Summer Camps—It’s Not Just Summer Training—It’s a Junior Pipeline Engine

Inside Squash On Fire’s Camps and Why the Model Fits Any Racquet Club

Tom Price, Executive Director of Squash On Fire

At 9:20 on a summer morning, parents filter through Squash On Fire’s glass doors as kids tug racquet bags toward the courts. “Our students start arriving between 9:15 and 9:30,” says Tom Price, Executive Director of Squash On Fire. “Technically, camp is 9:30 to 3:30.” The schedule isn’t an accident; it’s designed to fill quiet daytime courts, give parents a safe and healthy place to leave their kids, and then free up courts again before the after-work rush.

Across the U.S., summer camps have become a staple of racquet-sport programming—and an increasingly reliable business pillar. The model is simple and highly portable: week-based sessions, small-group coaching, progressive curricula, and daily match play. It monetizes off-peak, daytime hours while seeding the junior pipeline—mechanics that work just as well in padel, pickleball, and badminton as in squash.

A Spectrum by Design

Price describes a program that deliberately spans ages and ambitions. “We have to be honest, in some cases, it’s just activity-heavy daycare or babysitting,” he says with a laugh, recalling six-year-olds rolling balls across the court and sketching on the back-wall glass with erasable markers. “And then you end up with really proper training…with campers as young as seven or eight and up to their late teens.”

Director of Squash, Ronny Vlassaks on court with the kids

Two weeks each summer are flagged as high-performance—older or identified talents, higher intensity, personally coached by our world-renowned Director of Squash, Ronny Vlassaks, who designs the whole program. “We specifically highlight two weeks a year where it’s the high-performance camps,” Price notes. “Those camps are closer to $1,000 per week.”

The club also executed a college-pathway week featuring Georgetown University’s Varsity Women’s Head Coach. “All of the students were female, which shouldn’t have been a surprise,” Price says. The takeaway: a guest coach’s profile shapes your sign-ups—use that gravitational pull intentionally.

The Schedule That Respects Peak Hours

Unlike overnight programs, Squash On Fire runs day camps only, starting mid-morning and ending by mid-afternoon. That protects evenings for adult players and leagues while turning midday courts into revenue blocks. (Many U.S. camps operate along similar lines, with full-day or half-day options and a clear staff ladder from lead coach to junior helpers.)

Ratios, Capacity—and a “Drop-In” Safety Valve

On the floor, Price enforces a simple rule: “Never more than four students per court.” Typical weeks hover in the low to mid-teens; on “crazy” weeks, the club has run 16–18 juniors by splitting groups (e.g., a starter cohort alongside high-performance). To capture last-minute demand, the team even held a court and introduced a daily “drop-in rate.”

Those ratios map cleanly to broader benchmarks. As a rough ceiling, a six-court venue can rotate approximately 24–30 kids if it holds to small groups and keeps stations moving. Pricing typically sits in the high hundreds per week for standard day camps, with elite weeks higher and residential programs (where offered) higher still.

What Success Looks Like on Paper

Price is candid about the club’s 2025 target: “$150,000 was the goal. We were a bit short,” he says. The culprit was partly timing: “A second ‘aspiring college player’ week that we didn’t fill.” For a venue with six to eight courts, he adds, a fully enrolled summer “could make $150,000 over that three-month period.”

Those numbers align with industry math: a single week with about 20 campers at roughly $600 yields around $12,000 gross. Stack multiple weeks, layer in higher-priced performance sessions, and the totals add up quickly—with minimal displacement of morning and evening players.

From One Week Summer Camps to a Year - Round Customer

The real strategic value may be downstream. “Our summer camps are our best resource for conversions into Junior Academy,” Price says. Many families re-enroll for consecutive weeks—sometimes booking four weeks by August—and a steady stream of visiting families returns next summer. “They came back over and over again,” he adds. Price estimates a slice of campers are in town only temporarily (roughly two or three some weeks), with about 10% unlikely to return until perhaps the following summer—but most are local and stay to feed the year-round programs.

The Takeaway for Every Racquet Sport

For operators, the economics are compelling: camps monetize otherwise idle daytime hours without displacing evening members, boost pro-shop and café spend, bring in deposits ahead of delivery, and feed juniors into year-round programs and memberships. Measure success with fill rates, revenue per court-hour, re-enrollment, and parent satisfaction—and remember the framework is sport-agnostic, transferring cleanly to padel, pickleball, and badminton with only minor drill and equipment tweaks.

Next week, we will complement this article with a deep-dive analysis on the organizational details of running successful summer camps.