How to fill your club’s off-peak hours with mixins
A club with eight courts open from 8am to 11pm has 120 court hours a day. It sells, on a good day, forty. The other eighty are the biggest hidden cost in the business, and cutting the price does not fix them.
The off-peak hour is the one nobody wants: 10am to 5pm on weekdays. The club’s instinctive reaction is to cut the rate, and it is the wrong one: discounting off-peak cannibalises the people who were going to pay full rate at 7pm and brings in nobody new, because the problem for someone not playing at 11am on a Tuesday is not the price. It is that they have nobody to play with.
Mixins solve exactly that: they are the product that turns “I have nobody to play with” into “there are people here on Tuesday at 11”.
Four formats that work off-peak
1. The mid-morning seniors’ mixin
10am to 12pm, two or three days a week. It is the format with the most unmet demand in Spain and the one fewest clubs have set up as a product. The retired or semi-retired player has time, has money and above all wants company. Charge full rate: they do not need a discount, they need somebody to run the list.
Watch one detail: this is the group that copes worst with digital tools. Ask them to install an app and create an account with a password and you lose half of them. Which is why sign-up has to be a link and a name, with no registration.
2. The lunchtime mixin for nearby offices
2pm to 3.30pm, if you have an industrial estate or an office district less than ten minutes away. A short, closed format: ninety minutes, shower, back to work. It works as an americano with 12-minute rounds and a small cap, 8 to 12 players.
It is also the natural way into corporate padel: whoever comes to the lunchtime mixin is the person who ends up putting together their company’s team for the league.
3. The group lesson with a match
Half an hour of coaching and an hour of mixin. It splits the coach’s cost across 8 or 12 people and turns a lesson into a social event. It is the format that best retains the lower-intermediate player — the one most likely to drift away from the club when they cannot find opponents at their level.
4. The women’s morning mixin
The 9.30am to 11.30am band. Where it works, it works very well and fills every week of the school year. It needs critical mass: below 12 regular players it is hard to sustain, and the key there is never to cancel for low numbers in the first few weeks.
The numbers, without the optimism
A four-court club running three weekly off-peak mixins, 12 players each at €8:
| Item | Week | Season (36 weeks) |
|---|---|---|
| Gross revenue | €288 | €10,368 |
| Court hours filled | 9 | 324 |
| Balls and materials | −€30 | −€1,080 |
| Net revenue on hours that were empty | €258 | €9,288 |
Nine thousand euros from a band that used to bill nothing. And that is the direct effect; the indirect one — members who do not leave because they have a group — is bigger and appears on no spreadsheet.
Why most clubs do not do it
Not for lack of demand. Because of what it costs to run: three mixins a week is three lists, thirty-six payments and half a dozen last-minute drop-outs to refill. With a WhatsApp group, that is several hours a week of someone on your team, and the first week that person is on holiday the mixin does not get called.
It is the reason clubs start mixins in September and have abandoned them by November. It is not the players who fail: it is the process.
Where to start tomorrow
- Pick one single band and hold it for twelve weeks without cancelling, even if six people turn up for the first three.
- Charge full rate. The discount is not the argument; the group is.
- Take payment on sign-up. Drop-outs halve in the first month.
- Keep the list outside the chat, with a real cap and a real waiting list.
- Measure one thing only: how many of the people who came in week 1 are still coming in week 12.