FACILITIES - SUPPLIES - PEOPLE 10/26

Has anybody noticed how much insurance companies are spending on advertising to capitalize on the recent uptick in litigation? If you don’t want to be part of that trend, keep safety at your facility at the top of your to-do list. The fact is, prevention is the real quest for any tennis facility manager. Don’t wait for someone to tell you about a potential problem. See it before it happens.

In most cases, your insurance company will provide you with a free tour of your club and point out potential problems. In addition, OSHA provides and mandates safety protocols for your employees. But ultimately, your trained eyes will create the safest environment for your members and employees.

A week goes by, and he has not received any feedback from the insurance company concerning compensating him for missing time at work or for his medical costs. This is an important juncture; many insurance companies will drag their feet since most state regulations allow up to 15 days to respond to claims. They may be quick to respond to your needs, but in this case, this gentleman is not their customer and probably has his own insurance company. You need to step in right away and put pressure on your agent to handle this quickly before it blows up into a larger problem. The lesson learned…never assume that the insurance companies will respond promptly. You're working at a club of members who will talk about this incident and negatively impact the club’s social atmosphere. Don’t let an incident fester; stay on top of the case until it is fully resolved.

This next scenario is a perfect example of the unexpected and the value of posting precautionary signs. A member comes to visit the club and brings their dog along. You have signs posted that clearly state you do not allow pets to be left unattended on the premises. They want to grab something from their locker quickly, so they tie their dog to a post out front and run inside. In the meantime, an elderly gentleman exits the facility and, with his poor eyesight, does not see the leash, trips over it, and falls, bumping his head. An eyewitness goes immediately to the front desk and reports the incident. Your front desk person calls 911 and rushes to the scene. They quickly gather the names of everyone involved, including the owner of the dog. Note how thorough this action was; that will be very important if this incident escalates.

Fortunately, the elderly gentleman is not severely hurt, but the legal implications from this point on could get ugly. First of all, the degree of the injury is not relevant to you. That will be determined by a group of people that you probably will not be able to contact or acquire any information pertaining to the severity of the injury.  

A month passes, and you get a call from a lawyer representing the injured person. Whether it is a call or a letter, your response should be limited to your accident report, and you should notify your insurance company of a potential claim.

At that point, you may or may not find yourself in a lawsuit, but that’s why you have insurance. Fortunately, because your employee responded properly, you are in good shape. This is the number one reason to provide training for your staff for these possibilities. You also had the foresight to post a sign concerning unsupervised pets on the premises that will help exempt you from responsibility. Because the employee called 911 immediately, they shifted the care of that senior from the club to the emergency personnel. Because you have an eyewitness documented account, you’re well covered. The problem is now in the hands of the insurance company and the owner of the dog.

Although these examples may be common for most facilities, the type of coverage may not be the same. That is because the practice of insurance for covering a recreational facility is not the same in every state. While the fundamental types of coverage you need stay the same, the rules governing insurance, required policy minimums, and legal liabilities vary significantly by state. But no matter where you operate, a standard recreational facility package typically includes the same baseline products: 1. Commercial General Liability: Covers third-party bodily injury and property damage. 2. Commercial Property Insurance: Protects your physical structures, fields, and equipment. 3. Participant Accident Coverage: Pays medical bills for injured participants, regardless of fault. 4. Abuse & Molestation Liability: Protects against misconduct claims, particularly important for clubs that have children as members.

All insurance companies will ask you to review your coverage each year. This is a great time to shop for better prices. Often companies will provide a lower rate to encourage you to use their product, but then, over time, slowly raise your rates. This is especially true in workers’ compensation, where the rates are dictated by each state and can be more negotiable than most managers realize.

Keep track of your performance rating and how your employees are classified in their line of work. Most managers do not realize that different job responsibilities have different risks, which will mean different rates that will determine the cost of your Workers' Comp coverage. Make sure that the insurance company you hire has classified these employees accurately.  

Look for companies that specialize in covering the health and fitness industry. They often can provide a better package because they are more capable of securing an underwriter by marketing a larger group of applicants.

This action is IMPORTANT. Most companies will require you to have your members and their guests sign waivers before using the club. A waiver of responsibility can help, but remember, you cannot waive negligence. No matter what a member or guest signs, you will be responsible if it was an event that you could have prevented, especially if you have been warned about the possibility of such an event, or have a history of similar accidents.

Finally, never undervalue the importance of having a proper emergency plan in place. How many times a year does your club lose power? Electrical outages seem to be more common as we experience an uptick in severe weather. Do you have proper emergency lighting in place? How often do you check the system to make sure it works? Do your employees know what to do if the electricity goes out? Does this outage affect any of your appliances, machinery, pool motors, or time clocks? Should you evacuate the facility, or just wait until the power comes back on? Do you have enough backup batteries and flashlights? What if an emergency requires evacuating the building, such as a fire or an earthquake? How will those in your building know how to exit? Is there an alarm system that would notify everyone in the facility? Would your employees know how to properly evacuate the facility? If you have a sprinkler system for your indoor facility, is it scheduled to be properly inspected every few years, and would you or your staff know how to turn it off in case a sprinkler is activated? That all sounds daunting, but you could be preventing serious injuries and possible insurance claims.

These are management issues you need to have answers to before anything happens. Failure in this department not only impacts your membership, but it can result in the loss of your job. Think about it: if a major safety issue occurs that you could have avoided or did not prepare for, just know this: the consequence of that action will always fall squarely on the shoulders of management. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, we live in a very litigious world, and if you can avoid having to experience any interaction with an aggressive legal firm, your job and life will be much easier and less stressful.

In 1976, he took over as head professional/tennis director at the Mt. Tam Racquet Club in Larkspur, California, and added the title and responsibilities of general manager in 1982. After 48 years, he retired to work exclusively in helping others in the industry. 

In 2010, he was awarded “Manager of the Year” for the USPTA NorCal Division and the “Manager of the Year” at the USPTA World Conference. Rod has written several books, including “Down Your Alley” in 1993, “Playing Into the Sunset” in 2013, and most recently, “250 Ways to Play Tennis.”

He also produced the “Facility Manager’s Manual” and the “Business Handbook for Tennis Pros,” which is distributed by the TIA.

Management: I am interested in you.

The kindest thing a manager can do is just stop by the Tennis Office, take a seat, and ask a member of the tennis staff, "How are you and your family doing?" Do you have any family events planned?

Show the hard-working staff you appreciate them for who they are as individuals who make everything work for you and the club. This is such a humanistic skill.

• RSPA Master Professional. RSPA Lifetime Achievement Award

• USA High Performance Coach

• International Speaker at the Australian, Wimbledon, and US Open Coaches Conference

• Author of “Master Your Tennis Game - 50 Mental Strategies and Tactics”

• Co-author of the International Book of Drills with Dennis Van der Meer

• Member of the Directors Club of America
  

Tuesday, 2 PM. Court 6 is empty. Ask what that hour cost the club, and the instinctive answer is nothing. Nobody paid, nobody played, nothing happened.

Last month this column made the case for RevPCH, revenue per court-hour, as the number that fuses how full you are with what full is worth. The follow-up I promised is the empty half of that equation: what the unsold hours actually cost, and why the most expensive court at your club is the one nobody's playing on. That line gets used as a slogan. It's not one. It's accounting.

The hour was never free

Here's the part the instinctive answer misses: most of what a club spends is committed before a single court is booked. (The variable slice, things like per-booking cleaning and demand-scaled staffing, is real but small.) Debt service or rent on the land. Insurance. Resurfacing on its schedule. Lighting and climate for the building, not the booking. The staff who open the doors at 6 AM, whether six people walk in or sixty. These are fixed costs, and fixed costs have a defining property: they land on every hour the club is open, sold or not.

And unlike a pro-shop racquet that sells in April instead of March, the loss is permanent: Tuesday's 2 PM cannot be sold on Wednesday. Court-hours are perishable inventory, the property that made hotels and airlines rebuild their commercial operations decades ago, once they accepted that an expiring product needs managing before it expires.

Not all empty hours are equal

Here's where "just fill the empty hours," the advice this argument seems to invite, goes wrong. Meet two empty hours at the same club.

The first is Saturday at 9 AM. In most markets, that's when working members can actually play, so demand exists. If it's sitting empty, something specific went wrong: the price is off, the programming displaced the players who wanted it, or the booking rules quietly fenced them out. That hour is sellable, close to full rate, and its emptiness is a solvable problem worth real money.

The second is Tuesday at 2 PM. The demand pool is structurally thinner; most of the people who'd play are at work. It may be sellable, but to different buyers, at a different ceiling, and filling it at any price isn't automatically worth doing. Chasing it with discounts can even cost you, if the discounted booking displaces or reprices demand that would have paid more.

Those two questions give every empty hour a pair of coordinates: how deep its demand runs, and what the marginal buyer would pay. Together, they point at a target: the hour's expected recoverable revenue. One qualifier belongs with that target: it's the generalized version, and it calibrates to each club's own objectives. At a dues-bundled private club, a recovered hour's value may be member experience and retention more than booking revenue; at a commercial facility, it's closer to straight cash. The map stays the same; what "value" means on its axes is the club's call.

The spread between clubs that ask those questions and clubs that don't is not small. The 2026 Playtomic Global Padel Report, produced with PwC's Strategy&, found roughly a fivefold gap between average and top-tier club economics inside the same markets, on the order of five times the booking revenue per court, per trade coverage of the report. (The data is from padel, currently the most measured of the racquet sports, but the mechanism isn't sport-specific.) Demand alone doesn't produce a spread like that inside a shared market. A lot of that gap is which hours each club manages to sell, and at what.

The hours that should stay empty

Now the honest caveat, in the same spirit as last month's: a metric oversold is worse than no metric, and an argument oversold is worse than no argument. Some hours should be empty. Maintenance needs a window. A calendar with no slack has no way to absorb a rained-out Saturday, a league playoff that runs long, or a sudden surge of interest in the sport you just added. A club at 100 percent utilization has no resilience and nowhere to grow; the fully-booked building is fragile in a way the ledger doesn't show. The goal was never zero empty hours. The goal is knowing which empty hours you chose, and what the ones you didn't choose are costing you.

There's one more side to this, and Rod Heckelman's writing in these pages keeps arriving at it from the other direction: access. The hour the club didn't sell is also the game a player couldn't find. Same hour, one failure, visible on both ledgers, the club's and the sport's. A market where courts sit unsold at 2 PM while players give up looking for court time isn't short on demand or capacity. It's short on the connection between them.

What you can ask now

Last month gave you one number to write down. This month gives you one question to ask of your own calendar: take your ten emptiest recurring hours and sort them: which are sellable at real rates, which are sellable only at prices that aren't worth it, and which are doing quiet, useful work as slack. At RacquetX's City Series in San Diego a few weeks ago, we ran a decision quiz at our table: fast, competitive, and genuinely fun. What stuck with me afterward wasn't anyone's score. It was that on the questions about what things are worth, the honest answer, and operators there were refreshingly honest, was so often some version of "I'd have to guess." If that's your answer too, it isn't carelessness. Nothing ever asked you to. It's the same reason last month's number went uncomputed. But once the hours are sorted, "how are we doing?" turns into "which hour do we go get?" That is a different kind of conversation to bring to a board, a partner, or yourself.

Follow-up piece next month: the rate side. Your club already carries a dozen prices for the same court hour. The question: how many of them did anyone actually choose?