A cooperative tennis game should have the following characteristics

1. Each side of the net should be working cooperatively towards the same, challenging, goal.
2. It should be fun to play (at least as fun than regular tennis, especially for people who don't like competition).
3. To be fun, the physical & mental challenge should be as great as possible, while being easy to see improvement in play: it should be impossible to "master" the new rules allowing the team to "win" too easily.
4. The rules should be as simple as possible.
5. These goals, as prioritized above, will guide the search for the best set of rules. In order to facilitate this search, and to meet characteristic 2 above, lets look at the desirable aspects of the action during a regular competitive tennis game.

Consistency is the first rule of a tennis player: get the ball back over the net and into the court. But this goal alone is too easy after a while, as anyone who has "rallied" extensively will tell you. The action in regular tennis is also fast. The harder you hit the ball, the more challenging it is to keep it in the court, and the more difficult it is for the person on the other side of the net to return it. Finally, the more you vary where the ball lands each time it crosses the net, the more challenging it is for both players. It keeps you running and forces you to develop a wide range of shots from a wide range of approaches.

Note that the above challenges are all good aspects of the game, even though they are the very mechanisms with which we "force" the other player to make an error. The high level of challenge is desirable to keep the game interesting and stimulate excellence in terms of athletic ability, the rules that create mutually exclusive goals in order to achieve that challenge is what we want to change.

Tennis is setup as the epitome of competitive games: the best way to win a point, and the game itself, is to make the other person fail. This is especially true in more advanced play, when the competitors have advanced beyond the level where consistency is more important than brilliantly difficult shots. New rules for the use of a tennis court that set mutually attainable goals for the two sides of the net is the subject of the following discussion.

Tennis is a challenging game for beginners. Just hitting the ball over the net into the court is a non-trivial task, so there are five different sets of rules: one for beginners, two for intermediate players, one for advanced and one for expert. A team would continue to play the beginner or intermediate rules until they were both ready and wanted to increase the challenge and advance to the next more difficult rules.

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