The Club and the Facility – When Your Team Program Becomes a Landlord

The fastest-growing business model in youth sports, and the one nobody budgets for correctly

Every club director eventually hits the same wall.

You've got thirty teams and you need practice time. The high school gave you two nights and then took one back. The park district raised rates again and lost half your Saturday fields to a tournament nobody told you about. The one indoor facility in town books out in September and gives its own house teams the 6pm slots. You're splitting a middle school gym three ways at 8:45pm on a Tuesday, or you're on a field forty minutes out with no lights past October — and you're paying for the privilege.

So you start doing the math on your own building. And the math looks incredible, because you're comparing what you pay for field and court time to what you'd save by not paying it.

That's the wrong comparison, and it's the one that has sunk a remarkable number of clubs.

This post is about the model that actually works — running a club and a facility as two businesses that feed each other — and the specific places clubs get hurt on the way there. If you haven't read them, Part 1 and Part 2 of the Small Operator Guide cover the revenue drivers and the lease mechanics this post builds on. The rest of our writing for operators lives on the Fieldspace blog.

1️⃣ Why This Is Happening Now

The club-owns-a-building trend isn't a fad. Four things are pushing on it at once.

Access is getting worse. School districts have gotten more protective of their gyms and fields and more aggressive about pricing them. Park districts are doing the same — and municipal fields come with their own problems: no lights, no drainage, a closed season, and a permit office that can bump you for a town event. The "free-ish" inventory clubs were built on is shrinking on both surfaces.

Capital has arrived. American families spend roughly $40 billion a year on organized youth sports, and estimates that include facilities, events, travel and technology now put the broader industry above $50 billion. More than $2.5 billion went into new or upgraded youth sports complexes between 2024 and 2026 alone. IMG Academy sold for $1.25 billion. Varsity Brands sold for $4.75 billion. That money is buying the buildings you rent.

And it's consolidating them. Black Bear Sports Group, a private-equity-backed rink operator, now runs 47 ice rinks nationally — including nine of Michigan's hundred-plus, after acquiring two more in February 2026. Michigan's Attorney General opened a formal investigation into the consolidation in May 2026. The AG's office said it was acting over the risk of consumer harm — "including higher prices and reduced service quality" — arising from diminished access to competition. The investigation was still active as of July. Texas's AG has separately looked at youth hockey practices in its market.

Whatever you think of consolidation, here's the operational fact: if you don't control your fields and courts, someone with a fund behind them may buy them and reprice your time. For a lot of directors, that's the whole argument.

Regulators have noticed too. The proposed Let Kids Play Act (H.R.8788 / S.4522, introduced May 2026) would restrict private equity investment across youth sports — and it explicitly covers facilities, not just leagues and platforms. It's a bill, not a law, and it may go nowhere. But it tells you the direction of the conversation.

The Real Reason, Though

Underneath all of that is something simpler. A club with its own ground stops being a schedule and starts being a place.

Families identify with a home ground. Kids show up early and stay late. You can run open gym and open field, you can run camps in July, you can host the tournament instead of driving to it. Retention goes up because there's somewhere to belong to.

That's a real asset and it's hard to value on a spreadsheet. It's also not, by itself, a reason to sign a $6 million note.

2️⃣ The Number That Should Reframe Your Board Meeting

Here's the assumption almost every club-buys-a-building pro forma rests on: we're the anchor tenant, so utilization is solved.

It isn't. And there's data on exactly how not-solved it is.

A 2026 analysis of roughly 888,000 bookings across 327 facility businesses — published by one of the scheduling platforms in this space, so weigh it as vendor data from a self-selected customer base — found that the median established facility runs 19% prime-hour occupancy.

Nineteen percent. During prime time. At facilities that are up and running.

Two things make that number make sense. First, prime time is small — Monday–Thursday 4–9pm, Friday 4–8pm, Saturday 9am–5pm and Sunday 10am–5pm adds up to about 39 hours a week. Second, the median facility runs at 67% in its 95th-percentile hour, and two-thirds of established facilities sell out at least one prime hour a year. So it feels full. A handful of hours are jammed, and everyone extrapolates from those.

What Your Club Actually Solves

Your club fills prime hours. That's genuinely valuable — those are the hours a standalone facility fights hardest to sell.

But look at what's left. If you're open 90 hours a week and prime is 39 of them, you just anchored the easy half and inherited the hard half. Weekday mornings. Weekday early afternoons. And a dead season — which for an indoor court or turf building is July, and for an outdoor field complex is January. That's the inventory that has to carry the mortgage, and your teams aren't on it for any of it.

Outdoor clubs get this backwards more often than indoor ones, because the seasonality feels like it works in your favor. Your fields are jammed in June when an indoor operator is empty. But you've also got four or five months where the surface is unplayable and the note is still due every month. A turf field with lights and a dome over it is a twelve-month asset; a grass field is a seven-month asset with a twelve-month mortgage. That difference is worth more in the pro forma than almost anything else you'll argue about. (If you're a soccer club weighing grass against turf, that single line is most of the decision.)

There's a second effect that's less obvious and more damaging. At the median facility in that dataset, 74% of booked rental hours were already paid for somewhere else — memberships, team fees, enrollments. As the report puts it: "That's not leakage; it's your recurring revenue consuming what it bought."

A club that owns its facility and books its own teams into it is running that structure at close to 100% for those hours. Your calendar looks busy. Your building looks used. And not one dollar of incremental cash arrives at the moment of booking, because it already came in as registration fees in March.

The Mistake

Counting the rent you no longer pay as revenue you now have.

If your club currently pays $90,000 a year for field and court time, and you buy your own, you did not create $90,000 of revenue. You converted a variable cost you could walk away from into a fixed obligation you cannot — plus utilities, insurance, maintenance, and a mortgage that doesn't care how tryouts went.

The honest framing: owning the facility doesn't solve your utilization problem. It transfers the utilization risk from your landlord to you. That can absolutely be worth doing. But price it as risk you're taking on, not as savings you're capturing.

Pro Tip

Before you model a single financing scenario, build the schedule.

Take a real week in your busiest month and a real week in your deadest one — July for an indoor building, January or February for fields. Block out every hour your teams would use, surface by surface. (If you already run scheduling software, export last season and use real hours instead of guesses.) Then look at the white space and answer, hour by hour, who is buying this and at what rate. Not "we'll do camps" — how many campers, at what price, staffed by whom.

If the white space doesn't fill in that exercise, it won't fill on the property either. That's a two-hour meeting that has saved clubs seven figures.

3️⃣ Structure – Who Owns What

Standard disclaimer, and it matters more in this post than the last one: I'm not a lawyer or an accountant. Everything below is a map of where the problems are, not advice. The structuring decisions here are genuinely expensive to get wrong, and they're state-specific. Hire a nonprofit tax attorney before you sign anything.

Most youth clubs are 501(c)(3). Most facilities are for-profit. The moment you combine them, you're in one of the more technical corners of nonprofit tax law, and the standard consultant answer — "put the building in a for-profit LLC and lease it to the club" — is not automatically the right one.

The Case Every Club Director Should Know

Geneva Area Recreational, Educational & Athletic Trust v. Testa, decided by the Ohio Supreme Court in April 2016.

The facts are the exact structure clubs get recommended. A 163-acre training complex. The property was owned by a for-profit LLC. It was leased to a nonprofit that ran real charitable programming there at reduced fees.

The court denied the property tax exemption. Its reasoning: it is the owner's use of the property, not the lessee's, that determines eligibility. The LLC's actual use was commercial leasing. What the nonprofit tenant did inside the building was irrelevant.

In a state that tests the owner's use, the for-profit-owns / nonprofit-leases structure can convert a potentially exempt property into a fully taxable one. The analysis is fact-specific and statutory carve-outs vary, so don't read this as a rule — read it as a question you have to ask. Massachusetts is similar in spirit: the property must be owned by the charity and occupied for charitable purposes, exemption doesn't carry forward automatically, and Form 3ABC has to be filed every year by March 1.

This is not an argument for any particular structure. It's an argument for asking your attorney one specific question early: in this state, what does the owning entity have to be for this building to be exempt, and what is exemption worth per year? On a large building, the answer can be a five-figure line item that flips the model.

The Related-Party Lease

If the same people sit on both sides — club board members who also own the facility entity — you're in IRC §4958 intermediate-sanctions territory, and there's a well-defined way to protect yourself. The rebuttable presumption of reasonableness has three parts:

1. Advance approval by a body composed entirely of members with no conflict of interest. The interested directors recuse. Not "disclose and vote" — recuse.
2. Appropriate comparability data obtained and relied on before the decision. For a property transaction the regulation specifically names independent appraisals and competitive bidding results. (There's a lighter three-comparables shortcut for organizations under $1M in gross receipts — but read it carefully, because it applies to compensation arrangements only. It does not cover a lease. Get the appraisal.)
3. Concurrent documentation — minutes prepared by the later of the next meeting of that body or 60 days after the decision, then reviewed and approved as accurate and complete. They need to capture the terms, who attended, who voted, what data was used, how the conflicted members were handled, and the reasoning if you landed outside the comparable range.

Do those three things and the burden shifts to the IRS. Skip them and it's on you.

The Takeaway on Transfer Pricing

Here's the thing most clubs don't see coming. Everyone assumes the internal rate — what the club "pays" the facility for its own hours — is a management accounting decision. Charge ourselves cost, or charge ourselves nothing, and keep the money in one pocket.

It isn't a management decision. It's a tax question first. A related-party lease has to be at documented fair market value. Which means you cannot quietly give your own club below-market rates on the best hours in the building without either establishing FMV or creating excess-benefit exposure.

The practical consequence is actually clarifying: you have to price your own club's hours honestly. And once you do, you find out whether the facility is a real business or a subsidy — which is exactly what the board needed to know anyway.

4️⃣ The Tax Traps Nobody Warns You About

Four specific interactions that clubs routinely discover after the fact.

The Rental Exclusion, and What Kills It

Under IRC §512(b)(3), rent from real property is generally excluded from unrelated business taxable income. This is why club boards believe outside rentals are tax-free. Often they are.

The exclusion fails when:

• Substantial personal services are provided to the occupant. Heat, light, common-area cleaning, trash — fine. Staffing, catering, running the activity — not.
• Rent is based on the tenant's net income or profits.
• More than 50% of the rent is attributable to personal property.
• The property is debt-financed (below).

Birthday parties sit right on this line. Rev. Rul. 69-178 treats payment for use of a hall for a single afternoon or evening as rent, which escapes UBIT — and it makes clear that furnishing heat and light, cleaning public entrances and lobbies, and collecting trash aren't "services rendered to the occupant." Provide substantial services for the occupant's benefit, though, and the exclusion goes. Party hosts, catering, and running the games are exactly the things that make a party product good, and exactly the things that put it on the wrong side of that test. What you do with the money is irrelevant to the analysis.

Debt-Financed Property – Read the Exception First

IRC §514. If income-producing property carries acquisition indebtedness, the rental exclusion is reduced pro rata. The taxable fraction is roughly average acquisition debt ÷ average adjusted basis.

Before you panic, read the exception that may make all of this moot: property is not debt-financed property if substantially all of its use (85%) is substantially related to the exempt purpose. For a youth sports 501(c)(3) whose exempt purpose is providing athletic facilities to young athletes, renting to other youth teams is a serious candidate for related use. Get a real opinion on this one, because it's the difference between §514 governing your whole rental business and §514 not applying at all.

If it does apply, though, understand what it means. A club that borrowed 70% of the purchase price and rents to unrelated commercial users has roughly 70% of that net rental income exposed to UBIT — and the fraction does not simply melt away as you pay the loan down, because the denominator is adjusted basis, which depreciation is shrinking at the same time.

The borrowing that makes ownership possible is the same thing that can make the rental revenue taxable. These two rules are almost always explained separately, and they interact badly. If your pro forma has third-party rental income servicing the debt, ask your accountant to run it after-tax before you present it to the board.

Renting To Your Own For-Profit Entity

IRC §512(b)(13). If the nonprofit receives rent from an entity it controls, the rental exclusion doesn't save it — that rent gets pulled back into UBTI.

Don't assume this misses you because your facility entity is a taxable LLC. For a controlled entity that isn't tax-exempt, the measure is the portion of its income that would be unrelated business income if it were exempt with your purposes — which, for a commercial facility company, is effectively all of it.

Control is more than 50% — by vote or value for a corporation, profits or capital interest for a partnership. The threshold is a bright line; what's actually worth your attorney's time is how the ownership gets attributed.

This catches clubs that set up a for-profit operating company for the commercial side of the building and have the nonprofit lease space to it. It's a defensible structure. It just isn't a tax-free one.

If You Bond-Finance It, Read This Twice

Qualified 501(c)(3) bonds are attractive — Massachusetts Youth Soccer closed a $6 million tax-exempt bond through MassDevelopment in January 2022, purchased by TD Bank, to redo turf on five fields and refinance prior debt. Real, and a good outcome.

But under IRC §145, all bond-financed property must be owned by a 501(c)(3) or a governmental unit, and the private business use test drops from the usual 10% to 5%.

Five percent. So a nonprofit that bond-finances a building and then leases meaningful prime time to a for-profit academy — or signs a non-qualifying management contract — can breach the cap and jeopardize the bonds' tax exemption.

That is in direct conflict with the business plan of "we'll pay for it with third-party rentals." Nobody tells clubs this up front. It doesn't make bonds wrong; it makes them a structure you build the revenue plan around, not after.

One More: Naming Rights

A qualified sponsorship payment — where the sponsor gets nothing but an acknowledgment of their name, logo, or product line — isn't taxable. Logos, addresses, phone numbers, websites, and general product descriptions are all fine.

It becomes taxable advertising when you add qualitative or comparative language, pricing or savings information, endorsements, or a call to buy. Exclusive-provider arrangements and payments contingent on attendance also break the safe harbor. And if one message contains both an acknowledgment and an ad, the whole thing is treated as advertising.

Naming rights on a club-owned building are a great revenue line. Just write the agreement with someone who knows where that line is.

5️⃣ Financing – And the Number That Decides Everything

The Menu

SBA is probably closed to you. SBA requires the borrower to be organized for profit — nonprofits are ineligible. A for-profit subsidiary of a nonprofit can qualify, but the loan proceeds have to benefit the for-profit entity.

And if you get there, know that SBA classifies sports facilities as special purpose property — the list explicitly names sports arenas, swimming pools, tennis clubs, and golf courses, on the grounds that their design restricts their usefulness to the thing they were built for.

That changes your down payment, and the rule is more demanding than most summaries suggest. Under 13 CFR §120.910, a 504 borrower puts in 10% normally, 15% if either the operating business is two years old or younger or the project is a limited or single-purpose building — and 20% if both are true.

Read that against your situation. A club building its first facility is a startup operating entity in a special-purpose building. That's the 20% case, not the 10% one on the brochure.

USDA is the program SBA-ineligible clubs should actually look at. The Community Facilities Direct Loan & Grant Program explicitly includes community-based nonprofits, serves rural areas under 20,000 residents, offers repayment terms up to 40 years with no prepayment penalty, and for the April–September 2026 rate window was pricing between 4.5% and 4.75% — USDA republishes these periodically, so check the current window rather than the number here. Grants covering 15–75% of eligible project cost are available depending on population and income.

The catch: recreation and sports facilities aren't named among the eligible facility types on the current program page. That doesn't automatically mean no — eligibility is determined locally and the category is broad — but it does mean the first call is to your state Rural Development office, before you build a plan around it.

New Markets Tax Credits are now permanent. The 2025 tax law made NMTC permanent with $5 billion in annual allocation authority, eliminating the sunset that would have killed it at the end of that year. Nonprofits are fully eligible. A YMCA in Wautoma, Wisconsin closed an $18 million NMTC allocation in September 2025 for a facility with a gym, fitness center, childcare, and aquatics. If you're in a qualifying census tract, this is worth a phone call.

Ground leases are worth a conversation. Santa Barbara Volleyball Club negotiated a 15-year lease from Santa Barbara County at no rent, in exchange for funding 100% of construction on an 18,400 sq ft, four-court building. The county pays nothing; the club gets a home.

Note the shape of that deal before you copy it, though: the club is amortizing an entire building over a 15-year term. Whatever you negotiate, the renewal terms and what happens to the improvements at expiry matter as much as the rent number — which, per Part 2, is true of every lease clause that isn't the rent. Still: if there's public land near you and a parks department with a gap in its programming, this conversation costs you nothing to start.

Now the Number

Here's the analysis that matters more than which loan product you pick.

There's a publicly available cost-and-revenue model for a proposed indoor facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming — an MBA capstone by Shad Griffith at the University of Wyoming, dated January 2020 and posted by Visit Cheyenne. It's a student project, not a commissioned feasibility study, but it's unusually transparent about its line items, which is what makes it useful here.

It models an 86,400 sq ft building with about 78,400 sq ft of playing surface, two ways. The fabric dome version totals $7.33M including land and a 10% contingency. It projects $941,340 in annual revenue against $453,856 in operating expenses.

That's $487,484 of NOI — an unlevered yield of 6.65%. Respectable.

Now finance it. (The arithmetic below is mine, run on the model's numbers — it isn't the author's conclusion.) Put 15% down and borrow $6.23M at a 7.5% blended rate over 25 years. Annual debt service comes to roughly $553,000.

That's a debt service coverage ratio of 0.88. It doesn't cover. Not "it's tight" — the projected NOI does not pay the mortgage.

To hit a 1.30x DSCR — a normal lender requirement — you'd have to hold the debt to about $4.2M. Which means roughly 42% of the project has to come in as equity, donations, or grants. Not 10%. Not 15%. Forty-two.

And three things make the real picture worse, not better. The construction costs are 2020 dollars while the debt is priced at 2026 rates. The opex line contains no property tax — and if your structure doesn't qualify for exemption (see section 3), roughly $48,000 a year of Wyoming commercial property tax takes that DSCR below 0.80. And $941,340 is a stabilized year; year one is worse than that for everybody.

That gap — between what the down-payment tables imply and what a special-purpose sports building's cash flow actually supports — is the single most useful thing in this post. It's also consistent with the failures that make the news.

What Failure Looks Like

Legacy Cares / Legacy Park in Mesa, Arizona is the case study. A nonprofit borrower. $284 million in municipal bonds across two 2020–21 offerings. A ~$280M complex that opened in January 2022 and defaulted in October 2022 — nine months later. Chapter 11 in May 2023, with $366.7M in liabilities against $242.3M in assets. Sold to a new operator for $25.5 million.

In April 2025 the SEC charged three individuals with defrauding investors, alleging they "fabricated or altered documents forming the basis for those revenue projections, including letters of intent and contracts" with sports organizations.

The anchor tenant commitments were the fiction the entire capital stack rested on. That's the lesson for a club, and it inverts nicely: you're the one signing the letter of intent. Your commitment is the realest part of anyone's pro forma — which is exactly why you should be ruthless about whether it's actually as durable as it looks, and about what the other 60% of the calendar is worth without you.

Even good outcomes are bumpy. The Maryland SoccerPlex — 21 grass fields, 3 turf, 8 indoor courts, opened in 2000 by a nonprofit foundation in partnership with the county — took on far more debt than projected when early revenues came in short. In 2005 a single donor family committed $6 million over ten years, about $2.5M of it for operating expenses and the rest for new fields, scholarships and club subsidies. It's a well-run, well-loved facility today. It still doesn't own its land; it operates on a long-term lease from the parks commission.

Two things to take from that. Early revenue projections for these buildings run hot, and a philanthropic backstop is not a nice-to-have — it's frequently the thing that carries the project through years three to eight.

A Fair Benchmark for What You Can Carry

For scale: Midland Soccer Club in Michigan has been working toward a $10M, 150,000 sq ft indoor facility on its existing 50-plus-acre campus. (One funder describes the club as serving nearly 4,000 players across 25 counties; another puts it above 2,000 — take the range.) Its 990s show fiscal 2025 revenue of $1.55M against $0.98M the year before — a 58% jump that is almost certainly capital campaign contributions rather than a step-change in operations. Net assets: $4.1M. They're funding the building with donations, sponsorships, tournament revenue and rental income, and as of mid-2025 they were reported at 60% of the fundraising goal and had not yet broken ground. (Check their current status before quoting this — the reporting here is from 2025.)

Take the honest ratio: a $10M building against roughly $1M of operating revenue, funded largely with philanthropy rather than debt, with the club not starting until the money was substantially raised. That's a 10x multiple of annual revenue — and it only works because it isn't leveraged. The discipline is the strategy.

6️⃣ The Flywheel – Why Clubs Have an Advantage Standalone Facilities Don't

Everything above is the hard part. Here's the part that makes the model genuinely better than either business alone.

A standalone facility's hardest problem is customer acquisition. It has to find families, convince them to come, and get them to come back. That's why the marketing burden is so high and why so many facilities live and die on their off-peak hours.

A club has already solved that. Every registered family is in your database. They already pay you money on a schedule. Their kid is already on your fields or in your gym three times a week. You have their contact information, their child's age and sport, their payment method on file, and — crucially — their trust.

The facility side of the house has to spend hundreds of dollars acquiring a customer. The club side already has hundreds of them, and they walk through the door on Tuesday.

The Move: Turn Registrants Into Members

The mechanic is straightforward. You build the facility membership into the registration itself — a season plan that carries facility benefits, sold at the moment a family is already paying you and already thinking about the year ahead.

What the membership includes is where the design work is:

• Credits toward extra instruction, cage or lane time, half-field or court rentals — a bucket of hours that comes with the season
• Member pricing on lessons, clinics, and open field or court rentals
• Access to open gym, open field, member-only sessions, drop-in hours
• Priority booking — members see the calendar before the public does
• Included programming — X clinics a month bundled into the registration

Now re-read section 2. The off-peak hours that were going to sink you — the weekday mornings, the dead season — are exactly the inventory these members consume. And per Part 2, fencing member benefits to off-peak and access rather than discounting prime is what keeps this from cannibalizing your rental business.

You're not discounting your best hours. You're monetizing your worst ones, using customers you already have.

Why Anchor Tenancy Finally Pays

This is the version of "we're the anchor tenant" that's actually true.

The club isn't valuable to the facility because it fills prime hours — you'd have sold most of those anyway, and section 2 explains why filling them with pre-paid team time generates no incremental cash. The club is valuable because it's an acquisition engine for facility memberships.

Registration is a moment of intent that a standalone facility never gets. The family has committed to the sport, committed to the season, and has their card out. That is the single best moment in the entire year to put something in front of them that fills your Tuesday at 10am.

The Mistake

Making the membership a discount card. If registrants get 15% off everything, you've cut your margin on the business you already had and added no new behavior. The membership has to change what families do — get them onto your fields and courts on days their team isn't practicing — or it's just a price cut with extra steps.

Design it around credits and access on off-peak inventory. That's the whole trick.

7️⃣ How Fieldspace Handles the Club-and-Facility Model

Section 6 is the half of this that software actually decides — connecting registration to facility membership, and fencing the benefits to the right inventory. Here's concretely how Fieldspace does it.

Team and season registration lives in the same system as facility memberships. A membership plan can be a standard individual plan or a team plan — season or tryout — with named teams underneath it, roster caps, and an approval workflow (pending review → approved or rejected) for clubs that screen registrations. Season plans carry an end date, so a fall season expires when the season does.

Registration is priced like registration. Team plans support installment schedules and deposits, because "$1,400 for the season" and "$350 down, then four payments" are the same product with very different conversion rates. Payment history and installment progress are tracked per family.

Then the benefits engine does the work. Every plan carries benefits you configure:

• Credit hours and credit sessions — the bucket of extra instruction, cage time, field time, or court time that comes with a registration. Credits can be set to roll over for a defined number of months so a family that misses a week doesn't lose it.
• Access — unlimited, or capped at N uses per period. This is how you build open gym, open field, or drop-in access that's real but bounded.
• Discounts — percentage or fixed, on bookings and separately on add-ons.
• Early access days — members see and book the calendar before the general public. The priority fence from section 6, as a setting.
• Scoped benefits — and this is the important one. Benefits can be scoped to specific resources or event types. Which means you can grant credits that work on cages and half-fields but not the main turf, or member pricing that applies to off-peak court rentals only. That's how you fence a membership to your low-value inventory instead of discounting your prime hours.

Events know about members. Any bookable event can carry member pricing, a member discount, a member-only flag, and a restriction to specific plans. So the same field or court rental can be one price to the public and another to a registered family — and a member-only session is simply invisible to everyone else.

And the resource model handles a real property, indoor or out. You define your physical spaces once — fields, courts, cages, lanes, instructors — and then compose sellable events on top of them. A "full field" event can consume both half-fields so it can't double-book — the same mechanic that keeps a full-court booking from colliding with two half-court ones. A 1:1 lesson can require a coach plus whatever cage is open. Variable pricing rules let you charge differently by day of week and hour, which is what section 2 of Part 2 argues you should be doing anyway.

The point of all of it: a family registers for your team, and the same transaction makes them a member of your facility — with credits to spend on the hours you most need to fill.

One thing software won't do for you, though: the hour-by-hour schedule exercise from section 2, and the fair-market-value documentation from section 3. Those are a spreadsheet, a board meeting, and an appraiser. Do them first.

If you want to see what this looks like for your setup, pricing is here.

The Honest Summary

If you're a club looking at a property — fields, a building, or both:

• Don't count the rent you stop paying as revenue. You're trading a variable cost for a fixed one and taking on utilization risk.
• Build the schedule before the pro forma. Hour by hour, surface by surface, who buys the white space — in your busiest month and your deadest one.
• Assume you need far more equity than the loan tables suggest. On a special-purpose building, 40%+ is a realistic planning number, and the projects that survive are the ones funded with philanthropy rather than leverage.
• Get the entity structure and the property tax question answered before you sign, not after.
• Price your own club's hours honestly. The tax rules require it and the board needs the truth anyway.
• And build the membership on day one, not in year three. Your registrants are the reason this model beats a standalone facility, and registration day is the moment to convert them.

The clubs that make this work aren't the ones with the nicest buildings. They're the ones that understood, early, that they were now running two businesses — and that the second one has customers the first one already found.

Fieldspace runs team registration, season plans, memberships, and facility booking in one place — including scheduling for soccer, basketball, baseball and batting cages, tennis, and swimming. See pricing or read more on the blog.