Why I Built BallBot

By Tobin • April 2026 • 4 min read

I never planned to build software. I'm a pickleball coach. I spend my days on public courts in Irvine, California, teaching everyone from five-year-olds to retirees how to hit a third-shot drop. That's the work I love.

But there's another side to coaching that nobody talks about. The side that happens between sessions, after hours, on weekends. The admin work. And it was crushing me.

The spreadsheet spiral

It started innocently enough. A Google Sheet to track my clients. A few columns: name, phone, email, what they paid. Then I added a column for notes. Then a column for their kid's name. Then a column for which session they attended. Before I knew it, I had a spreadsheet with 30 columns and 200 rows, and I was spending more time updating it than actually coaching.

Messages were worse. Parents texted me. Students emailed. Some reached out on WhatsApp. Others sent Instagram DMs. I was checking five apps between every session, trying not to miss anything. I missed things anyway.

The message that changed everything

One Tuesday afternoon, a parent reached out asking about group lessons for her three kids. I was on the court and didn't see the message until Friday. By then, she had already signed up with another coach. Three kids. Three recurring sessions. Gone, because I was busy doing the thing I'm supposed to be doing — coaching.

I lost a client because I was too busy coaching to reply. That's when I knew something was broken.

I looked for tools. Court management systems, coaching apps, CRM software. Everything I found was built for facilities — tennis clubs with front desks, academies with IT departments, gyms with reservation systems. I don't have a front desk. I teach on public courts with a bag of paddles and a hopper of balls. None of these tools were built for me.

Building what I needed

So I started building. Not because I wanted to be a software founder, but because I needed a tool that didn't exist. Something that could read my incoming messages, understand what people were asking, and either handle it or flag it for me. Something that knew my clients, my schedule, and my voice.

BallBot started as a simple client database. Then I added message tracking. Then AI drafting — because I realized the bottleneck wasn't reading messages, it was writing replies. I needed something that could draft a response that sounded like me, not like a corporate chatbot.

Then came waivers (because chasing signatures is the worst), payment tracking (because awkward "hey, you still owe me" texts are the second worst), and lesson plans (because even I run out of drill ideas sometimes).

The difference

Every feature in BallBot exists because I hit a wall in my own coaching business. I'm not guessing what coaches need. I'm building what I need, and then sharing it with other coaches who are stuck in the same spiral.

I still coach every day. I still use BallBot every day. When something doesn't work, I feel it myself — on the court, in real time. That feedback loop is what makes this different from tools built by people who've never taught a lesson in their life.

If you're an independent coach drowning in admin, BallBot was built for you. Literally. By someone who was drowning too.