7 Best Practices for Running a Successful Public Racquet Sports Facility

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It’s Ashley with Court Reserve. It’s another courtside conversation today all
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about being a public facility. Welcome. We’re so excited to have you. I already
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see questions coming in the Q&A. That’s amazing. Uh but before we get started,
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don’t worry. Uh this will be recorded and put on our Court Reserve YouTube channel later on today. Um, and today is
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kind of a very exciting day because we are talking about all kinds of public
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facility best practices. And one of those is for you and your team to join
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us at an upcoming court reserve catalyst. That is a two-day teaching and
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best practice event. We just had one in Columbus, Ohio last week. It was incredible. Four hours of roundt best
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practice. So if you like what you see today, come to Detroit, Denver, or Toronto. That is on steroids. And it’s
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an amazing time. You just get to network with people that are like-minded and in our space. And then the second day is
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full teaching and court reserve. And at the end of that day, people walk away with like pages and pages of best
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practices that they’re going to take back for their facility. So, if you have any questions, uh, you can just reach
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out to courtreserve.com and the Catalyst registrations are in there. The tickets are only $99 and we feed you. So, please
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come. We have a great time. If you’re anything in the pickle ball business and want to learn best practices, our next
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club pickle ball mastermind is going to be August 12th through the 14th out in Utah um, with our friends at Club Pickle
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Ball. And if you didn’t know, today is the day that it’s a big celebration for
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us at Court Reserve. We’ve been working with Google for the last year to today
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is the day it goes live for everybody who uses Court Reserve. What does that
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mean? It means that now instead of going through the account creation, your
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players can easily book directly from their Google business profile. So, if you want to learn more, you should have
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gotten an email from us today about the Google public booking integration. Of
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course, you can reach out to our chat support team and we can send you the information. You can go out to
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courtreserve.com today. Our latest blog is this one right here. Um, and you can
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learn, you know, within a few minutes, as long as you have your Google business profile set up, your players could be
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easily booking directly from Google. And this is really to fill that unused court space, that programming that needs to be
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filled up, getting those new players in the door, which is exactly what we’re going to talk to Matt and Alex about
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today. Hi, friends. How are you? I know they’re here. They’re probably just trying to figure out where the video
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button is. [laughter] Good morning. All right. Well, so today our panelist,
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uh, very great people, great facilities. Matt is from HJK Ventures Balboa Tennis
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out in San Diego. A beautiful facility. Can’t wait to hear more about it. And
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then Alex is uh our friend from the north all the way up in Toronto. Multi-
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location of Pickle Plex. So, we got a little bit of pickle and a little bit of tennis today. Um and then Kayla from our
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customer support team is going to be helping us with all of our questions. So, please put your questions out in the
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Q&A. Uh, that would be the best place and we will get to them. So, Matt, can I start with you? We’d
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love to hear just a little bit about your facility all um and all about you guys. Sure. So, uh, first of all, thanks for
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having me. Um, out here in San Diego, our business began about four years ago at Baloa Tennis Club. That’s San Diego’s
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largest tennis club. Um, we have 25 courts. Um but the business that we run
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is actually only instructional business. So we don’t manage any of the memberships. We don’t manage the members
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or open play, booking courts, any of that. Our sole focus is four courts of
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instruction. And so what that does is it means that all of our attention is on
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how do we utilize this court space as efficiently as possible? How do we touch
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as many lives as possible? That over the course of the last few years led to us actually managing now a second club in
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San Diego. That’s a little sixcourt club that’s called University City Racket Club. And basically we’ve we’ve turned
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it into a bit of a powerhouse and it’s it’s a once the train gets going full speed sometimes you’re a little scared
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of what comes with it. And I’m sure we’re going to talk about some of those challenges today. But I’m just very excited to be here.
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Thank you so much. All right, Alex, let’s hear about your facility up in Canada. Hi everyone, my name is Alex and I’m the
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director of operations for Pickle Plex and we’ve got 13 and I guess kind of a
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half because we have a little popup location going right now. Um, locations running up in Canada. Um, all ranging in
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different sizes mainly from six courts all the way to 13 courts just focusing
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on pickle ball at this time. Uh, and we opened up our first location uh, in
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January of 2025. And now we’ve already scaled up to 13 um, locations and
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counting with more and more coming on the horizon, as I’m sure Ashley sees, new locations being created by me every
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few weeks. Uh, it’s getting a little bit crazy now, but super exciting. Um, and
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we operate with like a franchise model, but we also have four corporate stores, and we’ll be opening up our fifth
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corporate store soon. Um, so super excited to share all the learnings I’ve had along the way as well as learnings
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I’ve had from my past jobs um, in relatively the same space as well.
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Okay, so we’ve got the tennis and the pickle. So, first let’s really talk about um, how do you balance that public
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access and making sure that you have good structured programming? And I know Matt, that’s what you guys specialize
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in. And Alex, you guys specialize in that and court utilization or filling up those courts for those reservations. So,
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let’s talk about that first. Matt. So, I guess I would say that
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in in my world in San Diego, the tennis community is extremely competitive. So,
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there’s a lot of options for people to go and play at different places, take
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different clinics, different lessons. I would say I learned very quickly when I moved to San Diego 15 years ago. You can
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walk down your street and one of your neighbors played in a grand slam. So just showing up I realized from the
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beginning you have to offer something that’s different. And that’s really what we specialize in
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and I think why our business has thrived is that uh we basically have four main programs that we run for adults. Uh I I
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should have mentioned we have the largest adult tennis programs in Southern California. I don’t know
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anybody. It might be further than that, but I haven’t searched further. And so we have about 500 adult clinic spots
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every single week on four courts. We have 32 pros. So what that means is
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every time somebody walks in the door at Balboa and now our second site, we have
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to offer them an experience they can get nowhere else. And we have slowly and intricately grown that through, and you
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know, Ashley knows this. I I feel like I’m speaking to you, Ashley, but I’m speaking to everyone else. Through an
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incredible partnership with Court Reserve. I don’t know how else to say it, that it allows me the time to manage
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500 clinic spots through the software. And the story of our success basically
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is the story of court reserve which is that as they’ve expanded and offered more features and more even just that
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the new Google integration is like another way that I’m like great we need we need another club where are we going
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to fit all these people so I love that yeah it’s a pretty simple tale of find
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something that works for you guys and then extrapolate it and expand it and the simplest way to put it is we just
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would not be here without core reserve. Wow. So before we move on to Alex, specifically on the tennis side, what is
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your best program right now that you know is a home run and how did you know
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that that was going to be a home run or did you just test the waters? Yeah. So if man, I could it’s almost
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hard to boil it down because I am the type of person who thinks about this 247
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and constantly testing my hypothesis. Is this class better? Is it worse? the timing, the coaching, the how we train
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the coaches, all that stuff that I think a lot of facilities take for granted. The number one thing that we do is our
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adult beginner tennis programs. And that is the key to every single thing we do
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at the club because we make our own players. We don’t have to convince
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players from another club to come over to us. We don’t have to try to upsell you on taking more lessons. The whole
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system that I think a lot of the tennis industry is used to is flipped. You’re lucky to be here because I got 20 on the
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weight list. And so, for lack of a better term, whatever we end up doing with pricing, which goes up every year,
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they’re there for it. Whatever new coaches, new experience, new day, new time, people are spilling into those
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options. And so, 100% uh and I hope we’ll talk about this more, the adult
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beginner clinics have been life-changing. I don’t know how else to say it. Wow. I think Alex, I’m ready to
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go to San Diego and be in a beginner tennis clinic. I mean, I’m excited. All right, Alex, you’re on mute, but tell us
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a little bit about how you guys look at how do you balance that public access and that structured programming? And
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then is this the same in pickle ball as it is in tennis? Great, great question. Let me first just
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touch on how how do we balance the public access? So, we sell memberships
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and we also sell memberships that give people free access to be able to play as
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included in their membership. We have certain restrictions that allows the court reserve allows us to set into those memberships. They’re not going and
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booking every day, every court booking all in the future. But we sell a limited
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number of those memberships. The reason why we mainly sell those memberships is one, those people are going to be the
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ravers for us who go out and tell everyone about the community about us. And two, those are the people that are
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going to shorten our revenue ramp to get up to our full potential of being able to optimize the amount of utilization
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and the amount of revenue that’s coming into our business. It’s easy to sell busy. It’s hard to sell empty. So, if
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you sell a base level of memberships out of the gate and those people are going to play a lot and get into all of your
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different programs, all your different open plays, that’s fine as long as they’re not filling them all up with all
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free play. Because what I found is when you have the public wanting to come play and they go look at your open plays and
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they see there’s zero people registered, one person registered, two p of people registered, they’re hesitant to sign up.
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But when you sell a base level of memberships or sell a base level of punch passes to people that they can go
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and access these programs for free and now there’s eight people enrolled, what you’ll start to see is just an effect of
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it just waterfalls. everyone starts to sign up for it and it’s it’s super exciting. We found that to be really
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really a difference maker for us and as Matt said, you know, we we start to hike the prices from there. Like once you
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realize the value, the average value that each member is getting, you can always uh grow from there. But the most
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important part is just not overselling, but selling enough that at least things are getting busy from the get-go. I love
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what you said because I think Matt and I have talked about this in Texas a couple months ago where when people see that
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they’re going to have FOMO, they’re going to miss out and they see the weight list or they see it filling up,
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they don’t they they’re like, “When can I get on the the list? When can I when does registration open up?” So, Matt,
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when you guys are doing your programs, these with 20 people on the wait list,
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how far in advance are you opening up these programs for registration? And how many times are you having to say, “I’m
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so sorry, you should register early.” [laughter] It’s a It’s a great question. I the
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system that works for us now I’m I’m always open to a new system that’s a little bit more um amicable or fair to
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everyone but the best one I can find is that everyone assumes I am going to open up the clinics uh about four times a
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year for the next 3 months and I alert all of our players through court reserve that that’s happened and
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you’re welcome to sign up. I’ve dabbled with, and this kind of goes back to this
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interesting conversation that Alex kind of started making me think of. I’ve dabbled with making it more amicable.
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So, you can only sign up for a certain class 60 days out or 30 days out. What I found was that drove down demand the
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harder it was for people to remember to sign up. So, I would get We have one
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class in particular called sip and serve. You have to be 21 to 40 and we
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play big group tennis games and then we go out for food and drinks afterwards. This is every Sunday night. 36 spots.
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2024 uh I think we had it like 46 weeks 46
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Sundays out of the year. All 46 were sold out. All 46 had a wait list. 2025 I
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thought, well, we’re seeing the same people just book out everything. Maybe I’ll put it so that you can only sign up
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60 days out. thinking somehow that was more fair. What you had was people just forgetting to sign up and now all of a
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sudden there’s no weight list. It’s the same people, but I was making it more fair in an attempt that kind of drove
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drove that feeling of um that demand of, oh, I’ll never get in, so I’ll just throw myself on every weight list.
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It it it again, it was maybe fairer that more people got to play, but removing
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that experience of I am lucky to get into this class. If I get in off the weight list, I’m not cancelling. It was
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a priority for people. And I I learned a valuable lesson. Let’s put it that way. Well, and it’s habit, too, right?
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Because like at my club, Saturday morning live cardio, right? [clears throat] It’s seven days out to register. If I
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forget, then I get out of the habit of remembering to even make that a part of my week.
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So, I love that. So, Alex, tell us about your programming. How many days in advance for programming specific for you
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guys? We we only allow 14-day advanced program like booking for any of our programming.
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And that’s only for members. Uh anyone who’s coming in off the streets, it’s typically down to 7 days. Uh but again,
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we make sure we limit it so that come the seven days there. If there’s enough demand, we’ve got a popular program out
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there, there’s going to be space available for the public to get into and they know they need to get in fast. Uh
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we like to open it up at 8:00 a.m. for the entire day. So, anything that’s set for 14 days or 7 days out, it’s always
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opening up at 8 a.m. just to keep that same standard if you can just sign up at that time because we’ve found if you set
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it exactly 14 days to the hour, some people have skirted around the system and found little loopholes that we just
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can’t get around. So, um that’s how we’ve typically set up the most bulk of our stuff. sometimes for lessons and
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sometimes for summer camps or things of that nature. We’ll go to 90day or 120day
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just to really try to drum up some interest and start to get an idea of what is the demand from the
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community for something like this. Yeah, I know on the summer camp uh conversations we had a couple months
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ago, one of the participants was like, I push summer camp for next year at the current summer camp this year because
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that’s when people are like, I don’t parents don’t wait until June. they gotta book this stuff in, you know,
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November and December. So, I I love that. Um, so help me understand, Alex,
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from your perspective, what’s your pickle ball specific? What’s your best programming that you guys have right
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now? Is there a particular class where you just knock it out of the park every week and it’s sold out?
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Yes, we’ve got two, I will say, two that are very different. One within lesson and one within program. The the program
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one is uh mini tournaments. So, we host set partner mini tournaments, which are
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literally just making set partner round robin, but making them sexy. That’s all it is. We’re just giving them a sexy
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name. All it is is you have a set partner. You’re going to be playing with them for the entire two-hour rotation, and let’s
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say you’re using three courts. You’ll have seven teams sign up, so only one team sits off at a time. You’re going to
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play the six other teams. We put it all into Swiss, which is one of Courtes Reserve partners. And at the very end of
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it, it’s just based on po total points won across all the matches. And all of our clubs have a podium. So we do little
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photos of everyone on the podium. Sometimes we even get sponsors at a lot of our clubs for these. And we give
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people little prizes and we get photos. We put it into our, you know, WhatsApp groups. Uh, but these are so so
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successful right now. And all we’ve really done is taken a set partner around Robin and just made it a little
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sexy. I love it. That’s amazing. And now in court reserve, you can sign them up as a team. Um, and that’s that’s awesome. I
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love that what we do. And then for for lessons, it’s it’s basically the same as Matt.
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It’s these we do free introduction to pickle balls um for adults and we do
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these at least four times a week and they are so successful. Again, I love
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love love what Matt said where you’re not competing with someone else who’s
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already a member of another club who’s got these expectations. The way things are, you need to train them about what
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they need to be like in your club. They don’t have any expectations. You’re bringing someone brand new and you’re
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providing them an 11star experience. I hate to say fivear because we st th strive to always go above and beyond
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that fivestar experience. and you ensure that you give them the best free introduction to pickle ball that you can
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possibly give them. So they keep coming back and they are the ones who are going to funnel into all your other programs
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and be the best public players that you could possibly have in your community above all else.
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I’m learning a lot here, Ashley. Mic drop. Podiums. [laughter] I need to invest in podiums. Incredible.
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Come on. Right. I love it. I think that’s the one thing that pickle ball’s done well is it’s done this, you know,
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if you think about as an adult tennis player, I played USA tournaments in North Carolina for years and you
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literally had to play all weekend, several rounds to get, you know, a medal and then there was like, you know, 20
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people left at the end of the tournament because the other 98 had gone home already because they had lost, right?
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But pickle ball, it’s it’s pretty like happy and there’s a lot of people at the end and they made the podium and they’ve
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got the the you know the little gold chain. My husband Tim has a wall full of
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pickle ball medals that will never remember where they came from, right? But it means something, right? It means
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something to adults. Uh because how often do you get to win something as an adult? And it’s so cool. It’s it’s a
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great experience. So um I love that. So Matt’s getting podiums. Awesome. All right. So, let’s talk about how do you
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know when it’s the right time to raise the price and how do you raise the price? Do you tell them? Do you give
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them notice? Like, how do you handle that? Because it’s a business. We’re still driving business here. Let’s let’s
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go with you, Matt. So, my business model typically, and
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again, I’m speaking more about our club that has the large mass of clinic takers. Um it’s similar at our club that
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we manage the entire club. But just when we’re talking about instruction and clinics um cuz that’s kind of the the
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main focal point of my attention most days. Basically,
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we need to think backwards from raising the price.
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So I’m always talking to my coaches about this plan that every year we’re
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raising the price at least a dollar on everything. Okay? And why we do that is because now
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it I think sets a plan for the entire year which is will they be happy with
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that the customers generally nobody likes the price to go up. So what are we going to do that makes them concede yeah
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this not only is something I’m okay with this is a good thing. So things like my marketing to the
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players about like hey we’re committed to having the best balls in our teaching cards in San Diego. Okay,
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that’s that’s huge, right? You go to one of the most expensive resorts and they have all old dead balls in the carts.
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That’s a really simple one. Number two is like the service the pros offer has
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got to get better. Maybe it’s a better experience as far as them, one of my favorite things we’re having our pros do
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is take a little video of the player at the end of their lesson talking about
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what they learned and what they need to remember on their phone. So, they take their lesson learnings home with them.
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That costs nothing. It takes 30 seconds and all of a sudden they go, “I’ve never had a tennis pro do that before.” Uh, I
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know from my end, we need to offer programs for people that in just a sign
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up, organization, clarity, what happened with the rain? Did I receive my credit
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back to my account? I need to have an experience that is 100% smooth for everybody. like a great week for me is I
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had I wouldn’t say no complaints, but I had no obstacles. Somebody couldn’t
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figure it out. It didn’t make sense. Oops, I forgot. And so, it’s just forces
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us to get better every year. As opposed to, I think for a lot of people, their fear in raising the price is, well, what
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are we doing differently? We’re just going to do the same thing every year. So, why are you raising the price?
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So, that that’s the that’s the one for it drives us is I guess what I would say. I love that. What about you guys, Alex?
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I love what Matt said. You always need to be striving to be better, right? So, you always need to be striving to
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providing an experience above all else. And the most important thing that we always look at when we’re raising
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prices, and we do raise prices all the time, is what is the market rate within
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a 30 minute drive of any of the clubs that are within distance to us. I always want to be aware of what are all our
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competitors doing and what sort of prices are they providing for the type of facility that they have. Um, a lot of
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times we look at some of the other clubs in our areas and we realize some of these aren’t necessarily clubs. I like
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to refer to them more as facilities, right? In my eyes, a club is a place where you can find your community and
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find other people where a facility is a place with just courts. You play and you always just leave immediately. there
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isn’t that extra level of experience or hospitality that you’re being provided. So, we we look at trying to charge a
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fair market rate with the other clubs within our network and always making sure our staff are all prepared with
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what are the other prices in the community so they’re getting asked, they know how to prepare for it. The way we
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look at it is if we’re completely filled and no one can gain access and it’s
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filled days days days in advance, we’re probably charging a price that’s a little bit too low.
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So, at that point is when we really look into what are what are the other places in our community doing? What are they
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charging? What is the experience like? I go play at those clubs. I tell my franchises, I tell my general managers,
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go play at those clubs. We go check it out. Um, but above all else, it we don’t
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have to base our pricing on what they’re doing, but if we’re charging a higher price, then we need to be providing a
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heightened level experience on top of what those places are providing, or else we will lose our customers.
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I love it. I love it. All right. Well, let’s continue with this player experience uh theme we’re going down.
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We’ve talked about the beginner player, but how do you serve both the beginner players and then those very high level
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or competitive players? Now, we’re all four O’s in both sports, right? We know we’re all four O’s, but but there is a
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difference in those beginners and then those maybe four, fours on up. How do
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you do it, Matt? How do you handle the experience for both? Man, I’m when I This is such a great
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question because I feel very validated by this question. Um, I, as you may or
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may not have already been able to tell, I like to go against the grain a little bit and the sort of this is how we’ve
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always done things. And I have a little bit of a working theory about how the
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tennis industry operates. And that is that if you look at most tennis clubs,
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their membership by level, let’s just say, is the shape of a diamond. So there’s very few beginners and there’s a
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huge mass of 3 0 3540’s that are mediocre regular players. they play
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league, they’re casual, they didn’t play college. Um, and then it peaks again as
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you start to get to people who are an elite level athlete. However, if you look at tennis in the world, there are
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very few people who have won a major and there’s 8 billion people who have never picked up a racket. So, our tennis club
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should reflect that. And so one of the things that I have done is built out
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literally a pyramid structure of the amount of time we dedicate to beginner clinics, beginner play opportunities,
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beginner leagues. And that gets slimmer as we get to the upper elite levels.
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That is the simplest reason why our business has grown because well more than half of our business is lower level
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people. I’m or players I should say. I’m giving a a seminar at a conference
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coming up called why your lowest level player should be your highest priority. And it’s specifically just around the
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fact that I think we we over prioritize because we think about the person who
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won the tournament as like yes that’s that’s elite that’s special that does
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not fill a business. If you’re waiting for Jookovices to come and fill your 300 person membership facility there’s not
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enough of them. So, I guess the balance I would say is not an equal balance, but
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it’s sort of a funnel that’s driving as many players into our club as possible because to be honest with you, and
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here’s the simple answer, there’s a it’s kind of based on what Alex said, there’s a lot of other options for people who
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are high level. They’re the most fickle players to take care of. They’re, you know, when they’re saying, should I
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spend $35 on a clinic or go hit with my friend for free? That’s hard to compete
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with. So, we really don’t cater to those players as much would be the simplest answer.
26:53
Wow. Alex, pickle ball, man. Right. Those high level pickle ball. I mean, I have a pickle ball club. Those those
27:00
highlevel players, you almost have to like pay them cash to come play at your club sometimes, right? So, I agree with
27:06
Matt. What do you think, Alex? I I could not agree more. Beginner players are your bread and butter and
27:12
the most important. the beginner players and your lower intermediate players. Those are the players who don’t know or
27:18
don’t have other players to play with. They want help. They’re searching for
27:24
other ways to be active, be involved, but they don’t have that like long
27:29
contact list or they’re not getting reached out to every day, someone asking for a hit. Those highle players,
27:35
everyone wants to play with them. They’re getting asked for hits all the time. They’re the ones who are going to come into your facility and want to play
27:40
eight hours in a day and be have it all be for free and you know maybe even have you give them free stuff because they’re
27:47
playing at your facility. So, it’s it’s really a balancing act because oftent times the beginner players are going to
27:53
be your quietest players and your most talented players, as Matt said, are going to be the most fickle players and
28:00
oftentimes be the ones that are going to come up to you, not necessarily with complaints, but suggestions for how
28:06
things should be or how things would be. But you really need to quantify it. And
28:12
you need to quantify the percentage as Matt said as well of how much are you
28:17
allocating to beginner play, how much are you allocating to intermediate play, and how much are you allocating to advanced play. And I completely agree,
28:24
it has to be a pyramid. Beginner players are mostly going to be available to play
28:30
for the first time Monday to Friday in the evening or Saturdays and Sundays like usually in the morning or early
28:36
afternoon. and you need to have ample opportunity to get those people on the
28:42
court, but you do still need to keep those upper intermediate and advanced players happy, right? So, there’s a
28:48
balancing act there, too. And we mainly do that through verified play. So, we
28:54
have open plays. Open play, if you identify as an intermediate player, you can play an intermediate open play.
29:01
Advanced open play, if you identify as an advanced player, you can play an advanced open play. But a verified play,
29:07
you need a duper rating of X amount and with a reliability score or you need to
29:13
get a rating session done with one of our coaches who verifies you for that. And we only do verified play for the
29:19
highle players, which also makes those highle players feel more valued because they know they’re going to be protected
29:26
from playing with lower level players in some of these programming sessions.
29:31
I love it. It it makes a lot of sense and it keeps the process for you guys as well because then you’re not I mean it
29:37
is really hard to get into a group play when somebody is a lot higher or a lot lower because nobody’s enjoying that.
29:44
Nobody get wants to go out bag in any sport [laughter] 100%. [gasps]
29:50
Okay, so let’s talk about operations and staffing. So, uh, that front desk
29:56
check-in experience, that coming through the the front door, what’s that like for you guys, Matt, out in San Diego?
30:03
So, we try to it’s the more I tell you about especially Balboa, um, the crazier
30:09
you’re going to think we are. We don’t have a front desk, okay? We don’t have an office. We have four
30:16
courts. That is it. So when I talk to people and I tell them about what we’ve been able to accomplish there and
30:21
they’re like, “Well, but we don’t we that’s not this.” I’m like, “Listen, we we didn’t have every tool at our disposal.” So 100% of what we do is
30:30
through the app and me through my computer, and there really isn’t a desk,
30:35
per se. We have a pro shop on site that’s kind of separated, and so it’s not logical for people to like walk
30:41
through the pro shop to get to the courts. So everything’s got to be um not just digital, but um everything’s got to
30:49
be uh abstract. People have to be able to handle it from their phones. Um I
30:54
think that’s a nice thing because it makes it really streamlined. Like I have to set the system up in a way that makes
31:01
sense and will work for everyone. I can’t just say, “Well, talk to the desk about it.” And it also really
31:06
streamlines thing. I’m sure you could imagine with with 500 clinic spots a week, uh no one pays on site,
31:13
right? No one pays cash. Everything’s through the app. This makes life so
31:18
easy. In fact, we even tell people, we really try to discourage them from using the um website
31:24
and just download the app immediately. It’s the first thing you do. Download Court Reserve. And that just makes our
31:31
process really simple. It’s it there’s always a few little outliers, but most of my week is not spent manually
31:38
checking in with people. Hi, who are you? I met you in person. Oh, remember I told you this thing? Everything’s via
31:43
email, so everything’s trackable, traceable. I just told Ashley I’m going on my honeymoon. I can check emails
31:50
while I’m on my honeymoon this fall. And I’m sure I’m sure that will be really popular. But if there’s some sort if
31:55
there’s some sort of a big issue, it’s not in a physical place where I have to call people and do uh investigative work
32:03
to figure it out. So that that’s been the key for us. Now, at our other site, which is a little different because it
32:09
does have a traditional pro shop that you have to walk through, um everything’s checked in digitally with
32:14
your scan code. And after that, the front desk person is more or less there
32:20
just to make sure the daily operations of the club go smoothly. So, there’s there’s no on-site payments. Again,
32:26
everything’s digital. I Let’s put it this way. If the desk person had to go home sick, the club would work out fine.
32:34
Nothing. Love that. How about you guys, Alex? We’re somewhat similar. We need everyone
32:41
to download the app and scan in. Every single person needs to scan in. So, if that front desk person is helping out
32:48
with an open play, giving someone a little bit light instruction of of the rules or how to play or they’re going
32:54
out and cleaning one of our bathrooms, people are scanning themselves in and everything needs to be paid ahead of
33:00
time as well. And the main reason we want everyone downloading the app now more than ever is also with public
33:07
bookings because if we’re directing people to our website, it’s now taking our members to the public bookings,
33:12
which has gotten people confused. So now more than ever, we’re pushing everyone to download the app. And might I say
33:20
enable public bookings if you haven’t yesterday because you need to get it going. It starts bringing in so many
33:27
people. And also, when you get everyone to download the app, you can utilize push notifications. And we’ve found that
33:35
if we send out too many emails, everyone just starts unsubscribing and people stop opening those emails. So, we like
33:42
to keep our emails limited. But when you send out a bunch of push notifications,
33:47
it’s a lot more manageable and people don’t unsubscribe to them. They don’t
33:52
really even know how. and it’s directly to people’s phones so that we always put
33:58
a call to action every push notification that’s like here’s a link to sign up for this or we’ve got this availability
34:04
here’s the link to go sign up now and if everyone downloads the app it makes it
34:09
so much easier and you need everyone to check in themselves you need to set those that standard from the get-go the
34:15
only ever issue is like 15 minutes before the booking hour if we’ve got the public coming in because those people
34:22
don’t know our priorities our expectations. Um, so those are the people we need to teach what coming to
34:28
this club looks like. That’s awesome. So the payto-play model for sure. That’s awesome. Do it in the
34:33
app. Get them to sign the waiver. Get them to do everything before they get there. Now, what’s the policy around
34:38
those no-shows or those cancellations? Matt, what do you guys do with those? Because I wouldn’t assume you have a lot
34:45
of those. Well, [sighs] so I’ll pivot from Balboa. Let’s look at University City Raquet Club for a moment
34:51
where again we manage the entire club and the membership and people have to check in at the disc. A little more
34:57
traditional experience. We have
35:02
a challenge and I haven’t figured out the perfect answer yet which is on one hand
35:10
there are a lot of people that try to obviously our court time is very limited and competitive. So, we have a lot of
35:17
players that want to get in and play. And if for some reason in hindsight they
35:23
see a court was open, they are committed to letting us know there was an open court and somehow they weren’t told
35:29
about it and who who canceled and are they being punished. I believe that and
35:35
I I actually ironically like the method that they use at the membership side of Balboa where essentially you get a
35:41
warning for a no show and then you lose privileges and that does fall in line
35:47
with our methodology of and again maybe this isn’t the best way of putting it that’s sort of like I’m lucky to be here
35:52
and have this opportunity and I might lose it if I abuse it. Maybe that’s a better way of putting it. Um, I don’t
35:59
love punishing people who are our customers, but again, if we’re doing our job of keeping the club high efficiency,
36:05
then that’s the only way to make people kind of go, “Oh, God, this is going to be annoying if I can’t book next.” Okay,
36:11
I’ll call. I’ll take a minute and figure out however I have to alert them. That’s good. How about you, Alex?
36:18
We have really struck down on this. Uh because you know a lot of people
36:25
complain when you know someone doesn’t show up and it ruins a program or a court sits empty and there was a lot of
36:30
people looking to rent that court. So we do kind of what Matt was saying there. We give everyone one warning. After that
36:38
one warning we charge people $20 for a no-show fee and it gets put right on their account. Uh it sets the
36:44
expectation after the one warning. During the morning, we give them a phone call and then no matter what, whether
36:49
they answer the phone call and we explain what the policy is or not, we’re going to send them an email to exactly
36:54
what the policy is if they ever are to no show again. We have a far too lenient no-show policy. Like, we allow people to
37:02
cancel 12 hours in advance. Almost every other facility in the nearby area is 24
37:08
hours, but people love that we do 12 hours. We’re very very lenient, but we don’t allow anyone to cancel within that
37:15
12 hours. So, if you’re canceling within that 12 hours for anything, you’ve got to call us or you’ve got to email us so
37:21
that we can manage it. We used to allow people to cancel up to, you know, 4 hours before, but still had our policy
37:26
in place and then we found out there was people getting around like getting charged the no-show fee. So, now we make
37:32
it a requirement they have to contact us and let us know the reasons. Obviously, we work with our members. if there’s a
37:39
legitimate reason, we’re not going to charge the fee. But we’ve just essentially added a POS item called no
37:46
show fee. So, if you’re selling a racket, it’s like basically selling a racket, but a no-show fee to people when
37:51
they don’t show. So, if someone doesn’t show, um, we actually just create a list of everyone who is marked as a no-show.
37:58
and our managers of each facility every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday will just go in and add that POS item to the
38:05
person’s account every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to charge the no-show fees. Wow, that’s I mean, what else can you
38:12
do, right? Like, it’s the naughty list. And we have a revenue category for it. So, I track no show fees bi-weekly and I
38:19
give updates to every club about how much they’ve generated in these cancellation fees to let them know if
38:26
their manager or their staff are actually charging these and staying on top of these or if they aren’t because people will abuse the system if you if
38:33
you let them. So, you have to have parameters in in place to not allow for
38:38
people to abuse your system. Wow, that’s so true. Now, I know uh operationally, Matt, you said that the
38:44
your pro shop is onsite, but not really a part of what you guys do. And I’m not even sure about what you guys do, Alex,
38:51
for your pro shop, but how do you take a look at additional revenue, not just
38:58
from programming or lessons or court reservations? How do you look at that additional revenue as part of, you know,
39:03
being that full experience for a player in a public facility? out. Yeah, I I would say that
39:11
when you get back to and I want to touch on something Alex was talking about in his his first question answered, which
39:17
was essentially when you boil it down, Alex, what are we really two successful
39:23
businesses? What are we really in the business of? It’s not instruction really. When you think about it, it’s
39:29
not even play. It’s community. And so what we try to do is build in things
39:38
that only further drive that community. So a lot of consultations with our pro
39:44
shop team about rackets that just builds a new relationship there. Oh, cool. I know. I got a guy. You don’t know what
39:51
to do with your strings? I got a guy. Come talk to Matt. Let’s chat about that. Um, we’re talking about events.
39:57
events and and special one-off socials, gatherings, tournaments, all of those
40:03
things fall right into the category of, yeah, this is why I play here. More fun stuff. What the greatest question
40:09
somebody could ever ask is when is the next one? And so I would say that our
40:15
pro shop um does well compared to other pro shops, but the mass of players that we house
40:22
for our clinics are a lot of workingclass people who typically don’t
40:28
buy the new racket every year. And I would say lean more in the this is an
40:34
exercise class experience for them that’s more engaging or hardworking than
40:39
think of it in terms of bar or yoga or something like that. I only have an hour and a half. I want to get sweaty and not
40:46
think about work. And so it just isn’t the traditional tennis club where it’s
40:51
like, “Oh yeah, give me the new blade. Let’s buy that one.” Um, but yeah, I think a lot of those things are personal
40:58
and they’re special and uh, you know, a lot of the logo gear is like the big one for us. We don’t sell a lot of tennis
41:05
clothes. We don’t sell tennis shoes at all. Logo gear because that is their way of saying, “Yeah, I belong to this very
41:10
special community over here.” I love that. What about you guys, Alex? Matt and I are just so aligned, aren’t
41:17
we? [laughter] I love it. Like we we look at our pro shops as mainly being convenience for
41:24
our members and also a way to build and drive community, right? Like most of our
41:30
stuff is Pickle Plex branded gear. And even just having Pickle paddles because
41:36
the number one expense or the number one reason why people don’t try or play a sport is because it’s too expensive for
41:43
their first time out or they don’t want to pay and invest in the gear. So, if you’re looking at your pro shop and
41:48
you’re only selling those $300 to $350, $250 gear, it’s going to drive a lot of
41:55
people away from coming back again. But if you have something that’s a lot more palpitable to these people, that makes
42:00
it seem more affordable, makes it seem more approachable, makes it easier, um, and maybe it’s their first time in, so
42:06
you’re giving them a free paddle rental and giving them a free ball to just go and try it out. That’s the more important part because if you’re
42:13
building that avenue, you’re going to grow with that customer. So, you know, maybe they’re buying your $40 paddle
42:19
right now, but in a couple months, they might be buying that $250, $300 paddle
42:24
from you. And you really do need to listen to your community to see what they’re looking for. What are they
42:29
interested in? What’s the number one thing that’s selling to them? What are they asking for? Because if they’re
42:34
asking for it, we should try to find a way to sell it. And we’re not trying to gouge these people. I don’t look at it as like we need to we need to increase
42:42
our pro shop revenue like that’s our top priority. No, it’s just if we’re not selling anything, that means we’re not
42:48
stocking the right things. So, we need to stock the right things because we need to listen to what people are actually looking for.
42:53
I love it. We just uh we’re working on an integration with a company called Racket Pass and they do demos, right?
42:59
And it’s Oh, that’s awesome. It’s incredible now because like we have so
43:05
much data to be able to help a pro shop like not buy a bunch of extra stuff that nobody’s going to buy, right? and and so
43:12
those are the little things that you can do to help create that community and the best practice for your players and
43:17
everything. So, all right, here’s a big question for you. I’m going to start with you, Matt. What is the biggest mistake that public facilities make?
43:26
Okay. I think that and I’ll speak about the
43:32
San Diego landscape because I think it’s very unique and it may it may or may not
43:37
apply to other other places around the country, but for us here in San Diego,
43:42
we have something like 50 tennis clubs in San Diego. That’s and we’re talking San Diego County. We refer to it as the
43:49
city, but San Diego County has 1.3 million people, something like that, and like 50 tennis clubs. And
43:59
a vast majority of them are private tennis clubs and are your very traditional country
44:04
club experience where um things are expensive and it they’re exclusive is
44:13
probably the best way I would put it. I think for public tennis clubs, we forget that
44:19
their members of these exclusive country clubs can come to us for instructions
44:25
and programming and socials. Our members probably can’t go to their club. So,
44:31
that’s a little cheat code, life hack that I always try to think about when
44:37
we’re innovating is that I think it will really show how successful we are. When
44:43
we have those few ladies from the club where they make you wear all white show
44:48
up to our clinics and you go, “You play at that club, don’t you?” They’re like, “Yeah, we heard this is great.” That’s
44:55
indicative of what we’re trying to do. And if anything, I think being a public facility is um it’s an advantage that I
45:03
think often people are like, “Oh, you’re that’s nice.” And I’m like, “No, I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Um it’s
45:09
so much easier to cultivate that environment. And I I’ll just maybe comment on a previous facility I worked
45:15
at, essentially when I worked at this very very ritzy private club. Essentially, the job was
45:23
make sure these 300 people are happy, whatever they want. At a public
45:28
facility, I get to ask myself the big question of what would be best for everyone? How could I capture as many
45:34
people as possible? Again, a a private tennis club with 300 members might not
45:40
care about beginners because there’s not that many beginners there. A public facility can be built in that pyramid
45:46
structure. So, I just don’t think I could be nearly as successful as we’ve been if if if dealing with a private
45:53
entity. I love it. How about you guys, Alex? What’s the biggest mistake public facilities make?
45:59
I’ve got two two big ones. Um, number one is focusing all of your reliance on
46:06
just public play coming in and booking courts. You need to have programs and
46:11
you need to have lessons and you need to have tournaments and you need to have leagues because with all of those other
46:18
things that I just named, you’re building an experience that’s different than everyone else. When someone’s
46:25
coming in and they’re booking a court, they are essentially managing the vast
46:31
majority of their own experience themselves. we don’t really have any involvement besides maybe an initial
46:37
touch point, an initial, “Hey, Ashley, great to see you. Goodbye. Have a great day.” Beyond that, when they’re on the
46:42
court, there’s not as much to manage. So, if you’re going to neglect the
46:48
experience level of all your programs, lessons, leagues, everything else, then
46:55
you’re going to neglect building your business. Because those people who only
47:00
come in and are only ever interested in booking courts, those are the people that will leave in the grand scheme of
47:07
things should a better place or a better facility or a better anything come online versus all the people who are
47:15
funneling out to your programs who are having a great experience every single time they’re coming in and being mixed
47:21
around at your programs. Those are the people going to stick with you regardless of price. Price isn’t that
47:26
important. They’re only looking at paying for a higher level experience. They’re not looking at what anyone else
47:33
is charging. And those people are going to meet other people from those programs
47:38
and then they’re going to want to join the other people for just regular court bookings. And that’s the best thing to
47:44
see in the world. I love seeing that. Number two, which is a quick one, is just not auditing your own club. Not
47:52
going in and calling your club and asking simple questions to the front desk or getting a friend to ask them for
47:57
you to see how they respond. Not going and booking a court yourself and testing
48:02
out the new punch pass you put online, the new membership you put online, and making sure that it’s easy to understand
48:10
and that someone coming in off the streets can understand it. It needs to be simple and your staff above all else
48:17
need to understand it. So, if you’re not auditing things yourself and not auditing that check-in process
48:24
especially, you’re going to be missing the mark. Wow, that’s great. Well, we do have a
48:29
great question that I want to tackle uh before we miss out of time here. Rachel
48:34
wants to know how they have moved players from intermediate clinics to more advanced clinics and eventually
48:40
leagues. Our players seem to do beginner then intermediate but do not move up beyond like a 2011 class. Alex, you want
48:47
to take that first? Sure, I can charge ahead. I’m excited to hear Matt’s answer for this as someone who specialized in this stuff, but we’ve
48:54
had similar problems. Uh, and what I would say is we’ve started to try to
49:01
make the naming conventions for everything we run like dumb it down as
49:07
much as possible. Like we’ve started to really switch around like road to 3.75,
49:14
road to 4.0, know road to becoming a league player, road to becoming a tournament player. Uh make it super
49:21
simple because if you’re like skills and drills with serving clinic, people are kind of like what the heck is that?
49:27
Because most people don’t even go beyond just seeing what the title says. So, we’ve really tried to make sure that the
49:35
naming convention is simple and then also giving coaches incentives to have
49:42
people book on the spot and sign up for something later on. So, if they’ve just
49:47
taken a class that’s like a road to 3.5 and now they’ve succeeded and they’re a 3.5 and they’re put in that verified
49:54
level of a 3.5. Now, it’s how do you sell them on taking that class into a road 3.75 and giving the coaches either
50:02
a little bit of commission to go in and make that sale on the spot or giving them the ability to discount if they can
50:08
get someone to sign up right then and there on the spot. Um because you need to take advantage of people when they’re
50:14
in your facility face to face with someone they trust because if you rely on them doing it on their own time,
50:20
they’re not going to do it. Wow. Matt, what you got for that one? This is this is an interesting point and
50:27
it’s funny. So many of the questions I’ve answered then Alex answers and I’m like, “Ooh, this is so different from tennis to pickle ball.” And I I think
50:33
it’s it’s a healthy conversation if you’re in both spaces because tennis is so much more instruction driven than
50:40
pickle ball. And pickle ball is so much more play driven. For us, the coaches drive everything. So our beginner
50:47
classes are called the Balboa beginner pathway or the University City beginner pathway 1.0 where everybody who knows
50:54
shows up is playing with orange balls, adult or kid. Well, I shouldn’t say for the kids, but for adults and they know
51:00
they are a 1.0. Our next level beginner class is 2.0. They play with green dot balls. They are a 2.0. And we set
51:08
restrictions on their level where they cannot change their level in court reserve. So all of the clinics that come
51:14
after that, in order to get your level changed, you must have approval from one of our coaches on site. So at least the
51:20
coach can give me a heads up. Hey, this person’s ready, but they’re also in their 80s. Just so you know. Don’t push
51:26
them too fast towards a certain speed. Again, many of these people with 500 people a week. I don’t know many of
51:32
them. So, speaking to our coaches on site, they’re the ones you have to get approval from to get upgraded. And
51:39
again, there’s just this understanding that because we’re not This is a little
51:44
bit of like a tennis thing that I I don’t know if pickle ball has, but traditionally tennis is focused on the
51:50
best players. So, all the programs are the most fun for the best players. So, everybody has to move on. I would say to
51:58
I think it was Rachel who asked this question. You don’t care if they get better, right?
52:04
They could be a 2.0 forever. I have a client who is playing beginner green dot
52:11
and she’s in her 70s and she said, “Please don’t bump me up to yellow ball
52:17
because then it’s going to be too fast and it’s not as fun. This is my tennis crew. I love doing this.” So, I guess I
52:24
would I would counsel you first of all on not worrying about how fast people
52:29
move. I had someone the other day come to his first tennis class who grew up playing bad mitten and he’s a fighter
52:36
pilot and he’s just very intense and it was like, “Dude, you’re a 4.0. You need
52:42
to go to go over there. Like, you’re incredible.” That that’s great. We lubricate that pathway for somebody
52:47
who’s ready. If you are a 2.5, we have a lifetime of community and experiences
52:53
and fun that you can have with us. And we’re not going to be like, “All right, you’re not getting any better.” You
53:00
know, most of our experiences again are that sort of play experience, not we need to make you better to get to the
53:06
next one to get to the next one endlessly. You’ve already arrived. You’re good enough.
53:11
I love that. It should be the best 90 minutes of my entire day, right? no matter what level I am. So that’s
53:19
that’s a great way of putting it. All right, last question. What’s the one thing you would implement
53:26
immediately if you had to start over from the beginning? Who wants to go first?
53:31
Alex, you go first. I want to hear your answer. [clears throat] [laughter] That’s that’s a that’s a tough one. I I
53:38
love I love this question. It’s it’s a really good question. I would say it’s
53:44
very different because I get to start over at least every month because we’re always opening up a new club and I
53:52
luckily have implemented a new thing probably five new things every time we
53:57
open a club. So, it’s it’s really exciting. Like one of the most recent ones that I we’ve started trying to
54:03
implement is how do we get it so that people’s renewal dates on their
54:09
memberships aren’t coming into the summer season for a pickle ball membership because we’ve noticed with
54:16
our clubs when they come up for renewal when their renewal date is around you know February, March, April, May,
54:24
there’s a significantly larger percentage of people who don’t renew their membership versus those who
54:31
have their renewal dates at the end of August, September, October, November. Um, the vast majority of those people
54:37
approve like renew for their membership. So, we’ve been trying to work on strategies out of the gate of how do we
54:44
get it and strategically sell extra months of memberships even if it means it being at a slight discount um so that
54:50
everyone’s renewal date comes up around that fall season when it comes to memberships. Another thing I would say
54:56
is if a club doesn’t make it mandatory to scan in right from the get-go, it’ll
55:02
be almost impossible to switch everyone over to get them used to the idea of every single time you come and you need
55:08
to scan in. So, that’s another critical critical one because as I mentioned
55:14
earlier, we use push notifications into the app as well. Um, so if you’re not getting everyone to do that from the
55:20
get-go, it it can end up being a huge huge mistake. And I lastly I would say
55:25
is overselling memberships. If you oversell these memberships and then you
55:31
put out these programs and your members who have heavily heavily discounted um
55:37
bookings into them or your um members who get it for free are going to
55:42
overcrowd them to the point where public can’t get in. And if the public can’t get in, they’re just going to give up on
55:48
ever trying to come to your facility and they’re going to go play at your competitors and never even come visit your facility. Wow, those are good. All
55:55
right, Matt, I’m making notes here, Alex. I just want you to [laughter] know that. I’ll I’ll send you a check. So, I’ve I’ve got kind
56:01
of two different two different ways of looking at it. One would be for our Balboa business, which is purely
56:07
instructional, and that would be starting with more beginners from the beginning of our of our time there. Uh
56:13
when we took over, they had a clinic uh one court of one clinic every single
56:18
week, and that was eight spots. I didn’t I all of our clinics are six now, but that was eight eight players a week that
56:23
were beginners that had an opportunity to start playing. Within a year of that, we had about a hundred. This summer,
56:29
we’re going to have 150 adult beginner clinic spots every single week. Wow. That, like I said, drives everything. I
56:35
only wish I had started it sooner and uh and who knows where we would be now. The other thing I would say is that our our
56:41
other club, University City Raet Club, which again is a little bit more of a traditional tennis club environment. And
56:47
I would say it’s it’s really three things if I could do it over and just wave a magic wand. One would be no
56:53
memberships because we’re public facility. We offer a very reasonable membership. It’s it’s
57:00
you know like 30 bucks a month which is nothing for the year. But now these
57:06
players have ownership over your facility and a certain amount of that time. and I’m dealing with a board of
57:12
members who although very nice are looking out for their own interests. So, we don’t like that you’re changing that
57:19
schedule or you’re moving those programs or we want to have our open court time which anyone will tell you is the death
57:26
of most tennis clubs. We just have open court time for anybody to use. It’s it’s not the 70s where you can just have
57:32
courts and people will show up and fill them. So, that’s one. No memberships if I could wave a magic wand. Uh, no ball
57:40
machine. That’s another one. Very inefficient use of space. In tennis, we
57:45
don’t have the luxury of balls that never go dead. So, we’re constantly replenishing the balls. So, yeah, sure,
57:52
there’s a small amount of profit at the end of the year, but it’s a really inefficient use of space. And people,
57:59
one person at a time, again, private lessons are the same way for me. That’s not going to make our business uh thrive
58:05
or build a community. Um, and then the third one for us is at University City,
58:10
we allow 2 hours for double play, doubles play reservation and an hour and a half for singles. And uh, again,
58:18
that’s something that we inherited. I think it’s more amicable to say we do a
58:23
lot of like, who’s the fourth? Oh, they didn’t show, so we actually just played singles even though we had a 2-hour
58:30
reservation. It it’s that’s a lot of wasted time on our front desk to like manage that and have quite frankly some
58:36
young people have to go tell adults hi you know you should actually have to leave the court you know that’s none of
58:43
the people who work for us but you get my point so I would just say a across the board an hour and a half reservation
58:48
for whatever you want to do doesn’t matter what what you do you had five people show up you had eight people show
58:53
up you got the court for an hour and a half that would that would make us so much more efficient in those prime times.
58:59
Wow. Well, this has been such an incredible 60 minutes. Thank you guys so
59:04
much for all your insight and um I’m just so excited. We’re going to cut this
59:09
up and put it all over social so we can just continue to help more club owners and operators do best practices uh with
59:15
the public facilities. So, thank you Matt and Alex so much for coming today. Thank you Ashley. Alex, I’m gonna call
59:21
you when I have questions, my man. I’m gonna call you. I’ve got a lot of questions for you. We’re gonna be connecting and Ashley, thank you for
59:27
hosting and inviting us on. Truly a pleasure and this was great. I think Matt and I both can’t be more thankful
59:33
for Court Reserve and we are loyal customers for life. Thank you guys. See you soon. Take care.
59:40
Bye bye.

3:08
Hello everyone. It’s Ashley with Court Reserve. I hope that you are having a great almost spring day. It is beautiful
3:15
in Florida. I’m so excited to join you on our weekly spark series this week all
3:20
about weight list. And not only do we have Emily here with us, we also have
3:26
another Emily here with us. We have both Emily’s from our customer support team
3:31
uh that are going to take us through weight list today. But before we get started, you know, I have a bunch of announcements I want to tell you. So,
3:38
don’t forget our next pickle ball mastermind is coming up in just two weeks. It’s in Utah. It’s fantastic. And
3:45
then Catalyst is back. Uh if you’re living under a rock, you don’t know. But our next one is in April in Columbus,
3:52
Ohio. And then Detroit, Michigan at Wolverine Pickle Ball in May. Denver,
3:57
Colorado in July and then we just added Toronto in August. So, I’m really
4:02
excited. Uh once I get done, I’ll put the link to that um in the chat so you can learn more about it. Now, remember,
4:09
Catalyst is all about teaching your front desk, your operations, your instructor, your director, whoever you
4:15
want to bring. We’ve cut the price in half. It’s only $99 and it’s a day and a half. So the first day half is four
4:23
hours of best practice round table with the attendees that come and we usually play pickle ball just for fun and then
4:30
the next day it’s a full day of learning. So we have just blown it out of the park. January was incredible and
4:35
I hope that you’ll find time to come join us at one of our events this year. And then we also this weekend uh we’re
4:42
going to be at the RSPA tennis coaches conference in Minnesota. And then next weekend, me, Tim, and I think eight more
4:50
of us are going to be at Racketex and the IAPF uh conference. If you don’t
4:55
have a ticket and you want to go, I might have some free tickets. Uh so, let me know. I can probably get you in. Just
5:03
reach out to support. Hey, Ashley said I might could get a ticket. And they’ll uh I’ll get in touch with you for sure.
5:09
I want you to know that education, that’s my passion for making sure that not only we do it from a court reserve
5:16
standpoint, but that you guys learn it from each other. So, we’re going to start something called courtside conversations. It’s going to be monthly.
5:22
We’re going to do a topic each month. The first one’s going to be in uh at the end of March. It’s going to be all about
5:28
summer camps, and we have some fantastic people from some of our big clubs that
5:34
run summer camps very successfully. So, it’s going to be about how do you set them up? how do you do uh this group of
5:40
kids? How do you do waivers? How do you do this? So, it’s a lot less about court reserve and more about like learning
5:46
together. Um so, if you’re interested in that, you can check out our first one. And then in April, it’s going to be all
5:52
about public facilities. And I know for me, Emily, is public booking not like
5:57
blowing your mind? We have hundreds of clubs that have already turned the public booking interface on and it’s
6:03
just driving revenue and I’m so excited about it. So, I’m ready. Are you ready?
6:08
I’m ready. Okay, here we go. Hey y’all. Glad to see y’all again. So,
6:14
today we’re going to start with our weight list in regards to events and depending on how long I take or any
6:22
questions that come through about this. We’ll then go through a couple other options of weight list, but I really wanted to hammer down on event weight
6:28
list today and all the options that are there. So, I set up for myself just to show you all. I have a weekday evening
6:35
open play and I have a weekend or weekly open play, weekend open play. And I’m
6:41
going to show you the two differences between those. So, first things first, in order for a weight list to work in
6:46
your event, you have to enable max registrance. You can adjust this at any time. Um, especially when you’re first
6:54
creating it. And then if you want to Emily, I just want to stop you because I can only see your beautiful face and no
6:59
screen share. I completely forgot. Thank you.
7:04
There we go. I guess that is important. Let’s do that again. All right, here we go. So, my week
7:10
weekly evening open play. So, back on that. You do want to make sure you have your max registrance set up in order for
7:16
weight list to begin working and populate because if you don’t have this option, the wait list will not appear.
7:22
And you can adjust this after you have created it and you have registrants who are already in some dates. If you want
7:28
to adjust this total at any time, you can do so by going to the event dates themselves and editing how many people
7:35
can be there for that specific date. So I’ll go through the main option of a
7:41
week of a weight list here. So the first thing you want to do and understand is
7:46
that weight lists work in two ways no matter what. So, you do have your weight list to allow for registering for single
7:53
dates, which is drop in registration, and you have weight lists for all dates if you do a full event registration. On
8:00
something like an open play where it’s going to be several days a week, and it’s basically you want to have as many
8:06
people come as you want as they can. I wouldn’t recommend having everybody do full event. You just want to have the
8:12
drop in. Next thing you can do with that is require minimum participation for this
8:17
event. Especially if it’s something where you have it set up for the day and you want to make sure if there’s not
8:23
enough people that it just automatically cancels. You can put in how many people you want to have max here and then how
8:30
long or how soon in advance at what point you want that date to
8:35
cancel. So you can do it a couple hours beforehand or as little as 1 hour beforehand. So, if your event, this one
8:42
is starting at 7:00 p.m., if by 6:00 p.m. on that date, I don’t have eight
8:48
people, the system’s going to automatically read that and cancel that for me. So, to allow the weight list
8:53
after you have selected that, you’re just going to click it here, and that automatically turns it on. One thing I
8:59
will recommend with this is if you are doing a weight list for any event,
9:06
it’s not going to require upfront payment if they are registering to the weight list. If you turn this on down
9:11
here, this means that if they register and they’re part of the first 16, they will be required to pay upfront. But if
9:18
somebody registers for the weight list, it’s not going to require upfront payment in the case that they don’t
9:23
actually make it into the event. So another thing that we do recommend is you do turn on requiring payment profile
9:30
because at that point if somebody cancels out of the event, somebody else joins from the event, then they have
9:36
that payment profile on hand and if they don’t pay it, you can go back and pay it after.
9:43
So looking at that, you can come and see your weight list here when you go over to the dates.
9:50
If it is, excuse me, if it’s full, it’s going to have that here and it’s going to tell you how many. This will be your
9:56
registrance here. And then you can see who else is on the wait list here. At any point, you can come here to this
10:03
side from the admin panel and add to the weight list. So, say somebody calls you and says, “Hey, I want to be on that
10:08
weight list. I just don’t have access to my phone or or to the app or the desktop.” You can come in, type their
10:14
name for them, and add it to that, and they will get a notification.
10:22
The way this one works is that if somebody in this weight list decides or
10:27
somebody who is registered decides that they do not want to be in this event anymore or they can’t make it and you
10:33
allow them to withdraw. At that point, the system does send out a notification to those who are on the wait list here.
10:40
They will get a notification. Let me find it.
10:46
Weight list. they will get this notification here of a wait list available slots notice. It’s going to
10:51
let them know, hey, there’s an open slot in this event that you have reg registered to. One thing with this to
10:56
note is that it’s kind of a everyman for himself cuz it’s not going to go only to the first person who’s been registered
11:02
to the weight list. It’s going to go to everybody on that weight list. So, it’s a who can do it fastest. And at the same
11:09
time, if somebody else who’s not currently in the wait list, but is just scrolling on their phone or is on the
11:14
member portal, they see that a spot is open, they can also join in at that time.
11:21
With that too, if you as the admin decide, okay, we actually have enough space to add a couple more people at any
11:28
time, you have the ability to come in from the admin panel, go over to the weight list and manually register to
11:34
them here. And that’s a good thing to note is that you can do this from the admin panel because I have had ad admins
11:40
coming in wondering, hey, I have only 16. Let me let it load.
11:48
I have only 16 people in this event. Why am I showing 17 or 18? And that means
11:55
that somebody at some point will have come in from the admin panel and clicked register to event. and what that’s going
12:00
to look like. And anything like that can be tracked inside of the audit log here. So, let me go ahead and register
12:07
here. We always recommend keeping track of your audit log, especially if you’re not sure why somebody was registered or why
12:14
somebody left. Every event has this audit log here, and it’s a great way to keep track of things.
12:19
So, if if the player created their registration, it’s going to have this M here to let them know to let you know
12:26
this was the member doing it. But if an admin did this or subadmin, it’s going to have that A or essay for subadmin.
12:32
And that will be one thing to look for if you see that somebody has been added to the weight list that you don’t think that they should have been there. And if
12:39
you are losing track of anything at any time, you always have the little funnel
12:45
here where you can type in I usually recommend contains and like typing in
12:50
the member’s name and that’s going to pull it up for you. So, let’s say this.
12:56
And that’s going to pull up anything that has uh matches that inside of the audit log. And that is the main
13:06
weight list for events. So, this is on you and it’s on the members if a spot
13:12
becomes available. Any questions before I move to autoregistration?
13:19
We do have a question. So what’s the question? Yeah, it is. How do you add a person to
13:24
a weight list if they are only a guest and do not want a free visitor account?
13:31
That is a great question. And the thing with that is I’m not too sure if we
13:36
allow for adding to weight list for guests. Oh, actually I know it might be the difference.
13:43
Number one, if you want to have guests, you need to make sure you go down into your event setup into guest setup and
13:48
allow guests. And if you want to make sure that you only have a certain number of guests to allow your members have a
13:54
fair chance, you’ll put in a number here of how much you want to max out and just make sure you click that if anybody else
14:00
you want to make sure that others can bring guests well as well. So let me save that change
14:08
and let me see if doing that.
14:15
It doesn’t look like it’s going to let you add a guest to a wait list. So, if
14:21
you find that you have somebody who wants to bring a guest, your only option is to come in, hit register.
14:28
Yes, it is over booked. Register guest. So, that’s just going to
14:34
put them straight into the registration. You’re not able to put them into the wait list for the as a guest. That is a
14:41
great product improvement we could add, though. Yeah, I like that. I’ll uh I’ll send that over to our product folks,
14:46
especially now with public booking. That’s probably a good use case right there. Yeah, that’s an excellent use case. We
14:52
did update the flow for registering players recently, which does now allow you to have the option of registering a
14:58
guest and putting in first name, last name, phone number, and email. So, I think it would be a great idea to have it also on the wait list because that
15:04
way they could also get that notification. All right, any more questions before I
15:10
move over to the next one? Sweet.
15:16
So along with that, I’m now moving to my weekend open play. Going into weight
15:21
list, you do have the option of a more automated system, but this is specific
15:27
only to single date registration. And I want to make that clear. When you turn on the weight list, you have this option
15:33
here to autoregister from weight list. And the way this one works is that anybody who signed up, you get your
15:39
registration full and then anybody who is in the weight list, they then have the option to sign up and the system is
15:47
going to if a spot becomes open, the system’s going to look at the weight list, look at who was registered first
15:52
and automatically register them to the registrants. You can have this on up
15:58
until 1 hour before the event starts. And then you can also, this is a really
16:04
handy thing, autocharge if package or payment profile exists. So, as I said when I was talking about uh just your
16:10
regular weight list requiring a payment profile, this one you especially want to have cuz if they get autoregistered from
16:17
the weight list, the system is going to number one register them and charge them at the same time. And if they have a
16:23
package that covers that event, it’ll charge from the package instead. And another thing that’s really key to
16:30
note is allowing family members to be individually me uh registered. If you don’t have this on and to uh two players
16:37
who are in the same family unit register, the system’s going to look at them, say that they’re kind of like a
16:43
package deal, but there’s only one spot available. It’s going to skip them and go to a single person. So, you want to
16:48
make sure you have this enabled here. So, require payment, require payment
16:55
profile, always handy. So if you want to see how that looks can
17:01
come into as always over here look at your audit log and it’s going to have
17:06
this little auto registration in a gear wheel. So this right there is going to tell you that this was the system automatically kicking in. So it’s going
17:14
to track if there has been an event uh a cancel to event registration whether that’s you as the admin doing it or the
17:20
player themselves withdrawing. The system, I believe, kicks in within like 60 seconds to begin registering whoever
17:26
is first in line. So, it’ll show that there.
17:33
And as I did say, this does stop 1 hour before the event begins. So, I had a
17:39
situation like this recently. Uh, an admin had autoregistration on,
17:44
but then somebody, I believe 30 minutes before the event started decided to pull out. And so what the system does at that
17:51
point is it no longer autoregisters, but it does kick out the hey slot is
17:56
available. And so anybody who’s on that weight list and wasn’t autoregistered then has the chance to jump in and get
18:02
registered. And that’s pretty much the difference between those two. Any questions on
18:09
that?
18:14
We did have one question. Uh, when a player gets autoregistered from a wait list, do they get a confirmation
18:20
notification? Yes, I believe it is going to Let me get back into here.
18:27
They are going to get
18:32
H. That’s the stuff. It looks like it’s the event registration confirmation. I do not believe we have an auto.
18:41
No, that would be a good one to add if we wanted to have a little bit of a
18:46
difference, but they should absolutely get the event registration confirmation that lets them know that they have been
18:51
added to it. And um it’ll also send them a payment notice if you have the auto charcharge if payment profile exists.
19:00
Sweet. One more question. Um for the required minimum particip participation
19:07
for this event to occur, can you set it as zero? And if nobody signs up, it will
19:12
automatically cancel. Uh, I think you have to have at least
19:17
one in there. Like you have I don’t believe if you put a zero it’s going to work. It has to have at least one person
19:23
registered. Or actually, why don’t we test it out?
19:32
All right. It lets you put in a zero. So if nobody registers, then yes, you
19:37
absolutely can have it cancel itself automatically. And so at that point, you may want to have this a bit earlier,
19:44
like farther out than 1 hour before. Um, but if it if you want to run it that
19:49
way, you definitely could. All right, still got plenty of time for
19:55
questions if we want to have any more on event weight list before I move into something else.
20:06
Okay, at any point if yall have questions, feel free to ask them. All right, so
20:12
that is our event weight lists and if at any point you have questions
20:18
on that, always feel free to reach out to our rallybot which will give you information here and then if you just
20:24
want to look it up, our knowledge base is always available there for you too.
20:29
So, the next part of what weight list can work on is your court weight
20:34
listing. And this is another great option for allowing players the chance
20:39
to get in line if your courts are booked and you have the potential of somebody
20:45
cancelling. So, you want to make sure that that space is used. To get this
20:50
turned on, first we have to come down into additional features.
20:58
find our weight lists and you have so you’ll come down into your additional features. Turn on court weight list and
21:04
once you do that you can hit the setup button which is going to take you here to court weight list. You can also after
21:11
you turn this on go to settings manage court and resource settings and court weight list at any time.
21:18
So for this one you can have it available on any weight list inuler. You can let the players register from the
21:25
member portal or app. You can let them weight list to a desired court or allow player to wait
21:33
list when desired court type is available. So say you have four pickle
21:38
ball courts. Two of them are player favorites and two the other two are not so much player favorites and those two
21:44
are open but you have people who want to specifically wait list for the two favorites. You can allow them to do that
21:51
even though those other two spots are still open if you have this. If you don’t want to allow that, turn this off.
21:59
This tells you how many you want to have this enabled so you can see from the admin panel how many people are currently waiting and on the member
22:05
portal. And if you want it to go according to whatever restrictions and rules you have
22:11
in your booking settings for each membership, you want to make sure this is allowed here.
22:17
If you want to prevent a wait list a certain number of hours out from a booking. So say you allow booking at 7
22:24
am the next day and you don’t want to have them um registering before a cert
22:30
in time to a wait list, you would use this in conjunction with that. And if you want to make sure you have
22:36
that weight list only on specific courts or all courts, you handle that inside of here. So say I only want it on these
22:43
courts, check that off. And these courts here, once they’re booked, you cannot wait list for them. They’re just booked
22:49
unless it becomes empty. Inside along with that, you do have the
22:54
ability to override your uh court weight list specific to custom schedulers. So,
23:00
say you have a customuler that’s available, especially if you are doing public booking and you create a a
23:06
customuler that is specific for public booking and then you have a customuler that’s specific for your actual members.
23:13
You can put in or override the court weight list inside of each customuler.
23:19
It’s going to have this option down at the very bottom to override where you can then put in different uh it’s it
23:27
mimics the same thing going according to what courts you allow here, but you can do a bit more adjustment with this of
23:34
allow players to do this on the app. choose if they want to have a different court type even though another one’s
23:40
available. How many players and enforcing booking rules as well as the hours here
23:48
on your admin panel. It’s going to look like this here. So, if you have these
23:54
here, I have it only at a certain time. Um, and I have it just because of these
24:02
courts being booked. Here you’re going to see the option to wait list player at any time that you can do that you want
24:08
to from the admin panel by clicking weight list player. Choose what type of reservation they have to have or they’re
24:14
looking to have. So let’s say do doubles what time it’s supposed to start. They
24:21
want to have it for 2 hours. And at that point you can put your name. So we’ll just put that. If you want to have it
24:29
specific to any type of court type, you can do that here. and which courts of the ones that are booked and do that
24:35
there. And you don’t have to do that one as well. Do that. It’s going to
24:43
it’s going to ask you if you would like to wait list. Then click yes.
24:48
And then once you refresh your page, you’ll now see that a player is waiting
24:54
there. And if you want to see who is waiting, you can always click on this at any time.
25:00
If you decide that you want somebody to get this or say somebody cancels this
25:06
and nobody has booked it yet, you can cancel this
25:12
and then all these players here who are weight listing, you can come in. You can go look at the time that they wait
25:18
listed. It’ll tell you here what time they were weight listed, how long they want that court, what reservation, and you can
25:26
create the reservation for them. It’s going to pop it open like this, which is your normal uh booking a reservation
25:32
from the admin panel. Hit save, and that is going to pull them out of
25:38
that weight list and put them on the uh scheduleuler for them. Similar to the
25:44
event weight list, they do get notifications for available spots,
25:50
and you’ll find that here. So you have the weight list availability notice that goes out when a
25:57
court becomes available. Unlike the autoregister from weight list, we do not have an autoregister for
26:04
court weight list. It’s kind of every man for himself at that point as well as anybody who’s currently looking at
26:10
theuler. So this goes out as soon as availability becomes open and
26:18
everybody can just go as they want. And if you have a way for them to contact you um directly and you know that
26:25
somebody’s been specifically hoping for that, you can also just let them know, hey, I’m going to create this for you
26:31
and do it from that side. All right, that
26:37
is this one. Oh, and any if you want to remove somebody from this, you can at any time with the trash can. Any
26:44
questions on this? Uh we have a question here. Um, can the
26:49
system be set up to send out a blast email in the evening telling members that courts are available the next day?
26:59
Yes and no. We are testing out a uh or it’s currently in beta. It’s being
27:04
worked on. If y’all would love to be added to this, we’d love to have you. We have a new email builder that is going
27:12
to be replacing the current bulk email, which is going to give you the option to both create drafts, templates, but also
27:20
schedule emails. So, if you wanted to, you could do it that way by scheduling an email, letting them know in BLA, hey,
27:27
this court is available. But there isn’t anything that is an automatic notification that goes out.
27:35
All right, still have a little bit more time. Any more questions on that? We do have another question here. Um,
27:42
how can an admin or a player register for a wait list if they already have a reservation, let’s say an hour later,
27:50
but they would like to play an hour before, they could definitely do that. It goes
27:55
according whatever restrictions you have. So, if you don’t have any restrictions on them, meaning you’re
28:02
saying like the gold membership, how many minutes they can book a day or how many courts they’re allowed to book, how
28:09
many outstanding reservations they’re allowed, it goes according to that. So, if they have, say they’re on the wait
28:16
list for a reservation that’s 60 minutes, but they are allowed 120 minutes per day with their membership,
28:23
they still have the ability to go and book beforehand if that court is available and it’s um it’s not being
28:29
weight listed. Basically, the weight list option is only going to appear for them on the
28:35
member portal if that court that they want is unavailable for them.
28:42
All right, any more questions?
28:50
Very good. Managing to get through everything, which is fantastic. So, on the last bit
28:56
of weight list, this comes from our memberships, membership weight
29:02
lists. So, this is for clubs. If you’re going to be like you have a specific number of weight or um spots available
29:10
in your club or you have a new weight uh new membership that’s going to be coming out soon and you want to have everybody
29:16
start registering for that. This is what you would want to do. Similar to the court weight list, you’ll go into your
29:23
get back, go to your settings, scroll down to the bottom to additional features,
29:29
go find membership weight list, and set up.
29:34
So, you can do this for individual memberships and family memberships. The main weight list settings are going
29:41
to be here or like the requests and offers. So, you can see what has been requested, what
29:48
has been offered. individual weight list settings are inside of each membership over here on
29:55
the very last. So you can enable weight list for all of your memberships or certain ones if you want that. So let’s
30:02
say I enable this here. I have a max capacity of 100 memberships for the club
30:07
staff. This will tell me how many people currently have this assigned. And if I
30:12
decide at any point I don’t want anybody else on this, I can click is full. So if I click is full, that means the weight
30:19
list is all full. Nobody else can join. And then you also have the option here to allow players to join weight list. So
30:25
if you want them to have the ability to join from the weight list, join the weight list on their end, you would have to turn this on. And you can put a
30:31
little notification in here. Requests are going to come in here. And any offer, meaning you create a membership
30:37
offer, and this sends it to them. You can do it for one specific person or
30:45
you can put it in for a m like 15 people. The system, if you have that
30:50
many, the system is going to look at who is registered here for that weight list, you’re going to put in a start time of
30:56
when that offer opens and an end time of when that offer ends. So, if at that
31:02
time you have 15 available um spots, only six or seven of them register or
31:09
decide to claim that offer at when that end time ends, that offer expires. And so, anybody who’s still on the wait list
31:15
will have to wait for a new offer to be given to them. Uh let’s get back to memberships.
31:25
If you want to see how many total accounts you have in the weight list or weight listed memberships, there is this
31:32
uh bar here that’s going to appear when you come over into your membership settings.
31:39
And down here, enable max capacity weight listing across all memberships.
31:45
So, if you turn this off, it’s totally normal. It’s totally fine. It’s going to take away that bar, but this is just a
31:52
quick way to turn on the weight list for all of your memberships that require payment. So, hit that, hit save,
32:00
and now it’s back up. And all of your memberships that require a fee are weight listed.
32:06
All right, we have about a minute left, so we can take a couple quick questions
32:13
if there are any.
32:21
We do have one here. Okay. Um, we’ve decided to use the weight list option for a sublist, meaning people can
32:28
register on the weight list if they want to sub on certain days of the 7W week league play. We are still in the
32:35
pre-registration stage, but already have people interested in weight listing on the sub list. Um, they can’t wait list
32:43
until the league is full. Is there a way to do this?
32:49
Um, I’m assuming you’re Are you running the
32:54
league? I’m guessing you’re running the league as an actual league or an event.
33:00
At any time you can come in if it’s an event. At any time you can go into that and add somebody to the weight list. But
33:07
that would where you would need to be careful is if you have autoregistration and you add somebody to a wait list, you
33:15
would want to turn off autoregistration cuz you could come in and add. Let me go to this one. You have to have at least
33:21
one person registered here. So let’s just register myself.
33:28
Save. Okay. Get back to here.
33:35
Right. Come here. As long as you have at least
33:41
one person registered, you can come over to the weight list and add to weight list and it’s ah
33:47
I am proven wrong by the system. So unfortunately no, you cannot wait list players who are trying to register for
33:54
something that is not full. So, at that point, a great workaround or solution
34:00
that you could do is have a uh member group if you would like to do that where you have players who are weight listing
34:07
for that and you can grab from that member group when you come into the registrance and they’re available. Hit
34:14
the register option filter to the players and go according
34:19
to that member group and then you can grab them from there to get them registered.
34:26
And all right, we have hit 1:30. So if you have any additional questions,
34:33
Ashley, where do they go if they still have additional questions? Oh, our wonderful customer support team.
34:40
Um, please, we really want to help you. And for most of you, if you’ve used the
34:46
chat in the last couple weeks, we have actually turned on some AI functionality that uses the very same knowledge base
34:52
that we use and you guys use. See, even Dexter is happy about it. Uh, so, but yeah, reach out to support and don’t
34:58
forget to sign up for next week’s webinar. Thanks for joining, y’all.