For clubs
How do you start a tennis club?
Opening a club means starting two businesses at once: running a facility and running a community. Most new clubs prepare for the first and learn the second on the way — yet membership structure, pricing and record keeping are exactly the things that cost the most to fix later. This guide works through the decisions in the order you need to make them.
Decide which business you are actually in
Court rental and club membership are not the same business. In court rental, revenue comes from hourly bookings, loyalty is low and you compete on price. In a club, revenue comes from memberships, loyalty is high, but you are obliged to run a community — tournaments, leagues, social events.
The two can be combined, and most facilities do sell discounted hours to members and full-price hours to guests. What matters is knowing which one is the main business from the start: your court rates, membership fee and booking priority rules all follow from that decision.
Match court count and surface to real demand
You can start with a single court, but you cannot run a tournament or a league on it; the second court changes not just capacity but the kind of events you can host. Three or more courts is the practical threshold for finishing a weekend tournament in a single day.
Surface determines your long-term running costs: hard courts are the cheapest to maintain, clay is popular with players but needs daily care, and artificial turf is the standard for padel. Straying far from what players in your area are used to narrows demand before you open.
Build the revenue model around empty hours
A court earns from its actual occupancy, not its theoretical capacity. Weekday daytime hours sit empty in most clubs, and filling them with school groups, corporate deals or coaching hours brings in more than raising the evening rate ever will.
Define your relationship with coaches early too: are you renting them the court, taking a share of lesson income, or employing them? All three work, but left as a verbal agreement, the monthly settlement turns into an argument.
Keep records from the first day
Most new clubs start with members in a spreadsheet, bookings on the phone and payments in a notebook. That works for a few months; once membership grows there is no historical data, so you cannot measure which hours fill, who owes money, or which month was profitable.
The cheapest moment to set up record keeping is while there is almost no data to migrate — that is, before you open. Keeping the court calendar, memberships, dues and balances in one place costs almost nothing compared with switching later.