This is a product explainer — SquashRT uses two on-court indicators, the Power Donut and the Shot Area, to show where and how you can hit the ball. Here's what the two rings mean and three in-app positioning mistakes to watch for.
Shot Area: where you can reach the ball at all
Per SquashRT's own drill-builder guide (squashrt.com/guide/boards), on the drill boards (Court View / Tactics Board) the white dotted ring around your player marks your reach — described there as “about 1.3 m.” Outside that ring, the guide states you cannot hit the ball at all — it isn't a judgment call, it's a hard limit in the game.
Power Donut: where you hit it well
The same guide describes a smaller, player-colored ring inside the Shot Area, at “about 80%” of full reach, as the Power Donut. According to that description, striking the ball on this ring gives the strongest shot; contact too close to your body is weaker. The boards' own tooltip puts it a different way: the inner ring is full power, the outer edge is a weaker, stretched-out reach.
Three in-app positioning mistakes to watch for
- Waiting too long to move. Players who react late often end up hitting at a stretch or cramped, rarely on the Power Donut, because there wasn't time to close the distance cleanly. Suggested drill: Receive & Move trains reading the ball and moving early, before the shot forces a late scramble.
- Standing too close to the ball's path. Crowding the ball means contact happens near your body instead of at extension — the opposite of where the Power Donut sits. Suggested drill: Straight & Cross Mix (in Foundation Drives) asks you to choose a straight or cross-court answer before the bounce and contrasts contact beside you with contact out in front. Use the rings to observe the in-app position rather than treating the drill as a guaranteed correction.
- Treating every position as good enough. Because the Shot Area is fairly generous, it's easy to hit something from almost anywhere in it — but “reachable” and “well-struck” aren't the same thing, and the difference shows in how the ball travels. Suggested drill: Alternating Rails (in Foundation Drives) alternates feeds between the two sides and asks you to recover through the T. Use the repeated feeds to observe your in-app position relative to the two rings; no improvement in real-world contact is claimed.
Why this matters more than it looks
None of this is about raw power in the sense of swinging harder — it's about distance from your body at contact. Watching for the Power Donut specifically, instead of just “did I reach it,” is a more precise way to self-check positioning during a drill; this article doesn't claim it produces faster improvement than any other method, since that hasn't been measured.
SquashRT uses a physics-based approximation of ball flight, not a full simulation. These drills are a companion to on-court practice and coaching, not a replacement, and do not guarantee improvements in real-world technique or power.