How VK Tennis Academy cut the admin work behind every booking

Vladislav Karadzhov played for the Bulgarian national Under 14 and Under 16 teams before founding VK Tennis Academy. He knows how to build a player. What nearly stopped him was the admin behind a training session.

This is his account of what changed, in his words.

Hundreds of messages a week to book one session

Before the academy moved to a booking platform, every reservation started as a conversation.

"Clients would message me on Viber, we'd talk on the phone with hundreds of messages on a weekly basis. It was a long back and forth where I'd go in, check my schedule and my colleagues' schedules. So it was just a lot of communication on Viber or other channels." - see the full G2 review.

Then came the part nobody sees.

"I'd write down every single session, first in notes, then in Excel. Overall, it was a lot of admin work just to book one training session."

Every booking was entered twice. Every coach's availability had to be checked by hand. Every parent's question waited for a founder who was usually on court, teaching.

If that sounds familiar, it is because it is the default. Most academies grow into a messaging app and a spreadsheet because both are free and both work fine at ten members. Neither survives contact with a waiting list.

The problem was never demand

The most useful thing Vladislav says is not about software at all. It is about where the ceiling actually sat.

"For a startup academy with a quality service, I keep seeing that we have demand, meaning we have plenty of demand. But one of the reasons we couldn't respond to that demand at the pace it was coming in was simply that it was too slow and too exhausting. It was really bogging down the process and, at some point, was also leading to burnout for me."

Read that again. The academy was not short of people who wanted to train. It was short of hours in which a founder could answer them.

That is a different problem from the one most owners think they have, and it has a different fix. More marketing would have made it worse. What the academy needed was a way for demand to convert without passing through one person's phone.

What changed: members book, pay and manage it themselves

The fix was to take the booking out of the conversation entirely.

"Now people can book entirely on their own. Our marketing website is linked to the booking platform, so people can see, first, who their coach is. Second, they can check open slots themselves. They can make the payment entirely through the platform, and overall, this has made the admin side so much easier for me."

The full path a new player takes now:

"A user can log in, register, book a session, see the different training programs we offer, buy a single session or a subscription package, and then show up on the court with everything sorted out, and they can track it all on their phone with a single click, without waiting for us to reply three, five, or ten days later to a text message."

Three, five or ten days. That is the number worth sitting with. It is not a service failure, it is what happens when the only person who can confirm a slot is also the person running the session. Every one of those days is a family deciding whether to look elsewhere.

The clearest proof arrives in the middle of the video, where Vladislav is standing on his own court while he talks.

"As you can see right now, I'm here on the court because I don't have to answer messages on Viber."

Members noticed before they ever walked in

Self-service booking did something the academy did not plan for. It changed the first impression.

"I've gotten positive feedback that clients are extremely surprised that such a service exists, one that is so professionally developed in this field. The fact that they went onto 1club, saw our website, thought it looked super professional, really well-maintained, great design, clean, everything is clear and easy to navigate. And then they were even more impressed that they could book a session from there, both for their child and for themselves."

For a young academy competing against established clubs, that matters more than it looks. A parent choosing where to send their child has very little to go on. A clean site where they can see the coach, pick a slot and pay in a couple of taps reads as a serious operation. A Viber thread does not.

The booking experience is the first thing a member experiences. For many academies, it is the only thing they experience before deciding.

What other academies can take from this

The specifics are Vladislav's. The pattern is not.

Find out whether your ceiling is demand or response time. Count the enquiries you received last month and the ones you answered within a day. If the gap is wide, more marketing spend will not help you.

Put availability in front of people instead of behind you. If a parent has to ask what is free on Thursday, you have added a step that costs you both a day.

Let payment happen at the moment of booking. Collecting later means chasing later.

Connect the website to the booking system. Vladislav's members came for the site and stayed because they could act on it immediately. A brochure site that ends in a contact form throws that away.

Count the hours you spend scheduling as a real cost. As Vladislav puts it: "1club saves me a lot of headaches, a lot of sleepless nights, going to bed late just to make schedules and reply to messages."

He frames the outcome more broadly than admin savings.

"1club organizes the business and consequently helps it grow, which can only benefit the whole community, both us as the people providing the tennis service, the tennis training, and the clients who use it, and consequently this raises overall usage and quality."

Watch Vladislav's full story: VK Tennis Academy testimonial

Run your academy without the back and forth

VK Tennis Academy did not need more demand. It needed to stop being the bottleneck between a player and a court.

1club is AI-native tennis club management software that handles bookings, coach schedules, memberships and payments in one place, with a member portal your players actually want to use.

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