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 01August 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 02July 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 03July 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 04June 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.
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.
