Resources Guide · Rainouts
The rain-day playbook.
Rain is the one truly unbeatable opponent an outdoor coach faces, and you can't schedule around it. What you can do is decide in advance exactly what happens when it wins, so a rained-out Saturday costs you thirty seconds instead of a lost evening of phone calls and a week of arguing about credits.
Decide the policy before the clouds
A rainout gets expensive when you improvise it, deciding family by family, mood by mood. Settle the defaults in the dry season. Fix a call time, say a go or no-go decision by 7:30 for a 9:00 clinic. Make yourself the only person who ever makes that call, so nobody stands in a parking lot guessing. And pick one thing families get: a credit back, a makeup slot, or a rollover.
Credits back, not makeup lessons
Makeup lessons sound generous and schedule terribly. You end up renegotiating twelve calendars for one slot, and half the makeups quietly never happen, which families do remember. Refunding the credit to the pack is cleaner. The family loses nothing, the pack keeps its value, and the reschedule runs through normal booking whenever they're ready. Save real makeups for privates, where one conversation moves one lesson.
One message, everyone at once
The cancellation rarely causes the damage. The trickle does. Some families hear at 7:30, some at 8:40 from the parking lot, and one shows up at 9:05 with a kid already in tennis shoes. Whatever tools you use, hold to a single message, sent to every enrolled family at the same moment, saying what happened: the session's cancelled, the credits are back, here's how to rebook.
In Upswing
The rain button
One tap cancels the session, alerts every enrolled family, and puts their credits back. You can do it from the car.
A copy-paste rainout policy
"If weather cancels a session, I'll notify all enrolled families by [7:30am for morning sessions / 90 minutes before start otherwise]. Cancelled clinic sessions are automatically credited back to your pack, so nothing is lost, and you can rebook any open session. Private lessons will be individually rescheduled. If conditions turn mid-session, sessions past the halfway mark count as played; earlier than that, credits are returned."
Put it on your booking page and in your welcome message, and nowhere else. A policy that lives in one place stays consistent.
What this looks like automated
In Upswing this whole playbook is one button: cancel the session, all the enrolled families get the alert at once, and credits return to packs automatically. The policy above stops being a promise you execute by hand at 7am and becomes something the system keeps for you.
Questions
What about partial rainouts, mid-session?
Pick a halfway rule and publish it: past the midpoint counts as played, before it the credit returns to the pack. A consistent rule will always serve you better than a generous, unpredictable one.
Should I offer an indoor backup instead?
If you have reliable indoor access, offer it as an option, never as an obligation. Backup courts double your logistics on exactly the mornings you have the least time.
Families who push for cash refunds instead of credits?
The published policy is credits; honoring it consistently is what makes it fair. Save cash refunds for genuine circumstances, an injury or a move, where you'd want to extend the goodwill anyway.
