The whole point of repeating a drill is to burn the feel of a good shot into your body. But when you practise alone, the hardest part is knowing whether the shot you just hit was actually good. On court, a coach fills that gap in real time — "deeper", "back to the T", "that one should have been a lob". Online, that voice was missing.
With this update, every drill on SquashRT now has a real-time judgment system. A coach's eye follows every ball you hit.
The verdict appears where the ball lands
Hit a shot in any drill and the moment the ball arrives at its target, a judgment pops up on the court:
- EXCELLENT — the ball landed exactly in the zone the drill asked for
- GOOD — close to the target, but not quite there
- BAD — off target
The judgment is shown at the landing, not at the swing. You hit, your eyes track the ball, and the result appears right where it bounces — the same visual rhythm you follow when drilling on a real court.
Accuracy alone is not EXCELLENT
This is not simple target practice, for two reasons.
First, the shot type matters. Put the ball on the target in a drop drill, but push it there with a flat drive, and the grade comes down one tier with a hint underneath: PLAY A DROP! or LOB IT! A lob drill wants lobs. A boast drill wants boasts. The drill defines the shot, and the shot must be respected.
Second, the movement matters. If the drill data includes a T-recovery, you are expected to return to the T after each shot and move out again for the next ball. Skip the T and cut straight from corner to corner — or camp on one spot to make the shot easier — and even a perfectly placed ball is capped at GOOD, with BACK TO THE T! shown below the grade. Sacrificing movement for accuracy is a habit that never survives a real match.
Every miss comes with a reason
When a rally ends in a miss, the screen now shows MISS together with the real squash call:
- TIN — the ball caught the tin. Since a top-down view cannot show height, a tinned ball now dies at the front wall exactly like the real thing. A ball sitting dead against the front wall means one thing only.
- DOWN — the ball hit the floor before reaching the front wall
- OUT — the ball struck above the out line
- NOT UP — you failed to return the ball before the second bounce
The TIN call is a particularly good teacher in drop drills. Once you know the ball went in too low and too slow, the next attempt naturally gets a little more lift or a little more pace — the same lesson the metal tin teaches with its clang on a real court.
At the end of a drill, all of these judgments roll up into your rally accuracy: EXCELLENT counts 100%, GOOD counts 50%. Run the drill again and you can see, in one number, whether this run was better than the last.
Learn it with your eyes first, then play it
There is an order that makes the judgment system work hardest for you.
- 1. Watch the drill in Court View (3D). See how high each ball travels, where it lands, and when the player returns to the T. Get the whole picture into your eyes first.
- 2. Check the pattern on the Tactics Board (top-down). From above, the angles and the movement lines read like a diagram. Fix the cycle in your head: feed → move → shot → back to the T.
- 3. Play it in Training. This is where the pattern in your head becomes rhythm in your body. Correct something after every judgment, repeat the drill, and push your EXCELLENT rate up.
Watch, play, correct — stack that loop and the drill's rhythm stays in your body. The day you step on court, the rhythm moves first.
Try it now:
- Start training: https://www.squashrt.com/play/training
- Browse drill routines: https://www.squashrt.com/routine
SquashRT — Squash Rhythm Trainer