Why I Copied a Chinese Tennis Concept and Brought It to Bulgaria

I didn't invent Playbox Courts. I saw the concept working in China and I copied it. That's the honest version of the story, and it's more interesting than any marketing version I could write.

How I ended up in Chinese tennis clubs.
I've been studying Chinese since 2020 and have visited China several times. Before my most recent trip in 2025, I came across this ball-machine concept on WeChat. I loved the idea immediately — the ability to get a high volume of hits without needing to work with a coach every time. Coaches have their place, no question. But most of the time, a player just needs to hit ball after ball after ball. Since I was already planning the trip, I decided to visit several of these clubs. I had also booked a tennis coach in one of the cities where I stayed longer — Kunming. I asked him whether he knew about these self-service venues, and it turned out he knew the owners of several clubs personally.

While I was in China I visited multiple venues — not just in Kunming, but in Beijing and Guangzhou too. It became clear very quickly that these clubs are enormously popular there. There are dozens of them, and many players train exclusively at these venues without ever setting foot on a traditional court. Chinese cities are dense. Real tennis courts are expensive and scarce. At the same time, millions of people want to play — but most don't have a fixed partner, don't have predictable schedules, and don't want to pay a coach every time they practise. Traditional clubs simply can't serve that demand at scale.

What I understood, sitting in those clubs, was that the problems they solve in China aren't Chinese problems. They're tennis problems. The same problems exist in Bulgaria. Every recreational tennis player in Bulgaria has run into at least one of these:
- You want to play, but you can't find a partner — or your regular one cancels.
- You want to practise a specific stroke. You know exactly what you need to work on. You don't want to pay a coach just to feed you balls.
- You want to play after work, but by the time you coordinate with someone, it's too late.
- You're a beginner and you don't want to be watched.
- You only have 45 minutes free, which isn't enough for a traditional club session.
- You want to play more often, but €15–20 per hour plus coach fees adds up fast.
- You're tired of all the unnecessary back-and-forth — messaging coaches, hitting partners, or receptionists over Viber, Instagram, or the phone just to book a court or arrange a session.

These aren't unusual problems. They're the normal experience of most recreational tennis players. And none of the traditional clubs in Bulgaria are built to solve them, because they're built around a different assumption — that tennis is a social sport you schedule in advance with a partner. The Chinese format assumes the opposite: that tennis is an individual sport you do on your own time, and the social part comes later when you want it.

Why I thought Bulgaria was ready?
I wasn't certain it would work. Bulgaria is not China, and concepts don't always translate. But several signals were hard to ignore:
- Online booking had already been (partially) normalised in most Plovdiv clubs by 2024.
- Ball machines existed at one or two clubs, but were barely used.
- A lot of people had simply had enough of poor treatment at clubs.
- Specifically in Plovdiv, nowhere could you pay by card to play tennis. No receipts either. Every time you played, you had to withdraw cash from an ATM — and ATMs in Plovdiv aren't exactly everywhere. Plenty of people, like me, carry cash less and less.
- And most importantly — the recreational tennis scene in Bulgaria had been quietly growing for years. More people wanted to play than there were partners to play with.

The cultural gap I was actually worried about was different. In China, self-service and minimal human contact are seen as a feature. In Bulgaria, it could have been seen as coldness. I wasn't sure whether people here would show up to a club with no receptionist, no coach, no one to say hello. The answer, based on 55 organic five-star Google reviews and counting, is that people love it.

The broader lesson:
The wider lesson for me is that you can travel and copy things. Bulgaria doesn't need to wait 15 years for something to arrive from San Francisco or Berlin. China, Korea, and parts of Southeast Asia are building small-format sports and fitness concepts that work — and most of them would work here with minimal adaptation. Playbox Courts is one format. There are dozens more I saw in China that would work in Bulgaria. The entrepreneurial opportunity isn't in inventing new concepts. It's in noticing what already works elsewhere, and being the first person willing to bring it. I copied a tennis format. I'm not ashamed of it. The people playing at Playbox don't care where the idea came from. They care that they can play tennis tonight, alone, without having to call anyone. That's the whole point.