Running a Sports Facility Is a Scheduling Business First

By Trevor L Taylor

A sports facility earns its margin in the hours nobody competes for. The early morning and the evening fill on their own, because those are the hours a working adult can play, and a venue that treats them as its business is measuring the easy part. The operating decision that actually pays is what happens between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon.

Print one week of bookings at a racket venue on a single page and the shape repeats almost everywhere. The rows before work and after six are solid, Saturday morning is solid, and the middle of every weekday is blank.

Owners read that page as proof of demand, because the full rows are the ones that catch the eye. The blank middle reads as a fact of life rather than as the largest piece of unsold inventory in the building.

The sign that marks it is the language in the room. A venue in this position talks about the waiting list at six in the evening and about whether the peak price can go up again. It rarely talks about what the eleven o'clock hour earns.

What makes a sports facility profitable?

Utilization across the whole operating day, not demand at peak. A venue that fills its prime hours and leaves the middle of the day empty is running at a fraction of the capacity it pays for every month.

Capacity at a venue is measured in hours on a playing surface, and those hours cannot be stored. An hour that passes unsold is gone in a way that unsold stock in a shop is not, which puts a venue closer to a hotel or an airline than to a retailer.

Once the prime hours are full there is no growth left inside them. Every additional dollar of revenue then has to come from an hour that is currently producing nothing, from a higher price, or from a second site, and the first of those is the cheapest by a wide margin.

Fixed costs do not change with the increase or decrease in production or services. Rent, lighting, surface upkeep, insurance and a base level of staffing arrive in roughly the same amount whether the building is busy or quiet, so the margin on a booking in a quiet hour is close to the whole price of it.

An empty hour is not cheaper to own than a full one.

Two venues with identical buildings, identical prices and identical catchments can return very different results to the people who funded them. The difference is usually sitting in the blank middle of that booking page, where nobody has done any work.

Programming fills the hours players never book themselves

Open play is scheduled by the player, which means it lands wherever the player has time. Programming is scheduled by the venue, which means it can be placed where the venue needs it.

Leagues, lessons, clinics, junior academies, beginner ladders and weekday corporate sessions are the same move in different clothing. Each one takes an hour the venue has chosen and attaches a reason for somebody to be standing there when it starts.

The midday population exists in most places and is simply not the population a venue is built to notice. Parents between school runs, people who work remotely, retirees, hospitality staff whose shifts start late and students with a free afternoon are all there.

A program also changes behavior across weeks rather than across one afternoon. A player who has committed to a Wednesday fixture for eight weeks has moved that hour out of the category of things to decide and into the category of things already decided, which is worth more to a venue than any single booking.

The build is slow and it compounds. A single midday clinic with a handful of regulars becomes a midday ladder, the ladder produces pairs who book each other outside the program, and within a year that hour has a population of its own.

The management habit this asks for is unglamorous. Utilization by hour of the week belongs in a fixed monthly look at the numbers, next to revenue and payroll, because a pattern in the quiet hours only becomes visible when somebody reads the same page every month.

How do you fill off peak hours at a racket venue?

By selling the hour to someone whose day is already free at that time, and by letting the venue set the start. Juniors after school, retirees at midday, shift workers in the late morning and businesses that want a weekday clinic all fit hours a working adult cannot use.

In studies of why adults do not exercise, lack of time is among the most commonly reported barriers. That barrier is what packs demand into the two windows at either end of a working day, and it is also what leaves the middle of the day open to everyone whose day is shaped differently.

Coaching is the usual engine. A coach with a midday teaching block turns an unsold hour into a paid one and brings in players who will later book that hour on their own account.

Institutions are the other engine. Schools, colleges, employers and community groups all have people in one place at hours a venue cannot otherwise sell, and a block booked by an organization holds steadier than a block booked by individuals.

Price helps at the edges, and it is the lever owners reach for first. A discount on a quiet hour moves some demand, but much of what it moves is people who were going to come anyway, walking out of a full hour and into an empty one.

Measurement has to follow the hour rather than the month. A venue that reports occupancy as one number for the week can look healthy while every empty hour sits inside the same five windows, which is a very different business from one that is evenly busy.

Where the scheduling argument stops working

Research comparing group programs with individual ones has found that both formats can be viable paths to a change in activity behavior, so a league is not automatically better for the player than a booking made alone. Programming is an operating tool for the venue, and the claim here is a claim about the venue.

Programming also costs something real. Every league needs a coordinator, every clinic needs a coach, and an unpopular program burns staff hours while producing a half full hour that reads worse on the page than an empty one did.

There is a limit on the other side of the day as well. A venue that sells its prime hours to leagues can find that the members who pay for access cannot get on at six in the evening, which trades a reliable block of revenue for the slow loss of the people who fund the place.

And no amount of scheduling rescues a venue in the wrong place. If the surrounding area cannot supply juniors after school or anybody free at eleven in the morning, the quiet hours are quiet for a structural reason, and the answer is a different site rather than a better calendar.

The exception worth naming is the venue whose quiet hours are quiet by design. A single surface site with one coach and low fixed costs can be a sound small business running four busy hours a day, because there is very little cost sitting idle in between.

Padel facilities in Miami are part of my own work, so this question arrives in practical form rather than as theory. Stated in general terms, the pattern holds across racket sports and across venue sizes, because the arithmetic of an unsold hour does not care which sport is played on the surface or how large the building around it happens to be.

If you are looking at a venue, as an owner or as somebody being asked to fund one, ask for the booking page by hour of the week before you ask about membership growth. The prime hours tell you the sport is alive in that place. The quiet hours tell you whether anybody is running a business.

Trevor L Taylor is an investor, entrepreneur and lifelong athlete committed to supporting education.

Photos by Vincenzo Morelli and ARTO SURAJ on Unsplash

Sources

Plan Your Business
Perceived barriers and facilitators of physical activity in adults living in activity friendly urban environments
Individual versus group based interventions a systematic review and meta analysis of physical activity functional psychosocial and health outcomes