This Is How I Helped A Pickleball Coach Quit Her Six Figure Job And She Now Has Over 1,000 Happy Students (With No Club)
By Simon Lovell
When I first started working with her, she had no paid pickleball students. Zero.
She had a tech career, a genuine love for pickleball, and a quiet belief that she could build something — but no idea how to make anyone actually pay her for it. She wasn’t short of passion. She wasn’t short of coaching ability. She had no idea how to market herself, and without that, none of the rest of it mattered.
Within eighteen months she handed in her notice. Two years in, she has over 1,000 students, hitting $30k+ per months, creating jobs, huge local impact and a business that has grown well beyond anything a traditional coaching model could have produced. No club. No facility. Rented courts only.
This is how we got there — and how if you are a coach, you can start to shift your mind around what’s really possible if you truly love what you do.
Coach vs. Entrepreneur: The Distinction That Changes Everything
Before anything else, it’s worth being honest about something. What she built is not what most pickleball coaches build or may want to build, but it will help many coaches understand what’s possible in terms of creating a bigger impact if they want to. She’s both a pickleball coach and as the true entrepreneur combination which is rare.
That distinction matters enormously. Most coaches want to coach. They want to be on the court, working with small groups, doing what they love. That’s a completely legitimate choice — but it is very unlikely to replace a six-figure tech salary. The model that gets you there requires a mindset shift that not every coach is willing to make: at some point, your job stops being to coach every student yourself and starts being to build a system that serves as many students as possible while maintaining the highest quality.
That ambition was in her from the start. It just took time, confidence, and a growing student base for it to fully surface. When it did, everything accelerated.
The First Problem: Waiting to Feel Ready
The most common trap I see coaches fall into is waiting. Waiting until they’re a better player. Waiting until they have more experience. Waiting until someone gives them permission to call themselves a coach.
She was doing all three.
What broke the pattern wasn’t a marketing course or a fancy website. It was accountability — and work on the same mindset blocks that her future students would bring to the court. She started showing up in local Facebook groups, answering questions, sharing tips, being useful. No hard sell. No formal announcement. Just consistent, visible expertise in places where beginners were already asking for help.
Within weeks she had people reaching out. And critically, I had her getting on calls with every single one of them — not to pitch, but to listen. To understand what beginners actually needed, what scared them, what they hoped for. Real connection drove sign-ups faster than any website ever could. Visibility created credibility. Credibility created trust. Trust created students.
The Model That Keeps Most Coaches Stuck
Once the enquiries came, we hit the second problem: the model she was about to build was the wrong one.
Almost every pickleball coach defaults to the same structure. Someone contacts you, you book a session, they show up, you coach, they leave — and the coach says “let me know if you want another one.” Players are left hanging with no path, no next step, no reason to commit.
This isn’t just a revenue problem. It’s a results problem. Players who drift in and out of one-off sessions don’t improve consistently. They get frustrated, lose momentum, and quietly disappear. Low retention almost always reflects low structure from the coach — not low interest from the player.
Beyond that, the one-on-one or tiny group model (especially when you are splitting costs between players) has a hard ceiling. Your income is capped by your hours. And for a coach trying to replace a professional salary, that ceiling arrives long before the number they need.
The Ascension Model: A Business With a Next Step Built In
Instead of selling sessions, we built a journey. Her flagship entry point was a Pickleball 101 clinic — accessible, low cost, designed to give a complete beginner their first real win on a court. From there, players moved at their own pace.
Some went from 101 straight into her beginner leagues. Others progressed through 102 and 103 before making that jump. A portion went all the way through the structured curriculum and into advanced beginner programs. Every route led somewhere. No one left without knowing what was next.
At the top of the ascension path sit her retreats — three-day immersive experiences priced at $1,000 and above. These aren’t marketed cold. They sell to a community that already trusts her, has improved under her coaching, and is ready for the next level of investment. She has since built offerings beyond even that.
A student who enters at 101 and moves through this path represents several thousand dollars in lifetime value. The same student on a reactive, session-by-session model might have spent $150 before drifting away.
| Reactive Model | Ascension Model |
|---|---|
| Pay per session | Upfront program investment |
| No clear next step | Structured player journey |
| Income resets weekly | Revenue compounds over time |
| Player LTV: $100–$200 | Player LTV: $1,000–$5,000+ |
| Income ceiling: your hours | Income ceiling: your ambition |
Pricing: Stop Splitting, Start Packaging
She was going to underprice. Almost every coach does — partly from fear, partly from a genuine desire to make pickleball accessible.
Here’s what working with coaches consistently shows: lower prices don’t attract more committed players. They attract less committed ones. The players who invest in a proper program show up, do the work, improve faster, and refer their friends. The players chasing the cheapest option churn fastest and complain most.
The practical shift is important for coaches: stop collecting money at the session. Require upfront payment for programs using Court Reserve to help her manage her business more effectively. No more chasing $25 after a Tuesday evening group or stressing over no shows. Upfront payment gives the coach predictable income and signals genuine commitment from the player and increases chances they will be there. Both sides of that equation change the dynamic entirely.
Building a Personal Brand, Not a Brochure Website
Many coaches start off with a web site and nothing happens. She had zero web site for quite some time to build up revenue first. We built a personal brand (with very important personal brand shoot) at the right time and promoted in local Facebook groups. To this day her personal brand is a marketing machine combined with Court Reserve for her bookings. Many of her sessions sell out because she’s created so much demand because she truly cares about her students and their results.
Marketing, she learned, is a skill — not a personality trait. The coaches who struggle with it approach it as performance, trying to impress people. The ones who break through approach it as service, trying to help people. The difference in outcome is significant and consistent.
Behind the brand she built proper marketing funnels — automated systems that captured interest, nurtured it, and converted it into program sign-ups.
Scaling Past Yourself
Here is where most coaches hit a wall — and where the entrepreneur mindset separates itself from the coaching mindset.
At some point she reached her personal capacity. There were only so many students she could coach herself while maintaining the quality and results her reputation was built on. The choice at that point is binary: cap your business at what you can personally deliver, or build a team.
She built a team. She brought in assistant coaches to run sessions under her system and her standards. She developed ambassadors from within her own student base — people who believed in what she’d built and helped grow it. She hired admin support to handle the operational load that was consuming time she needed for coaching and strategy.
This is not a path every coach wants. Some are built to coach fifty students brilliantly and call that a success — and there’s nothing wrong with that. But if the goal is to replace a six-figure income and build something that outlasts your own court time, hiring is not optional. It’s the model.
When to Make the Jump
She didn’t quit her tech job the moment things started working. She stayed until the business gave her a specific, concrete reason to leave — not a feeling, a number.
Every coach sitting on this fence needs to answer one question precisely: what would specifically need to be true for you to quit? A monthly revenue figure. A client threshold. Three consecutive months above a target. The exact answer matters less than choosing one and writing it down.
Without a defined target, the day job stays forever — not because the business isn’t ready, but because the decision never actually gets made. Comfort is a powerful anchor, and a vague ambition is no match for it.
She defined hers. Hit it. And left. She didn’t just become a better player. She became a better business owner. That’s the real story behind 1,000 students.
The Part Nobody Tells You About
The hardest stretch wasn’t the marketing or the pricing or hiring the first assistant. It was the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it — navigating the small decisions that feel enormous when you’re making them alone.
When to raise prices. How to handle a difficult student. Whether it’s time to run ads. Which software to trust with your payments. The order of operations in building a coaching business matters, and getting it wrong costs time and money that early-stage coaches can’t afford to lose.
Simon Lovell runs and supports coaches in the Picklepedia Coaches Council, a way for coaches to connect and get the tools and help to become more successful in their communities.