Padel clubs
A ball machine for your padel club: how to make it pay off
A ball machine can become a good extra source of revenue for your club. But only if you start at the right end.
Contents
The most common mistake: starting with the machine
Many clubs think: we need a machine that fires balls, so which one is cheapest? That's an expensive way to save money. A machine that sits broken, is fiddly to use or comes without support leaves you with unhappy customers and no revenue.
Start with a different question: what should the ball machine do for our club?
Start with your goals
A ball machine at a padel club should have three goals:
Meet your customers' needs
Players want to train on their own when it suits them, and get help straight away when something goes wrong.
Create a new, growing source of revenue
The aim is a growing base of regular ball machine players who book courts they wouldn't otherwise have booked.
Make your coaches more effective
With a machine, a coach can take bigger groups and run more effective sessions, which means happier customers. That brings in more revenue for both the coach and the club.
Once your goals are clear, choosing the machine and the setup becomes much easier.
Customers buy an experience, not a machine
For players, the ball machine is a service. It has to be there and work every time. That takes three things on top of the machine itself:
Support that always answers
Players should be able to call a central support line and get help, whether or not anyone from the club is on site.
A machine that's always available
Customers need to trust that the machine is there and working when they've booked it.
Servicing that gets you going again fast
If the machine breaks, you need a replacement on site within days, not months.
Be wary of promises of quick repairs. It's not unusual for "fast service" or "quick repairs" to take anything from two weeks to five or six months in practice. Once you've built up a customer base, that costs you twice: customers get frustrated, and the revenue is gone for as long as the machine is away.
Ask the supplier:
- How many days, in writing, until we have a working machine after a breakdown?
- Who answers when a player calls on a Saturday evening?
- Who pays for shipping and repairs?
- How many clubs use the machine today, and how long have they had it?
Should players pay to use the machine?
This is the most important strategic decision. You can charge per machine session, or treat the machine as a tool for filling more court hours.
Our advice is clear: make the machine free for players. They pay for the court as usual, and the machine becomes the tool that drives more bookings – especially at times when courts would otherwise sit empty.
An extra fee makes players hesitate every time. Without one, the machine becomes a reason to book, again and again.
A club machine works harder than you think
At a club, the machine might be used once, twice or three times a day. A player who owns one might use it a couple of times a week. Most manufacturers build for home use, and those machines aren't made for the pace of a club.
Based on the figures in the text, for a club that's open seven days a week. Each dot is one session; the lighter dots are the day's second and third sessions.
The result is downtime and repairs, and the cheaper the machine, the sooner they come. Budget machines are also often hard to use for a player who only comes in now and then.
So choose a machine built for heavy use, even if it costs more.
Run the numbers
If you buy a machine for £2,000–£4,500, in our experience it takes 12–36 months to pay for itself. After three years, it's not unusual for a machine built for home use to be broken or to have recurring problems. That's not a good deal.
- How long it takes, in our experience, for the machine to pay for itself
- After three years: not unusual for a machine built for home use to be broken or to have recurring problems