Smash Tennis' Story
Tan De En started Smash Tennis Academy in 2021 out of a straightforward conviction: that tennis could be more than a sport. It could be a community. His own relationship with tennis was built on the connection between coach and student, the way skill development and growing confidence are inseparable, and the way a sport played individually can still bring people together. He wanted to build something that reflected all of that.
Building it, though, meant doing everything himself. As a small business founder, Tan De En wore many hats. From HR and accounting to marketing and scheduling, the administrative load landed entirely on his shoulders. He found that the passion for coaching that had driven him to start Smash Tennis quickly became tangled up in the operational work of keeping the business running.
The communication load was its own problem. Keeping coaches informed of schedule changes, tracking which students had paid and which hadn't, making sure the right person knew about a rescheduled session: all of it required active management with no system behind it. Tan De En knew that if he wanted to scale the academy and build the community he envisioned, he needed something that could run these functions without requiring his constant attention. Enter, Classcard.
How Smash Tennis Uses Classcard
A community of 500 active players on one platform
Smash Tennis Academy has built one of Singapore's more notable tennis communities, with 500 active players across private and group classes, junior camps, and corporate events. Classcard provides the infrastructure required to manage a community of that scale: every player, every coach, every session and payment tracked in one system, without the administrative overhead.
An estimated 10 hours per week given back to coaching
The hours that Tan De En previously spent managing lesson records, tracking payments, and coordinating coaches through individual messages now go back into Smash's core work. For a founder-coach, that reclaimed time has a direct impact on the quality of what the academy delivers - more focused coaching time, more energy for building the community, and the headspace to think about growth rather than just operations.
A coaching team that can operate independently
Each coach now has visibility into their own schedule and student roster without needing to ask Tan De En for information. That independence is exactly what he talks about when he discusses delegation as the key to scaling. "If you want to scale things up, you have to delegate tasks and get the right people on board. If it's just you, you might go fast but not too far. You're gonna get burnt out after a while.”
Building a team that can operate without being managed at every step requires the right systems to make that possible. Classcard provided it.