Which Of Your Tennis Club Programs Are Actually Profitable?

You love running tennis programs. They bring people together, keep courts busy, and make your club feel alive. But do you know if you have profitable tennis club programs that are actually helping your bottom line and which are quietly costing you money?

Figuring that out isn’t just good sense. It’s the difference between running a club that treads water and one that gives you breathing room to invest in new courts, better coaches, and better member experiences.

Let’s walk through step-by-step how to check which of your tennis club programs are profitable.

Step 1: List Every Program and Pick a Review Period

First off, let’s make sure nothing gets left out.

Grab a piece of paper or fire up a spreadsheet and list every program your club runs. The key is to list them all and sort them later.

Here are some common ones:

Group clinics and drills (kids and adults)
Private lessons and junior group lessons
Court rentals and social play nights
Leagues, ladders, and member tournaments
Holiday camps or school break camps
Special events like round robins, tournaments, fundraisers
Things tied to a program: pro shop sales during camps, gear or consumables used

Once you have that list, decide how to group them. You might believe it’s best to distinguish between group and private lessons, while another club prefers to see adult vs kids programming.

Group vs Private Lessons Grouping Example:

Group Classes
Kids
Adult
Senior
Private Instruction
Kids

Adult

Senior

Professional Track

Kids versus Adult Programming Grouping Example:

Kids:
Group Classes
Private Instruction
Professional Track
Adult & Senior
Group Classes
Private Instruction
Professional Track

Tip: If financials are not set up this way now, speak with your CPA or one of our fitness CPA’s about the best way to report your revenues

Then, decide what time span you’ll examine. If your club has strong seasonal swings, say summer camps followed by a slow season in fall, use 12 months. If things are pretty consistent, 3 or 6 months will give you a clear picture. The goal is to avoid distortion from one-off big events or unusually slow periods.

Step 2: Pull Program Revenue From Your System

Now that you’ve got your program list and your time frame, it’s time for revenue. This is revenue you can attribute to each program during that period.

If someone pays for a clinic, pull that income. If some private lessons happen, include those.

If you bundle things, say membership plus clinics, try to split revenue when possible, so the part relevant to each program is separated. If your software can show revenue per session, per participant, or even per coach, that helps a lot.

Pro tip: Look for your booking or club-management system’s reports. Many systems let you tag revenue by program, coach, or session type. If yours doesn’t, create a manual tag or extra code moving forward, so the next period’s tracking gets easier. Here at The Fitness CPA we’re always collaborating with our clients to set up their point of sale tracking categories for the best possible results.

Step 3: Assign Direct Variable Costs To Each Program

Revenue is only half the picture. Every program has costs, some of them are fixed overheads but others happen because the program runs, those are known as direct variable costs.

Direct variable costs include things like:

Coach wages: paying someone per hour or per session
Travel costs to off-site events
Consumables: balls, cones, court markers, maybe beverages or snacks for camps
Extra court fees if using lights or courts beyond your usual hours
Prizes or event-specific fees

In your accounting software, go into your payroll, expense sheets, and receipts to tag anything that you can clearly tie to a program.

If a coach teaches several programs, split their pay by the hours worked in each.

If consumables are used in more than one program, estimate carefully how much was used in each.

Step 4: Allocate Shared Facility and Overhead Costs Sensibly

This is where many programs look better than they really are, because overheads are hiding in the mix.

Shared facility and overhead costs are things like rent or mortgage, utilities, insurance, front desk staff, cleaning, admin payroll, and marketing. These costs don’t belong to just one program, but they have to be covered by all of them if the club is going to stay afloat.

Decide what makes sense as your cost driver for each overhead:

Court hours used by a program (useful for lights, court maintenance)
Number of coaching hours (useful if coaches require support or setup)
Participant count or revenue proportion (useful for admin, marketing)

For example, if your “adult social play nights” only use courts during off-peak hours, but use as many courts as group clinics, their share of lighting or court maintenance costs might be lower. But in contrast, their share of admin or cleaning might be similar.

For small operations and facilities where costs are fixed, our general recommendation is not to include overhead costs, as costs are fairly fixed no matter which program is running so tracking margin on direct costs is good enough.

Step 5: Calculate Contribution and Profit By Program

Now that we have revenue, direct variable costs, and allocated overheads per program (if desired), we can calculate our contribution and profit.

Gross margin = Revenue – Direct Variable Costs
Program profit = Revenue – (Direct Variable Costs + Allocated Overhead)

You’ll want to calculate the contribution per session and per participant. That tells you how much each session or each person is contributing toward fixed costs and then profit.

Let’s work through an example:

Say your junior drills session runs once a week, you charge $20 per player and 12 players are signed up. Your direct variable costs include coach pay ($100), consumables ($10) and special court lighting ($40).

$240 Revenue (12 players x $20 per)

($150) Direct variable costs = $100 coach + $10 consumables + $40 lights= $150

$90 Gross Margin

Next, let’s assume that your overhead allocated to that session is $60.

$90 Gross Margin

($60) Overhead

$30 Profit Margin

With this calculation, you can see that if you dropped below 11 players, you’d lose money on that session.

Once you run that for each program, you’ll start to see which ones make you money and which are just keeping the lights on.

Step 6: Interpret Results and Ask The Right Questions

Once you have these numbers, you have clarity to make decisions and act on them.

Here are questions to ask when results come in:

Is this program exceeding your minimum contribution margin target per session? If not, why?
Is growth driven by more players, or higher prices, or both?
Are there programs that lose money but you run them anyway because they bring in members or goodwill? It’s okay if it’s strategic “loss leader” but it’s important to know the cost.
Could a small price increase push a program from loss to profit without losing too many players?
Would combining low-enrolment sessions or cancelling them make more sense than running them at full cost?

Remember to be sure that you’re comparing apples to apples. Some programs need more prep or extra overhead, while others run in peak hours when court costs are higher.

Practical Tips To Improve Profit

Once you know which programs are marginal or underperforming, you can pull some levers to improve profit. These are things you can try right away and actually move the needle.

Set Minimum Class Size Requirement For Group Sessions

If you need 11 players to break even and often have 8 or 9, either combine classes or delay them until you fill. Be careful about cancelling classes, which can negatively affect member experience.

Redesign Coach Pay Model

If coaches are paid flat fees even when class sizes are small, you can consider introducing performance-based or per-player incentives, so your labour cost scales with revenue.

Use Session or Package Pricing

Offering multi-session packs or subscriptions helps with cash flow and reduces no-shows, as people pay upfront and commit ahead. It also helps build healthy habits in players by helping them follow through with their commitments while taking the guesswork out of their revenue streams.

Use Peak vs Off-Peak Pricing For Courts and Sessions

You can charge more for high-demand hours and discount off-peak hours. That spreads demand better and boosts your average revenue per court hour.

Focus Marketing On Your Best Margin Programs

If some of your sessions make really good contributions per player, but are lightly marketed, shift some of your promotion budget there.

Need Help With Measuring Profitability?

You cannot manage what you do not measure. Running profitable tennis programs is not about cutting fun; it is about making smart choices, so you can keep running more of the things your community loves.

If you make it a monthly habit to check program‐level profitability, you will find programs you love but that cost more to run than you thought. You will also find hidden gems you should double down on.

If you need more clarity on how your tennis club or any fitness program is running, speak to us! At The Fitness CPA, we work with all sorts of fitness businesses to keep their books in order and monthly accounting in check.

If you need some help with measuring your program’s profitability, book a discovery call with us. We’ll get right back to you!

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Eric Killian

CPA & Founder | Accountant, husband, father, mountaineer.
Fitness is such a big part of who I am. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle, eating well (mostly paleo), hiking, backpacking, mountaineering, practicing yoga and Crossfit are all important cornerstones of life. But I love ice cream and cookies too much to say no!
I love helping owners make sense of their business and finding ways to grow it. It’s an honor to help you see situations, scenarios and opportunities from all sides so you can make informed decisions.

Profitability