Tennis is an excellent sport to watch and play. It offers exciting end-to-end action for the entirety of a match, and if you are a good player, you can make more than a decent living from it.
However, learning how to play tennis is not that easy. Unlike team sports like football or basketball, in tennis, you can’t make good progress at a young age without proper tennis education. Becoming a good tennis player requires that you have a professional tennis coach by your side at all times.
The Perks of Opening a Tennis School
That’s great news if you are thinking about opening a tennis school. If you start a tennis school tomorrow, you can be sure of two things. First, there will never be a shortage of students. These students will be willing to pay top money for proper tennis education as they know that they can easily recoup that in a week when they become professional tennis players.
Secondly, you will be part of some amazing personal stories of success, and let’s be honest, that’s something that money can’t buy.
Let’s look at some useful tips when it comes to launching your tennis academy!
Pick a Location
Finding the right venue for your tennis school is essential. You want to choose a location which will let you build several tennis courts on it. That means the future school site you pick will have to be big enough to allow you to include six, eight, or more courts on it.
The reason for this is simple. You don’t want to have a group of students queuing and waiting for their turn to come to start practising on the court. Even with a relatively small group of ten students, you will still have to have at least five courts for these students to practise on them uninterrupted.
Of course, you can always decide to go with more lessons scheduled at different times. However, that will also mean that you have to pay your coaches for longer, so you might end up paying more than if you just bought a bigger school site in the first place.
Go with Hard Courts
The next thing to decide is the surface your students will be practising on. Traditionally, tennis schools go with hard-court surfaces. They are easy to maintain, and most players tend to be okay with them.
For instance, let’s say you have a group of tennis beginners, and you want all of them to be okay with the surface you choose. You cannot go with grass courts as these make the ball move faster, and it will be more difficult for your beginner group to practise on them. And that’s before you even start thinking about maintenance costs.
You also can’t install clay courts as these take a lot more energy and physical strength to move the ball around. That can be a problem, especially when your class is a group of 8-year-old girls.
And here’s where hard courts come in quite handy. Hard-court surfaces are easy to maintain, are predictable enough for students of all levels, and are the perfect middle ground between grass and clay courts.
Take the WTA Cincinnati Open 2021, for example. The tournament that has been played in its original city since 1899 is one of the most popular hard court events on the WTA Tour. It is also one of the favourite tournaments for all types of tennis players out there.
For instance, Serena Williams has often said that clay is her favourite surface because it is slower, giving her more time to set up her shots. However, the super-talented US tennis star had no problems appearing in three WTA Cincinnati Open hard-court finals and winning two of them.
In contrast, Dutch star Kiki Bertens prefers playing on grass courts. However, that didn’t stop her from playing some superb tennis at the WTA Cincinnati Open and winning the 2018 event.
Make Your Courts Blue
There’s also another thing that you can borrow from the WTA Cincinnati Open 2021 when designing your school courts. Make them blue. The hard courts in Cincinnati are all blue, and, as 2010 WTA Cincinnati Open winner Kim Clijsters once said, blue courts make it a lot easier for players to see on them.
Hire Top-Quality Coaches
The last thing you should do is hire experienced tennis coaches. A word of advice here – Don’t be afraid to compensate them accordingly. Top coaching talent is hard to find, meaning you will have to pay a lot of money to get them. However, since top-tier coaches are a prerequisite to a successful tennis school, that’s something you have to be ready for.
