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Almost everyone who opens an indoor sports facility comes from a sports background. They played competitively, coached youth teams, and spent years writing checks to other facilities. They think they understand the business because they understand the game.
This is the first mistake. You are not in the sports business. You are in the business of renting space and time. Until that distinction clicks, every decision you make will be slightly off.
The numbers don't care how much you love baseball or how connected you are to the soccer community. They care about utilization rates, revenue per square foot, and whether your 47,000 square feet of climate-controlled space is generating income or sitting empty. Software helps you see these numbers clearly and act on them. But the software only matters if you understand what business you're actually running.
Dead space and time is the biggest cash drain most facility operators don't recognize. Taking a week off between league seasons because "everyone needs a break" is the equivalent of a restaurant deciding to turn off its refrigerator for a day and let all the food spoil. You're throwing away inventory that cannot be recovered.
This doesn't mean you can't close on Christmas. It means you don't lose games or camps unnecessarily. If the schedule needs a gap, play those sessions on a different day. Squeeze them in somewhere. Every hour your facility sits dark when it could be operating is money evaporating.
The other drains creep up on you. Insurance costs have risen dramatically in recent years, with some facilities seeing 14% increases on renewal quotes. Energy costs hit hard, especially in climates requiring year-round heating or cooling. Building and equipment replacement costs have surged. If your budget doesn't include contingencies for these increases, you'll find yourself in trouble quickly.
Your software should give you visibility into all of this. Not just what's coming in, but how your costs stack up against revenue by time period, by program type, by space. Without this visibility, you're operating blind.
Every indoor facility operator eventually faces the same question: how do we make money between 8am and 4pm on weekdays? Kids are in school. Adults are at work. The building sits mostly empty while fixed costs keep accumulating.
If someone claims to have a simple solution to this problem, be skeptical. Industry veterans who've operated facilities for decades will tell you there are only a couple of reliable answers, and neither is easy.
The first is before and after school programs. This works, but don't underestimate what's involved. There are licensing requirements, background checks, staff-to-child ratios, insurance considerations, and regulatory compliance that differs by state. Hire someone with experience in this space. Don't try to add it to your already-full plate as GM.
The second, more ambitious approach: build a private school into your facility. This is increasingly common internationally and gaining traction in the US. The concept is straightforward. Students attend classes in the morning, train in your facility in the afternoon. Tuition covers your daytime overhead, and those same families become your evening and weekend customers. Some facilities report that tuition revenue exceeds all their other programming combined. The catch is that you're now running a school, with everything that entails.
If you're planning a new build, consider including classroom space that can double as birthday party rooms on weekends. If you're operating an existing facility, accept that daytime weekday revenue will always be your weakest segment and plan accordingly.
When struggling facilities ask for help, the first recommendation is often surprising: all hands on deck, and we're scrubbing. Because facilities that struggle are almost always dirty.
This isn't about being fussy. It's about basic psychology. If you've studied Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know that people can't engage with higher-level experiences until their fundamental needs are met. In a sports facility, that means feeling physically comfortable and safe. Can they find a trash can? Is the bathroom clean and stocked? Are the bleachers sticky? Does it smell like a locker room? Are the lights bright enough, or is everything dingy?
Every parent who brings their kid to your facility is making unconscious judgments. If they can't find a clean place to sit, they're not recommending you to other families. If the bathrooms are gross, they're not booking birthday parties. If the glass around your playing surfaces is smudged and the floors are dull, assumptions form about your operation that hurt you at the bottom line.
Nobody has ever complained that a facility was too clean. Invest in it. Pressure wash. Steam clean bleachers. Replace broken fixtures. Paint over patched walls. Make the floors shine. This is the foundation everything else builds on.
Software can help here too. Maintenance scheduling, inspection checklists, task assignment and tracking. The facilities that stay clean have systems. The ones that get dirty rely on hoping someone notices.
Here's something counterintuitive: the biggest poison to your business might be certain customers you already have.
There are players you shouldn't allow in your leagues. Teams that sandbag, starting fights, making the experience miserable for everyone else. People who throw trash around disrespectfully, spill drinks and shrug, treat your staff poorly. These customers drive away the customers you actually want.
Purge them. Not reluctantly, not eventually. Militantly. Because the customers who come five or six times a week, who refer their friends, who sign up for every program you offer, who support you when you need to make changes? Those customers won't stick around if you tolerate the bad ones.
This requires difficult conversations. Not everyone comes to this job with training in conflict resolution or crucial conversations, but it's a skill worth developing. When someone violates your facility's culture, address it directly: "I don't know where you've come from before, but that's not how we do things here. If you want to be part of this community, here's what we expect. If that doesn't work for you, there are other places you can play."
Your software should track customer behavior patterns. Who's had incidents? Who's been warned? Who should be on a watch list? This isn't about being punitive. It's about protecting the experience for everyone else.
Different programs require different metrics. For youth programs like camps and clinics, the critical number is kids per staff person. Put too many counselors per child and you wipe out your profit. It's better to put a few kids on the waitlist and run a profitable camp than to accept everyone and lose money on staffing.
For leagues, growth comes from exactly two things: getting teams and keeping teams. You need both. If you're great at acquiring teams but they don't return, you're on a treadmill. If retention is strong but you can't attract new teams, you're stagnant. Track both separately.
Collections rate is an early indicator of how a league season will go. The faster you get money from teams at the beginning of the season, the smoother everything runs. When teams pay throughout the season, the ones having a bad time simply stop showing up, which is bad for everyone. Collect upfront or early. Your software should make this easy to enforce.
Scores and standings from current and previous seasons tell you whether teams are in the right divisions. If someone's goal differential is two or three times the average, someone's not having a good time. That's a retention problem waiting to happen.
The graveyard of failed facility programs is full of ideas that seemed great in the planning stage. Bubble soccer is the classic example. "We could run a whole league!" No, you can't. People want to do bubble soccer at company picnics or birthday parties. They don't want to commit to eight weeks of it. The first session sells out. The second season doesn't exist.
Before launching any new program, do the research. Market studies are always cheaper than mistakes. Talk to your existing customers. Look at what similar facilities offer and whether it's working. Don't invest in equipment for 16 different sports that ends up sitting in storage because you couldn't get the programs going.
The same principle applies to events. Facilities sometimes chase tournaments, dog shows, trade shows, anything to fill weekend time. These can work, but they're one-offs requiring significant effort to book and execute. If your core programming (leagues, lessons, camps, birthday parties) isn't filling your calendar, adding special events won't fix the underlying problem. It just exhausts your staff while masking the real issue.
You don't have to be something for everybody. Pick two or three things and do them exceptionally well. The riches are in the niches. A facility that runs outstanding youth basketball programming will fill its calendar faster than one trying to offer every sport poorly.
Leagues have been the anchor of indoor facility revenue for decades. That's changing. Younger generations are less willing to commit to eight or ten week seasons. They want to show up and play when they want, not be locked into a schedule.
Facilities that figure out how to deliver a great experience for drop-in players, charging enough to make it sustainable, will have an advantage as this trend spreads to basketball, volleyball, soccer, and other sports. The key is treating these customers with the same care as league players, not as second-class fillers for otherwise empty hours.
Your software needs to support this flexibility. Easy check-in for drop-ins. Dynamic pricing that adjusts based on demand. Membership structures that work for frequent casual players, not just league participants. The facilities that adapt will capture a growing segment. The ones that don't will watch customers migrate to competitors who make drop-in easy.
Given all of this, your facility software should serve as an operational visibility tool, not just a booking system.
Show you where your dead time is so you can address it strategically. Track utilization by space, by hour, by day, by program type. Let you see which programs are profitable and which are just busy. Make collections easy to enforce upfront. Support flexible pricing for off-peak times and drop-in customers.
Handle the administrative burden of payment plans, membership renewals, and event registrations so you can focus on the things that require human judgment: coaching, customer relationships, program quality, facility maintenance.
Give you customer records that tell the full story. Not just transaction history, but behavior patterns. Who are your best customers? Who needs attention before they churn? Who should probably find somewhere else to play?
The technology exists to run a sophisticated operation. Whether you use it to build a profitable facility or just to marginally improve a struggling one depends on understanding what business you're actually in and making decisions accordingly.
Baseline provides all-in-one indoor sports facility software designed for how facilities actually operate. From utilization tracking and payment collection to membership management and drop-in booking, everything works within a single system built for profitability. No monthly subscription fees. Learn more at baselinepro.com.
