Sports academy management software for venues that also hire out courts | Real Sports
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Solution · Academies & coaching

Coaching programmes on the same calendar as the courts they use

Most academies do not have a booking problem, they have a collision problem: the coaching session and the public hire are sold from different diaries, so the pitch goes out from under the squad and somebody spends Monday morning apologising. Putting coaching on the same calendar as every court, pitch and resource removes that class of mistake rather than reducing it. This page is specific about what we do here — and equally specific about what we do not.

What you get today

  • One calendar for every court, coach, class and resource, so a session holds its space.
  • Class packs & credit balances — sell a block of sessions, spend it on classes or court time.
  • Attendance registers against the session, not on paper.
  • Your own payment gateway — Stripe, Checkout.com or Paymob, settling to you.
The operational reality

Four jobs that eat an academy manager's week

Not all of them are software problems. These are the ones that are.

01

The pitch sold out from under a session

When coaching lives in its own diary, nothing stops the public side selling the same surface at the same time. One calendar covering courts, coaches, classes and resources means the session occupies the space and the space is simply not offered — and booking-window control decides when slots open in the first place.

02

Collecting for a block, not a session

Selling one session at a time suits nobody: the customer re-books every week and you carry the admin. A class pack or credit balance is bought once and drawn down as sessions are booked, and the same balance works on a court hour, so a coaching customer who also plays socially has one wallet rather than two relationships.

03

Attendance that stays on the clipboard

Attendance marked on paper and typed up later is attendance that does not get typed up. Recording it against the session as it happens means it exists the same evening, which matters because who has stopped turning up is the earliest warning you get that a customer is about to leave.

04

Nobody notices the quiet leavers

An academy rarely loses customers in a dramatic way; people simply stop rebooking. Booking history plus segmentation puts the lapsed group in front of you as a list, and the growth layer drafts the message to bring them back — cheaper than replacing them with strangers.

How it works

How you would set this up

Four steps, all of it standard configuration rather than a bespoke build.

Step 1Resources

Courts, pitches and halls as resources, each with its own slot lengths, rate card and booking window.

Step 2Sessions as classes

Each group as a class with its own capacity, on the calendar that holds the space it uses.

Step 3Coaches

A coach calendar connected to the class or resource, with team access scoped by permissions.

Step 4Packs & registers

Sell a block as a class pack or credit balance; mark attendance against each session.

Straight answers

Where you would need a workaround today

Written down because finding this out after a migration is worse for you than losing the signup is for us.

No family accounts

There is no account that holds several participants under one paying adult with a single invoice. The paying adult is the customer; use custom forms to capture which child a booking is for. If one payer with several participants is the centre of your business, this is a real gap and you should weigh it before moving.

No sibling-rate rule

Second- and third-child pricing is not a rule that applies itself. You can achieve the discount with a scoped promo or voucher code, capped by use, but somebody has to hand it out — it will not attach automatically because two customers are related.

No term-enrolment object

There is no "term" that enrols a participant for a dated block and renews itself next season with holidays excluded from schedule and price together. A course is sold as a pack of sessions instead, which covers the commercial job — buy once, attend many — without the term calendar around it.

FAQ

Academy questions

Can we sell a course of sessions rather than one booking at a time?

Yes, through packages, class packs and credit wallets, which are on every plan including the free one. A customer buys a block of sessions once and books against the balance, and the same balance can be spent on a court hour or a class rather than being locked to one activity. Collection runs through your own payment gateway, so the money settles directly to you.

Do you support family accounts, where one parent pays for two children?

Not today, and we would rather say so here than after you have migrated. There is no family account that holds several participants under one payer with a single invoice, and no automatic sibling-rate rule. What people do instead: the paying adult is the customer, custom forms capture which child each booking is for along with anything else you need at checkout, and a discount is applied with a promo or voucher code. It works, but it is a workaround rather than a feature, and if family billing is the core of your operation you should weigh that carefully.

Can coaches take attendance for a session?

Yes. A session carries its attendance register, so who turned up is recorded against it rather than transcribed from paper later. Team access is controlled with custom access and permissions, so staff can be limited to what they need to see.

How do we stop a coaching session being sold to the public underneath it?

Coaching sits on the same calendar as everything else — one calendar covers every court, coach, class and resource, and a coach calendar can be connected to the class or resource it occupies. Because the session holds the space, the space is not available to a public booking. Booking-window control decides when slots open at all, which is the other half of the problem.

How do we see which customers have stopped coming back?

Customer records carry booking history, and segmentation groups people by how they actually behave — regulars, lapsed, one-off. Real Sports OS reads that and drafts the campaign to bring a lapsed group back, which is where an academy's revenue usually is: the family who quietly stopped rebooking, not the one who never signed up.

Keep reading

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Coaching and court hire on one calendar.

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