Every drill on SquashRT starts the same way: someone draws a shot. Tap a point on the front wall, tap a bounce, save. The catch is that a drawn line is only useful if the ball actually behaves that way — and squash balls are stubborn about physics. A drive that looks tight on a sketch might, in reality, clip the side wall early or die a metre short of the back corner.
That is why both of our drawing boards — the top-down Tactics Board and the 3D Court View — run the exact same ball-flight engine that later plays your drill in Training. And two small toggles in the control panel, Shot Snap and Auto Hop, let that engine do most of the drawing for you.
Shot Snap: the dashed line that knows the answer
Turn Shot Snap on and tap your first wall contact. The moment you do, a dashed guide appears — the ball's physically correct continuation from that exact contact point, computed by the simulation engine: angle in equals angle out, speed decaying the way a real ball decays, bounce included.
From there the board works with you, not against you:
- Taps near the guide snap onto it. Want the textbook continuation? Just tap roughly where the dashes run and your point lands exactly on the physical path.
- Taps far from the guide place freely. The guide is a suggestion, not a cage — drop a point wherever you want and the drill becomes yours.
- Drag the first contact and the guide re-draws live. Slide the wall point along the front wall and watch the whole continuation swing with it. It is the fastest way to feel how a few centimetres of width change an entire rally.
One detail coaches appreciate: on a wall, the snap fixes the horizontal geometry — the line the ball travels — while the contact height stays yours to choose. A drive and a lob can share the same floor path with very different wall contacts, and the board respects that.
Auto Hop: the second bounce, solved for you
The second bounce is where hand-drawn drills usually fall apart. How far does the ball run after it lands? Does it kiss the side wall on the way? Guessing produces drills that replay strangely; measuring by eye takes forever.
With Auto Hop on, you simply place the first bounce where you want the ball to land. The engine back-solves the shot power from that distance and then places the second bounce itself — including any wall rebound on the way. A tight rail that clips the side wall mid-hop will show exactly that.
The auto-placed landing is still just a node — drag it if you want a longer or shorter run-out, or switch Auto Hop off entirely and place the second bounce by hand for full control.
A 60-second drill-building recipe
- 1. Position the players. Drag the feeder and the hitter to their starting spots.
- 2. Tap the wall contact. One tap on the front wall starts the shot — and Shot Snap draws the continuation.
- 3. Follow the dashes. Tap the bounce point on (or off) the guide.
- 4. Let Auto Hop finish. The second bounce appears, wall rebounds included.
- 5. Fine-tune by dragging. Every node stays draggable and the path re-solves as you move it — you can even pull a floor bounce onto the side wall to turn it into a wall touch, or drag a wall point down to the floor.
- 6. Save and stack. Save the shot, add the reply, and build the sequence into a drill — then group drills into a Routine for a full session plan.
Why this matters for training
SquashRT stores your drill with its physics locked in at creation time. When you (or anyone you share it with) later runs the drill in Training, watches it in Court View, or prints the routine sheet for a real court session, the ball flies the path you drew — the same contact, the same bounce, the same hop. Shot Snap and Auto Hop are what make that promise cheap to keep: they make the physically-true drill the easiest one to draw.
Both toggles live in the control panel of the Tactics Board and Court View. Draw one rail drill with the guide on and you will not want to draw without it — and when you are happy with your pattern, share it or browse what others have built on the Public Drills page.