How to set up your first advisory program in DrillBase

Your income is limited by the number of hours you can stand on a court. You already know this. There are only so many slots in a week, and once they fill up, you cannot grow until you raise your rates or burn out. Advisory coaching removes that limit. You design the program once, hand it to students who do the practice in their own time, and review their work in a few minutes between sessions. DrillBase is built to make this work, and you can get your first advisory program live this afternoon. Here is exactly how.

Why advisory works (and why it changes your week)

Live lessons are great, but they have one problem: the good coaching only happens while you are watching. The student leaves, the week goes quiet, and you both start the next session warming up the same shot again. Advisory changes the balance. Instead of being needed for every practice rep, you become the designer. The student logs drills between sessions, you see what they actually did, and your live time goes to the things that truly need your eyes. One coach can serve far more students per hour this way, because the program does the work on the days you are not on court. DrillBase says it simply: sessions become systems. That is the whole idea.

Build the curriculum first

In DrillBase, everything starts with a program. The program is your curriculum, the full path a student will work through. You split it into cycles, which are the chapters of that path. A cycle might be four to six weeks on the soft game, then the next cycle moves to transition play. Inside each cycle you build drill sessions, and inside each drill session you add the individual drills.

Be specific with the drills. A drill called "dinking" tells a student nothing. A drill called "cross-court dink, 30 in a row before you stop" tells them exactly what to do and exactly when they are finished. For anything where form matters, attach a short video to the drill. Thirty seconds of you showing a clean third shot drop is worth more than three paragraphs of written notes, and the student sees exactly what good looks like before they try to copy it. Build one solid cycle before you worry about the rest. You can keep adding more as you go.

Attach a package and form the team

The program is the coaching. The package is the deal. In DrillBase a package is the commercial agreement that attaches to a program: the price, the number of sessions, and when it expires. Keep your first one simple. Decide what an advisory month is worth to you, set the session count, set the expiry, and move on. You can adjust the pricing later, once you have run it a few times.

Then form a team. Students in DrillBase are grouped into teams of two to four who share the same program. For advisory this is ideal. A team of three players working the same cycle keeps everyone accountable, gives them people to drill with, and makes the numbers work in your favour. They are all logging against the same curriculum, so your review time stays focused instead of spread across a dozen unrelated plans.

Set the rhythm

Advisory has a natural rhythm, and it is worth planning it on purpose. The simplest version: one live session per cycle. You meet the team at the start of a cycle, walk them through the new focus, watch a few reps in person, and answer the questions that are hard to answer from a distance. Then the program drives the weeks in between. The students do the drills on their own, log them in the student portal, and build their practice on their own schedule.

This rhythm is the part that frees up your calendar. You are no longer trading one hour of your life for one hour of theirs. One live session anchors a whole cycle of work, and the program carries the load between meetings. Tell your team the rhythm at the start so they know the live session is for the things that need you, not for practice they could have done at home.

Review the logs and leave feedback

This is where advisory stops feeling distant and starts feeling coached. When students use the student portal, they log their drills, track their DUPR rating, and watch their streaks, drill hours, and progress build over time. All of that comes back to you. A few minutes a week is genuinely enough. Open the team, scan who logged what, and look for the signal: who is on a streak, who went quiet, whose notes say a drill felt off.

Then leave feedback. A short note on a logged drill does something a silent dashboard never will. It tells the student you saw their work. "Nice, your dink count jumped from 12 to 28 this week, now slow the backswing and we go for 40" takes you twenty seconds and makes them feel coached on a Tuesday night when you are nowhere near a court. That feeling is what keeps people subscribed.

Your afternoon, start to finish

So here is the whole thing in order: build a program, split it into cycles, fill one cycle with drill sessions and named drills, attach a short video to anything that needs showing, attach a package with your price and session count, form a team of two to four on that program, set a one-live-session-per-cycle rhythm, and tell your students how to log in the portal. That is a real advisory business, and it fits in an afternoon. Get the first cycle live, run it with one team, and let what you learn shape the next cycle. Great coaches deserve more than a calendar full of hours. Build the system once and let it work while you sleep.