January 8, 2017

Meet Scott Baxter of PlayYourCourt in Atlanta

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Scott Baxter.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Scott. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
This whole journey began about 7 years ago; at the time I was a tennis coach at an exclusive country club. Members would regularly ask me if they had any suggestions for where their non-member friends who couldn’t afford the lavish country club life could take tennis lessons. The truth is there weren’t really any good options nearby so after getting approval from my boss, I started teaching some of these non-members on their local neighborhood courts on my days off.

The demand was way higher than I ever expected. All of a sudden I had 3 coaches underneath me helping me satisfy the demand for local lessons. I saw an opportunity here and in 2009 I poured every penny I had in my savings account (which as a 25-year tennis pro wasn’t much) into the first version of PlayYourCourt.com.

Fast forward seven years we are now a nationwide business with over one thousand coaches on staff.

Has it been a smooth road?
I don’t think anyone would ever say building a business is easy. I was a one-man show for about 4 years and it wasn’t making enough money to be my full-time gig. Needless to say, the biggest struggles early on were trying to learn and do everything myself and finding the time to work on the business.

Eventually, the business had gained enough traction where I knew I wanted to pursue it as my full-time career. At that point, I began shopping investors, raised money and slowly started building a team of what is now 6 full-time employees. Struggles these days still exist but they are more your typical budget, increasing team efficiency, scaling, marketing, etc type problems. Truthfully I look at them as more of opportunities for growth at this point.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the PlayYourCourt. story. Tell us more about the business.
Our mission is to make tennis more accessible. Tennis for so long has been limited to a wealthy exclusive community and it has always been our goal to make it more accessible to the average consumer. We’ve accomplished this by sending top-rated tennis instructors to our customers on any court of their choice for lessons. Using a rating system similar to Uber’s, we work hard to find the best instructors in every area and then send them to our customers on a convenient nearby court at a reasonable price. Our customer service, attention to detail, and focus on the quality of instruction at an affordable price is what sets us apart in the tennis space. People aren’t used to the type of care we offer, we’re like a really friendly tennis concierge.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
I believe people are way more social & convenience based decision makers than ever before and that our model will become more and more appealing as technology advances. Everyone wants to be able to break out their phone and get it done in one click, any business model that can’t move in that direction will struggle to grow in the coming years. I’m already seeing this in the tennis industry, country clubs are becoming less popular simply because playing or taking a lesson at a court down the street better satisfies that growing instant satisfaction mindset.

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