The Schedule She Couldn’t Trust: How Puma Academy Stopped Checking and Got Its Evenings Back with Baseline

She was the master calendar

Meghan Colon and her husband bought Puma Academy, a baseball facility, and inherited its software along with the building. League Apps handled teams, player fees, and parent communication. Cage bookings ran through Acuity Scheduling. Walk-in payments went through a Square reader. The website lived on Home Teams Online, which only processed payments through PayPal. Five tools, none of them connected, none of them efficient. Meghan made it work because she had to. She was learning the business as fast as she could and didn’t have the room to rebuild any of it.

The real system was in her head. She never kept a master schedule in a spreadsheet or a shared calendar. By the time she finished writing the rental contracts she already knew who was booked where and when, so committing it to software felt pointless. Her husband’s standard answer became "go to my wife, she knows the calendar," and people did. Every question about who was where routed through her.

She also couldn’t fully trust the booking system she did have. She would block a cage in Acuity and the block wouldn’t always register, so customers would book the slot anyway and turn up. That left her checking constantly: thirty minutes to an hour at home before she even left for work, then again through the day, making sure nobody had slipped in.

“I had this in the back of my mind that I couldn’t really trust it, so I had to keep checking.”

Meghan Colon, Co-Owner

Money was leaking in two places. Customers booked cages online but paid in person, so a no-show meant a reserved cage sitting empty and unpaid. From October through February, when nearly every space is full from 4 to 9 p.m., that was a lost slot at twenty dollars a time, four or five times a week. On top of that, her front-desk staff, mostly high-school juniors and seniors, didn’t always collect payment, which cost her another booking or two a week. Put together, the missed collections ran close to a hundred dollars a week.

Schedule changes were their own project. Every time the practice schedule shifted she rebuilt her cage availability by hand, one cage and one day at a time. Start to finish, that was about ten hours, two full evenings in the building — and Puma Academy changes its practice schedule roughly five times a year.

One platform, and an email that read her mind

Torren’s email landed at the right moment. The pitch was simple: he could see Puma Academy was running everything on separate tools, and he had one baseball facility management platform that did all of it. "You read my mind," she told him.

The switch was still a leap. Meghan had a long list of questions, and she knew tutorials only tell you so much. You don’t really know what a platform is until you are inside it, running your own business on it. What made the difference was that nobody oversold it. Torren was upfront that there would be a learning curve, and the Baseline team answered everything she asked, before the move and after it. The model helped too: there is no contract, so if Baseline hadn’t delivered, she could have switched it off and walked away.

“It’s really a leap of faith. You were so honest and upfront that there would be a learning curve. I knew I’d have to learn something new, but at the end of the day this was really going to work. And it has. It’s checked all the boxes.”

Meghan Colon, Co-Owner

Baseline folded the five tools into one. Teams, cage bookings, payments, the website, and communication now live in a single place. Bookings moved to paid-upfront and credit-only, which closed the no-show gap on its own.

She stopped checking the schedule

After about three months, the mental load fell off. For the first month Meghan still checked the schedule every day, half-expecting the old problems to follow her over. By April she had stopped looking at it entirely.

Owning a business means home time is never fully home time, but the constant checking is gone. There is no email pinging her every time someone books a cage. She used to be the owner who would be visiting in-laws in Chicago and suddenly remember that someone was booked at 3:30 with nobody there to let them in. That doesn’t happen now. Her attention goes to her two- and three-year-olds instead of her phone.

“Now when I’m at home, I don’t check it. That’s huge for work-life balance.”

Meghan Colon, Co-Owner

Budgeting less for a front desk she no longer needs

Puma Academy’s front-desk staff existed mostly to check people in and take payment, because every payment used to happen in person. With bookings and payments online, Meghan doesn’t need them the way she did. Heading into the new season she is budgeting less for staffing and puts the projected saving at around ten thousand dollars a year. As she describes it, the platform now does the front-desk job: people show up already paid, say hi, and go where they are supposed to go. Puma Academy still hires for the things software can’t cover, like umpires and its indoor T-ball league.

“I don’t have to put as much aside for my staff, because I don’t think I’ll need them as much as I did the last couple of years.”

Meghan Colon, Co-Owner

No-shows stopped costing her

Moving to paid-upfront, credit-only bookings ended the revenue leak. Before, a no-show meant a reserved cage and no money, twenty dollars gone each time during the months Puma Academy runs at capacity. Now there is no way around paying first, and the policy is no refunds, so a booking that doesn’t show is still a booking that paid. Between no-shows and uncollected rentals, that was roughly a hundred dollars a week she is no longer losing.

Two-evening schedule rebuilds, gone

The practice-schedule rebuild that used to eat two evenings now takes a fraction of the time. Across five changes a year, that work alone was on the order of fifty hours, roughly four hours a month, that Meghan gets back.

The busiest spring they’d ever had

The clearest outside signal showed up in the numbers. This was the busiest spring since Meghan and her husband took over Puma Academy. Bookings normally taper in late March and April as players head outdoors, even when it is forty degrees out, but this year that stretch was the busiest on record. Her regulars, the families who come back every six weeks for camps, told her how easy the new booking flow was and how much better the website looked. She credits the system for the difference. When customers are unhappy she hears about it quickly, so the praise, and the quiet, told her it was working.

“That was the busiest April and end of March we’ve ever had, and I think it’s because of the system, how organized it looks and how easy it is to book now.”

Meghan Colon, Co-Owner