Business of Running a Club Programme

John Cavill shares the secrets of running a club programme; understanding club culture, a fair deal, growing programmes and building trust.

John Cavill is the Director of Tennis and Co-Founder at Tennis Works, a tennis development and educational resource company, based at Stony Stratford LTC in Buckinghamshire. John is an experienced LTA Level 4, RPT Europe Level 4 and Bollettieri Tennis Academy International Coaches Programme Level 2 qualified coach.

This 45 minute interview is aimed at tennis coaches who are running their own club coaching programmes, who are interested in developing their relationship with the club, and who manage a team of coaches and assistants. John shares insights from his own experiences, including:

Changing a micro culture – When we started at Stony Stratford Tennis Club, which is quite traditional, there was a large section that saw us as a threat and caused a few stinks. Many of these are our greatest supporters now but it took a while to reassure and re-educate without being bullish and being very sensitive
Club contracts…what’s a fair deal? We negotiate very fair contracts with our clubs / centres and have walked away from a few offers as they didn’t feel right. I can share what we’ve done at Stony, what our deal is, why it’s fair and how it benefits both us and the club for the long term
Trusting your team – how we’ve developed a coaching team that is working hard together with long term ambitions sharing a common methodology.
Growing a programme – where we started with a basic framework that includes schools and how this spirals as numbers grow and needs change. We inherited a cheap and unstructured programme with about 40 people in a 9 court club. We had to change the format, increase prices and reduce ratios to ensure the quality is high. We now have 71 players in our competition programme of which are county, regional and national level and we have over 300 players in the programme who play recreationally at the schools and in club events / competitions.

Coach and Club Relationships

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Business of Running a Club Programme

John Cavill shares the secrets of running a club programme; understanding club culture, a fair deal, growing programmes and building trust.

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