Original studies built on anonymized operating data from hundreds of sports facility businesses — real bookings, real payments, real memberships, real rosters. Each one starts with a question operators actually argue about.
Study 01September 202622 min read
The research question
How do you build a winter season that fills — schedule, space per skill, class size, membership tiers?
27,677 held classes · 140,788 registrations · 14,458 athletes · 89 cage-equipped businesses · Nov 2025 – Feb 2026
“Unlimited” members come about once a weekClasses registered for per active winter week by members who used their plan — median member and 75th-percentile member, by tier
Members with ≥1 winter class, Nov–Feb. A 1×-a-week plan is mechanically a pool of ~4 credits a month; unlimited plans consume nothing per class. Unlimited members register about as often as members between the 1× and 2× tiers, and at the typical business only about one in six exceeds two classes a week.
Study 02September 202614 min read
The research question
Why do families book lessons — and why don't they?
Not all hours are worth the sameShare of a posted trainer hour that actually sells as a lesson, by time of day
Weekday 4–8pm sells 34.6% of posted time; 10am–2pm sells 10.5%. Same trainers, same prices — the difference is where the hour sits relative to the school day.
Study 03August 202617 min read
The research question
How likely is a youth-sports business to win a disputed payment?
1,100+ businesses on platform · disputes matched to their transactions · benchmarked against Mastercard, Visa & Chargebacks911 data
How likely are you to win a disputed payment?Share of disputes won under each approach — industry data vs. Baseline facilities
A dispute with no response is an automatic loss under card-network rules. The industry bar is net recovery across all disputes, answered or not (Mastercard 2025; Chargebacks911 2026 finds 10.7%). The Baseline bar is closed disputes won over the most recent three months; 90% of responses were filed with zero human edits.
Study 04August 202622 min read
The research question
Who actually trains for a living — and what caps a lesson book?
1,400 active trainers · 250k+ trainer-delivered sessions · $9.8M in linked payments · 278 facility businesses
The full-time private trainer is nearly mythicalShare of lesson trainers by average delivered hours per week in active months
n = 587 lesson-segment trainers across 173 facilities. Delivered hours = time on the calendar actually taught; prep and off-platform work aren't visible.
Study 05July 202624 min read
The research question
What does a club season really cost — and where does the money leak?
337 club businesses · 65,000+ roster spots · $85.7M in team fees · 49 states
Failure risk compounds with every installmentShare of installments hitting a failed attempt, by position in the payment plan
Three years of installment ledger history (2023–2026), matured dues only. The rise holds within fixed plan lengths — genuine per-family decay, not composition. n = 32,990 first payments.
Study 06July 202624 min read
The research question
How busy is a “busy” facility, really — and what is a space-hour worth?
Occupancy, honestly measured: spiky, not emptyHourly occupancy of prime space-hours over a full year — dot = median facility, bar = 25th–75th percentile
Established facilities: n = 125 with ≥10 active months, ≥500 service space-hours, ≥70% space-tagged bookings, first 90 days excluded (the all-facility row shows n = 284). Prime = Mon–Thu 4–9pm, Fri 4–8pm, Sat 9am–5pm, Sun 10am–5pm local. Occupancy = concurrently-busy leaf spaces ÷ available leaf spaces per hour, overlap-deduplicated, minus blocked-off time.
Study 07June 202622 min read
The research question
Which memberships retain — and what actually causes churn?
44,000+ memberships · $19.8M in membership payments · hundreds of facility businesses · 44 states
Read the full studyWhat Successful New Sports Facilities Do Differently · PDF included
What we found
The communication payoff is all-or-nothingMedian 6-month revenue by communication depth — of the 6 scorecard items (videos, email & SMS, mission, descriptions, staff bios, articles)
Values as published in the study's communication-scorecard table. Partial communicators earn no more than facilities doing almost nothing — the jump comes at 4+ of 6.
Baseline Experiments
We build a feature, turn it on somewhere, and publish the honest ledger
Experiments are smaller than our studies — one feature, one partner club, one season — and they come with a verdict: would we recommend turning it on? Hypotheses are written before the data is pulled, and the misses get published with the hits.
Experiment 01September 2026Keep it — with the reset valve
The question we tested
Can a deadline stop a club from chasing parents to finish registration?
485 timed registrations at one club · vs. the club's own 2024 season and 7,617 concurrent untimed registrations · de-identified
The follow-up list, one week after acceptingShare of accepted registrations still unfinished — the list somebody has to work
A week in, the club had 73 unfinished registrations out of 545, against the 132 its own 2024 rate implies. Eventual completion held (481 of 485 registrations started under a deadline finished). Descriptive case study — the timer's causal effect can't be isolated from facility and season differences, and 2024 ran on a different system.
Method
How Baseline research works
Real operating data
Every study is built on anonymized, aggregated operating data from Baseline's sports facility management software — bookings, payments, memberships, and registrations as they actually happened. No surveys, no self-reporting.
Distributions, not averages
Averages hide the story. We publish medians, quartiles, and full distributions so you can place your own facility on the curve — not chase a number nobody actually hits.
Free to read, built into the product
Every study is free to read in full, and what we learn feeds straight into our sports facility management software — from retention tooling to payment recovery.
Run your facility on the platform behind the research
The same system that powers these studies runs scheduling, memberships, teams, and payments for sports facilities across the country.
