A coach with two employees runs morning squads for children aged five to sixteen, private lessons in the afternoon and an adult doubles group on Tuesday nights — on five courts the public can book whenever the club is not using them. This is that club, running.
A coaching club is not a shop. Almost nothing it does is a purchase. It is a timetable that has to hold, a small number of courts that two different audiences both want, and — more than anything — a weekly conversation with a few dozen families about who is actually coming on Monday.
What follows is a term being run rather than a product being configured. Every screen is the live system.
Four weekly classes, thirteen weeks, five courts and three coaches. The hard part is not drawing the timetable — it is making the courts genuinely unavailable to everybody else while it runs.
Opening a session and attaching a court is not a note to the coach. It writes a real block against that court for that hour, which is why the blocked marker matters: for as long as it is there, the public booking page cannot sell Court 1 at nine on a Monday. The club stops keeping two calendars and reconciling them.
Every recurring class raises the same question, and the answer is asked for out loud rather than assumed. Choosing the series applies the court to this session and every future one at that weekday and time. A session that already holds the court is skipped, never double-booked.
Court 1 is being resurfaced on the fifth of October, so that Monday’s Mini Tennis moves to Court 4 and the rest of the term does not. The panel says which it did.
What the club actually did. Nine clicks — one per squad per weekday — produced 117 court blocks across the term. Courts 4 and 5 were never held at all, so they stay on sale to the public every hour of every week.
Three coaches, and a way to see at a glance who is carrying the week and which session still has nobody on it.
A coach is put on a session by dragging them onto it, and the same once-or-series question is asked. Each assignment writes a hold on that coach’s own calendar, which is what stops the afternoon private-lesson picker offering a coach who is already teaching a squad. It is also what feeds the payout ledger: the session rate that coach is worth arrives with the assignment, so nobody re-types it at the end of term.
The club’s own rule: the child is the member, the parent is the contact. One account per child, carrying a parent’s phone number.
A new child joins the Wednesday juniors. The coach does not create an account, choose a password or send an invitation. They type a name and a phone number into the bottom row of the register they already have open on the court.
Type the same name next term. The name box is a type-ahead over children the club already has, so three letters offers the child back with her parent’s number attached rather than creating a second one. The matching only ever looks at class attendees, so a customer with a similar name can never be turned into a pupil by accident. It is also how a freed place gets filled in the middle of a lesson.
Squads are rosters, and a roster can be put into a whole series at once rather than session by session. On the demo club, the Monday Mini Tennis series took 48 enrolments in 15 seconds — with the four children who had already been added by hand correctly reported as skipped rather than doubled up. The Wednesday series added 52 more. A child who is in no squad at all simply never sees a sessions page.
This is the part a coaching club actually lives in. Everything above is preparation; this is the weekly conversation with twenty families.
The child’s own account page carries the term: which squad, when it runs, who takes it, which court, and a button per session.
Giving up a place is one tap, so it asks first — quoting the class and the date, with keep my place as the safe answer. The place is released immediately, which is the whole point: the coach sees it free straight away rather than counting heads on the court.
An answer that only says no is half an answer. Cancelled sessions that have not started yet sit in their own section with a rejoin button, and rejoining is honest about it: it fails if somebody else has taken the place in the meantime.
Monday, nine o’clock. The coach opens one screen on a phone and works from it for the hour.
The session picker names the court, so there is no doubt which class this is. Emma’s row is red and says cancelled — the club was told on Friday and the place has been free since.
The coach types the first letters of the next child’s name and she is offered back complete, because she was entered once before. Then attendance: one tap each, and every one of them undoable. The column on the right is the money — what each family has handed over and what is still outstanding — totalled at the foot of the session, without anybody raising an invoice for a tennis lesson.
Five courts, two audiences. The club has to hold what it needs and sell the rest — and the adults who play every Tuesday need no coach at all.
They differ in what they can tell you afterwards, and that is the only thing worth choosing between them on.
| Taking the court | What it can tell you afterwards |
|---|---|
| A session with no coach on it | Who has it, and who turned up |
| Shrinking the pool for those hours | How many are left |
| A plain block | Nothing |
The club’s regular adult four is the first case. Club Doubles · Tuesday Night is an ordinary session with a capacity of four and Court 3 held for the whole term, and no coach — which is why it sat unstaffed in part 02. Because it is a session it inherits everything sessions get: it is on the calendar and the board, the four players are enrolled and can cancel themselves, the reminder goes out the day before, the court is genuinely held, and there is a register on the night.
The middle case is the afternoon. The club keeps courts free for private lessons by shrinking the public pool between four and seven rather than naming a court, because it does not matter which court a lesson gets. Plain blocks are for the cases with nobody to track: resurfacing, a storm, a corporate hire.
Private lessons run four till seven, Monday to Friday, three at a time — one per coach. The customer either chooses their coach or lets the club decide, and a coach who is teaching a squad at that hour is never offered, because the class assignment is already holding their time. The same three people the board schedules are the ones the ledger pays.
The public books a court by the hour and never names one: five courts sit behind a single listing and a free one is handed out. A class holding Court 1 removes one court from that pool for that hour. It does not take the listing off sale.
Screenshots are of the running system, unretouched, captured on a live demo club.
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