An Historic Club’s Metamorphosis Through Consultancy to Interim Management To Long-Term Strategy Completion

Pretty Brook Tennis Club first called BeyondTheBaselines.com in late 2019. The club was dropping members as if members were falling leaves on a cold November, football Saturday at the famed university in the club’s hometown of Princeton, NJ.

The president mentioned the club’s membership was at just 155 member households, significantly down from its glory days when it boasted over 200. Although the five clay courts were busy on weekend mornings, the club was having difficulty finding younger families who might join. Pretty Brook was founded in 1929, however, its younger upstart just down the road, Bedens Brook was literally stealing the younger thunder and attracting the families that would be the lifeline to Pretty Brook as it headed toward its hundreth year.

Princeton University is known for its eating clubs. Pretty Brook had started to resemble one of these old-fashioned institutions – a stodgy eating club rather than a modern racquets facility. Not exactly fraternities, the eleven Princetonian eating clubs are situated on Prospect Avenue just off campus. Several eating clubs still “bicker” (the phrase coined for admission decisions) as to which underclassmen they should admit. Bickering had been going on at Pretty Brook – perhaps a halcyon look back to their university days by the numerous Princeton graduates who were members of the club and had served at the board level and inside the admissions committee for years. Nonetheless, the club was at a crossroad between tradition and modernization.

The Princeton University Campus on our first day of Interim Management

As a management consultancy to the club, we did some of digging. The club, which boasts one indoor tennis, five outdoor clay tennis courts, two platform courts, one indoor tennis and two squash courts, wasn’t jam-packed on the weekends, or really at any time during the week. Average usage on a summer’s weekend morning we found from the data was 3.4 courts out of 5 of the clay courts. Mid to late morning wasn’t busy on the weekends on the indoor in the winter either. And, squash was really reserved to young students from Lawrenceville preparatory school who wanted additional coaching and a practice facility. They weren’t a part of the club’s social scene and a squash club championship hadn’t been held in recent years.

As we assumed the interim general manager’s role, we made changes and clarifications to the membership application process, the ethos of welcoming members and their guests, and started on the road to revitalizing and refurbishing the club’s grounds and programs. Trees were cut. Irrigation was improved and ponds were reconfigured and fortified. Club championships were reintroduced in squash. The staid prizes of glass tumblers were replaced with celebrated gifts and clothing, and branded retail was introduced – all symbols with which members could show pride in their club.

Change Creates Momentum

Thankfully, the board was largely open to change, given the membership situation. Through our mentorship, we investigated methods and programming to create greater court usage and larger revenues. We discussed membership drives. With Corey Ball, the Director of Tennis whom we were fortunate to inherit from the previous management firm, we were allowed to make substantial changes.

We moved the teaching court during certain times for Live Ball and 105 from the traditional teaching court, shaded at the back of the club, to the center two courts under the eyes of those on the patio lunching. This shift brought instruction and social tennis to the forefront of the club. Perhaps impossible just a few months previous, we were now filling three courts with 24 members on a social night rather than having years-old, closed doubles games with only half the players across those three courts. And, we were allowed music on the courts too – something that would have been unheard of just a couple of years prior.

Appointed as sports manager following our stint as interim club manager, we built a calendar around the newly appointed food and beverage provider, Chef and Baker, an outsourced catering firm. Pretty Brook only has two employees, the general manager and the head of housekeeping. Every other service at the club is outsourced, from the summer junior camp and fitness department to the cleaning firms for the club and pool. We worked closely with these other operators, opened the courts earlier and improved the playability of the clay by reworking the irrigation. We scheduled racquets events, such as member/guests, earlier in May to coincide with restaurant openings and happenings to gain a momentum into the summers and show off the club as we headed into a summer season.

With Corey at the helm, we looked at the indoor court and introduced cardio tennis in the mid morning winter hours. Again, the governors were open to change when we demonstrated possible new revenue streams. And, again that openness led to higher member visits, especially on weekends on the indoor court, for cardio tennis and live ball clinic options. We hired the first ever, full-time assistant professional for summer 2022, finding Valeria Nikolaev housing (another first for the club) and fortifying the program’s private instruction and clinic offerings. We hired guest professionals from Boston’s Thoreau Club and Orange Lawn Tennis Club (NJ) for bi-annual camp weeks and combined those weeks with retail clothing drops and trunk shows to boost awareness of the new retail offerings.

Corey Ball, Director of Tennis, kneels second from right at one of our Spring Tennis Camp Weeks at Pretty Brook Tennis Club

In spring of 2023, we found housing for the first-ever, year-round, full-time assistant, Shir Azran, who was instrumental in completing a full transition. Shir could use the indoor court, where we had built the instructional hours up to 35 hours per week, finally allowing for a full-time assistant. Where the club received a percentage of all teaching revenues plus the indoor court time fee per person, revenues grew yet again. Club revenues grew exponentially, especially as Corey, who holds paddle close to his heart, now had the opportunity to escape the indoor tennis court and head out to the paddle courts, in essence doubling the racquet department’s revenue. Combine that with a growing squash program and it was not surprising gross racquet department revenues went from $378,000 in 2021 to $491,000 in 2023. Retail revenues reached $50,000 with all the added member visits to Pretty Brook.

This past summer, BeyondTheBaselines.com employed an assistant professional in connection with really what is the final part of our long-term strategy: Building the junior program. Pretty Brook, which had been only a few years earlier more of an eating club reserved for an older demographic, had attracted new family members with juniors in the household due to the club’s metamorphosis. Mohammed Muqtadir, a teaching pro with a past history of coaching all levels of juniors both indoor and outdoor, has already made a marked difference in the number of juniors on the club’s courts.

Throughout this entire transition and now with a membership of approaching 220 households, Corey Ball has served as Director of Tennis. His embrace of our company’s ideas, his diligent work on the courts and the creation of new programming, and his attention to detail through markedly improved member and management communication, is the largest part of the success story. We are honored to have him as part of our team at BeyondTheBaselines.com and welcome him to the podcast to share his valuable experience and accomplishments.

BeyondTheBaselines.com served Pretty Brook Tennis Club as racquets manager before being appointed interim club manager during the transition started in 2019. The firm now serves as sports director and employs Director of Tennis Corey Ball and his assistants at the famed club in Princeton, New Jersey.