Racket Sports Tech-September 2026

Table of Contents

• Ashley’s Tech Blog

  • The Discount You Didn't Need to Give

• Quick Tech Brief

• Baseline Vision News

The Discount You Didn't Need to Give

Every club I talk to is running promotions. Very few can tell me what those promotions actually bought them.

That's not a knock on operators. It's a tooling problem. For most racquet and paddle clubs, a "promotion" has historically meant a staff member manually adjusting a price at the desk, or a blanket rate drop that anyone can walk into. Both work, in the narrow sense that a player pays less and books something. Neither tells you whether that booking would have happened anyway.

That distinction is the whole game. A discount is only worth what it changes. If you shave 20% off a Saturday morning court that was going to fill on its own, you didn't run a campaign — you just lowered your price. The Tuesday 1 p.m. court that sits empty every week is where the same 20% is actually doing work.

Start with the gap, not the offer

The clubs that get the most out of promotions tend to work backward. They don't ask "what discount should we run?" They ask "where is the hole in the week, the program, or the funnel?" Then they build the smallest offer that fills it.

Four gaps come up over and over in this industry:

• Off-peak court time. Weekday middays and late evenings are the most reliably underused inventory in the sport. An empty court has a hard deadline — once the hour passes, that revenue is gone permanently. It's the closest thing our business has to an airline seat.

• Under-enrolled programming. A clinic with six of twelve spots filled still costs you the same coach hour. Getting to nine changes the math on the whole session.

• Membership conversion. You have a population of frequent drop-in players who have done the arithmetic and haven't pulled the trigger. A time-boxed first-month offer gives them a reason to stop deliberating.

• New-player acquisition. The hardest ask in the sport is the first visit. Lowering the cost of trying you once is often cheaper than any ad you could buy.

Each of those is a different audience and a different economic problem. Treating them with the same broad discount is how promotional budgets quietly leak.

Guardrails are the feature

This is the reasoning behind how we built Promo Codes into CourtReserve, which is now available to clubs on current plans at no additional cost. The interesting part isn't the ability to take money off — anyone can do that. It's the ability to constrain the offer so precisely that it can only be redeemed by the person and the purchase you had in mind.

You set the discount as a flat amount or a percentage, with optional minimums and maximums so a code can't cannibalize a large transaction. You decide who can use it: open to anyone holding the code, or restricted to specific membership types, groups, or named players. You choose what it applies to — reservations, lessons, events, leagues, Public Booking, memberships, packages, point-of-sale purchases, and other fees — and you can narrow bookings down to eligible days and times. You set start and end dates, or leave the offer running. And you cap it, both as a total campaign limit and a per-customer limit, so one enthusiastic member doesn't consume the entire promotion.

Those controls are what separate a campaign from a price cut. They let you put a real number on your downside before you launch, which is the thing that usually keeps clubs from experimenting in the first place.

Redemption should be boring

The other half of this is operational. A promotion that requires a staff member to remember an adjustment at checkout is a promotion that generates errors, inconsistency, and awkward conversations at the desk.

Players enter an eligible code themselves during checkout and see the discount applied before they pay. Your team doesn't touch it. That sounds like a small thing until you're running four concurrent offers across three locations and a seasonal staff roster.

Then actually read the results

The part most clubs skip: closing the loop. Every campaign should tell you something you can use on the next one. Track total redemptions, net sales after the discount, the total dollar amount you gave away, and your error rate on failed attempts — that last one is usually the tell that your eligibility rules are tighter than your messaging suggested.

After three or four campaigns, patterns show up. You'll find that your members respond to program offers and your drop-ins respond to court time, or the reverse, and you'll stop guessing.

The takeaway

Promotions are one of the few levers a club can pull on short notice, and they're also one of the easiest to waste. The difference comes down to intent: a targeted offer aimed at a specific gap, with limits you set in advance and numbers you review afterward, is a growth tool. An open-ended discount is just revenue you decided not to collect.

If you're a CourtReserve club, Promo Codes live in your Admin Panel under Billing Settings. Pick your emptiest hour on the calendar and build one campaign around it. That's a low-risk way to find out what your players actually respond to.

Learn more.

Sports Business Journal - USTA Ventures invests in recreational sports platform Rec 

The USTA’s investment arm is funding an AI-infused technology platform that connects people with local parks and recreation facilities to rent court time, book lessons or enroll in sports programs. Read more.

Sports Business Journal - Oura expands reach in tennis with Coco Gauff, Taylor Fritz sponsorships

Gauff and Fritz will appear in marketing materials and share content about their use of the device and their preparation for the US Open at the end of the month. Read more.
See also this MediaPost article.

CourtReserve - New Feature: Meet CourtReserve Pulse. The Built-In Reporting Dashboard for Tracking Your Racquet Club’s Performance

No more pulling reports or reconciling spreadsheets. Pulse brings every metric that matters into one view, updated daily. See your club’s performance the moment you log in. Explore Pulse.

IBM - IBM and the USTA Introduce New AI-Powered Fan Experiences for 2026 US Open

Three new, enhanced AI-powered innovations are designed to help fans cut through the noise, stay closer to the action and experience the US Open in a more personalized way than ever.  Since 1992, IBM and the USTA have brought some of the most advanced digital experiences in sports to more than 14 million global tennis fans annually.
Read more.

Tennibot - MEET THE PARTNER LITE

Say hello to the newest member of the Partner family. The Partner Lite runs the same AI, the same custom drills, and the same app as the Partner V2. It just stays where you put it, so it costs hundreds less.

And it is the lightest AI ball machine on the market.

At just 25 lbs, about half the weight of most machines, you can carry it to any court in one hand. Set it down, open the app, and train with a real AI practice partner — from $1,495. Shop The Partner Lite

Train precision under pressure with Target Zone

​Design custom drills to master any shot or combinations, and watch player accuracy climb in real time.

Update your Baseline camera and app today, so you're ready to try Target Zone the next time you're on court.

Until next time!
The Baseline Vision Team
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