The evening courts

A padel club in Sheikh Zayed has had the same problem for three years. The courts between seven and ten in the evening, the only hours most working people can play, belong in practice to the founding members. They booked them first, they pay the old rate, and their slots renew without anyone asking. Everyone who joined later plays near midnight or not at all, and many of them quietly drift away.

The owner has spent those three years looking for the arrangement that suits everybody. A second waiting list. A discount for the late slots. A promise of new courts one day. Each idea is designed so that nobody has to give anything up, and each one changes nothing.

That is the clue. A problem that has survived three years is not waiting for a clever fix that hurts nobody. If such a fix existed, somebody would have found it in the first month.

The honest choice is uncomfortable. Open the evening courts to everyone by rotation, at one price, and the founding members lose something real: the certainty, the rate, the feeling of being first. They will be annoyed, and some of them will say so loudly.

But the many members who now play near midnight, or have stopped coming, would get an evening game. The club would have a future that does not depend on a small group never changing its habits.

Running something is not the job of keeping every person in it content. It is the job of choosing which disappointment is worth it, and accepting that the people who have always been served first are usually the ones who feel it.

When nobody can find the answer where everyone wins, the question changes. It becomes: who should lose a little now, so that most of the people who actually depend on this end up glad they stayed?