From Squash Facilities Network to the Racquet Sports Institute: a bigger stage, a bolder mission
- Markus Gaebel
- Sep 26
- 2 min read

For years, the Squash Facilities Network quietly helped builders, operators, and investors turn four walls and a dream into working clubs. Then the world changed. Padel surged. Pickleball exploded. Multi-sport complexes became the norm. Best practices from squash began proving invaluable across the broader racquet ecosystem. Today, that evolution gets a name worthy of the moment: the Racquet Sports Institute.
Why the change—and why now
This isn’t a logo swap. It’s a mandate. The Racquet Sports Institute expands SFN’s proven playbooks beyond a single sport to the full racquet universe—squash, padel, pickleball, and hybrids—because the business models rhyme even when the courts don’t. Investors and operators don’t need siloed opinions; they need pattern recognition that travels across formats, geographies, and budgets. That’s the Institute’s job.
What gets bigger—and better
Cross-sport playbooks: Weekly operating cadence, KPI dashboards, program calendars, staffing matrices, onboarding and retention flows, membership vs. pay-to-play architectures, event formats, retail/F&B alignment, maintenance standards, and risk protocols—codified for squash, padel, and pickleball alike.
Investor-grade tooling: Clear capital frameworks, cross-sport benchmarks, and decision trees you can actually run.
Technology built in: An AI model tailored to racquet sports—trained on the realities of federations, industry, coaches, and players—so teams make faster, higher-confidence calls.
Credibility you can count on
The Racquet Sports Institute may be a new banner, but the team behind it isn’t new at all. The founder has worked in the space for over 30 years, contributing to the planning and execution of 500+ facilities in 60+ countries—and has grown a global community of roughly 2,000 subscribers over the past two years as Squash Facility Network. The Institute captures that mileage and scales it for a multi-sport future.
Racquet Sports Institute built for today’s facility realities
Single-sport purity or multi-sport blend: Whether you’re optimizing a legacy squash center or designing a padel or pickleball hub, the fundamentals—utilization, yield, throughput, and experience—don’t change. The Institute aligns your operating model to your market, so capex decisions and programming choices reinforce each other.
From concept to daily cadence: Vision is great; calendars are better. Expect templates that turn ideas into what happens every Monday morning.
From benchmarks to behaviour: Numbers matter only if they shape decisions. The Institute’s toolkits connect KPIs to what staff actually do on shift, what members feel on court, and what owners see on the P&L.
The headline, in plain language
The Squash Facilities Network grew up—because the market did. The Racquet Sports Institute is the natural next step: a bigger tent, a sharper toolkit, the same practical voice. If you run, fund, or plan racquet facilities, this is where business discipline meets sport-specific nuance—so your decisions get faster, your operations get lighter, and your community gets stronger.
Explore the Institute. Borrow the playbooks. Book a call. Then run your facility like a modern service business.
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