Academy Management

An academy owner opens her laptop in the morning to a familiar mess. Yesterday’s cricket attendance is in a coach’s notebook. A parent’s enquiry about badminton came through Instagram and was copied into a spreadsheet. Fee receipts arrived via WhatsApp. Next month’s schedule is in a shared Google calendar. Student assessments are scattered across individual coach files. And the jersey order is being tracked through WhatsApp messages with a local supplier.

A youth tennis coach starts her Tuesday session the way she always has cones out, resistance bands unpacked, stopwatch clipped to her waistband. Halfway through, she pulls out her phone, records a player’s serve in slow motion, and later sends the clip to the parent group with a short voice note. Nothing about this feels dramatic. It’s just how coaching happens now.

This interview features Vijay Lancy, a former international badminton player and MBA graduate, discussing the intricate balance of merging athletic expertise with corporate discipline to build a successful sports academy.

It’s 6 p.m. on a weekday, and the phone at reception hasn’t stopped ringing. A parent wants to confirm a coaching slot. A corporate team asks if the turf is free on Saturday. A coach walks in needing an extra practice hour because a tournament date just changed. Somewhere in a WhatsApp thread, another customer is still waiting to hear if Court 2 is free tomorrow evening.

It’s the first week of the month.

Several parents still haven’t paid.

The owner keeps reminding them individually on WhatsApp — one message here, a follow-up call there, a note scribbled on a piece of paper that gets lost by Thursday.

An academy receives 40 enquiries in a month. Twelve enroll. The other 28 just… disappear.

It’s 6:45 PM on a Tuesday. Two parents are asking on WhatsApp whether Wednesday’s session is still on because of rain. A coach is texting to say he’s running late and needs someone to cover the first fifteen minutes. Three trial students never got a follow-up call because the notebook where their numbers were written got misplaced last week. And somewhere in a spreadsheet with fourteen tabs, a fee payment that was due ten days ago is sitting unmarked.

Parents are the actual customer in youth sports academies — the child is the user, but the parent is the payer, the decision-maker on renewal, and the referral source. This makes parent communication a business-critical growth lever, not a soft “nice to have.”

Every sports academy owner has felt this sting at some point: a student who seemed genuinely committed just stops showing up. No dramatic exit, no complaint, just silence — and then a message a few weeks later saying they’ve “decided to take a break.”

A ten-year-old watches a nail-biting final on TV, jumps off the couch, and announces to nobody in particular that she’s going to play that sport now. Her parent laughs it off. Then the next morning, over breakfast, she brings it up again. By the weekend, that parent is typing “sports academy near me” into Google.