that ball in the opposite corner.

So for example, I'm going to go up on a harder overhead and place it on the forehand side and then my easier overhead. I'm going to place it on the backhand side. This is more representational to what you might see in a match, meaning your opponent hits a really deep overhead. You have to go back and hit a pretty solid one. 

Not a point ending shot because you're deeper in the court and then because you hit that shot, they're going to give you maybe a shorter one because you have to go up and then finish it. This is a great drill to see again if you can do enough reps, and this rep now consists of two balls, meaning you have to deep one and then the short one and then do another one deep one and then the short one. 

And if you can do this four times, this is a huge confidence booster to your ability to hit overheads. If you have a little trouble with it, no problem. Slow it down just a little bit. Start making balls and then slowly increase the pace in which you're hitting their overheads and you feel more confident about what you're doing.