Club ladders, all year, beside your boxes

A box is a season and a fixture list: five or six players, everyone plays everyone, and in eight weeks it is over. The ladder has no end. It is one list of everybody in the club with a rating beside each name, and it carries straight on from one season to the next.

You can run both, and most clubs will. The boxes give the club its structure. The ladder gives the players in it something to chase in the weeks in between, and somewhere for a member who cannot commit to a box.

Everybody you put in a box. When a roster is saved, those players join the ladder too, so the club you already typed in is the ladder you already have. They sit under Yet to play until their first match, where they are not ranked and nothing chases them.

The league owner can add anyone else, and take anyone off. Taking somebody off sticks: they are not quietly added back the next time a season is built.

The ladder has its own player link. Post it in the club chat and everybody taps their own name, exactly as a box link works. On a doubles ladder each person taps their own name rather than the pair's.

So a junior or a social member who is on the ladder and in no box enters their own scores like everyone else, instead of the organiser typing them in.

Their opponent has to confirm it, the same as a box result. Until they do, the row is shaded purple and both ratings show as unsettled. If nobody answers, it confirms itself after three days.

The score counts from the moment it goes in, though. The ladder is never three days behind the tennis, and the purple is there so nobody mistakes an unconfirmed rating for a settled one.

Everyone starts on 1200. A win takes points off your opponent and gives them to you, and how many depends on the gap between you: beat somebody well above you and you take a lot, beat somebody below you and you take very little. Lose to somebody below you and it costs.

Your first 3 matches are placing matches. They move you further than later ones, so the ladder finds your level in a fortnight rather than a season, and you can play anybody at all while they last.

Nobody has to understand any of that to use it. Win, go up. Lose, go down. Beat somebody good, go up a lot.

A challenge ladder is positional: you call out somebody a few places above you and, if you win, you take their place. Clayside's is rated instead, so every match moves both players by an amount that depends on who they were playing, and nobody has to be challenged to move.

The LTA's Box League Manager runs boxes in rounds with promotion and relegation between them, which is a different shape again: it has no continuous rated ladder, and its results count towards the World Tennis Number, which ours do not.

Not unless you ask it to, and we would rather you did not. A rating is worth defending once it has had time to mean something, so by default seasons come and go around the ladder and archiving one leaves it exactly as it was.

If your club does want a fresh start every year, you can set that and choose what it does. Keeping every rating starts the table again and leaves everybody's level alone. Putting every rating back to the start means everyone plays their placing matches again, which is the honest description of throwing a year away. Nothing is deleted either way: turn it off and the whole thing comes back, because no rating is stored anywhere in the first place.

Yes, and there are two kinds. A doubles ladder holds pairs: a pair takes one place on the table and has one rating between them, and either of them can record a match or confirm one. The pair stays together, so changing who is in it means taking that pair off and adding the new one, and nobody can be in two pairs on the same ladder.

A rotating doubles ladder holds people. Partners change from match to match and the rating is yours: a match names four players, each side plays as the average of its two ratings, and both of you move by the same amount. Win with a weaker partner and it moves you further. That is the ladder most padel clubs mean, and it is the one on the padel demo.

Everybody the club puts in a box joins your club-wide ladder automatically, and that ladder can be singles or rotating doubles. A ladder of pairs is never filled that way, because nothing can guess who plays with whom.

Yes. Eight of them, on every paid plan. A club-wide one, a doubles one, one for the ladies' section, one for the juniors: whatever your club actually has, named whatever your club calls it.

They sit behind a row of buttons at the top of the ladder screen, and pressing Ladder opens the first one. Each has its own sport, its own scoring, its own players and its own ratings. Archiving one keeps everything that happened on it and frees the space for another.

Tennis, padel, squash, badminton and pickleball, scored by their own rules, exactly as a box is. You pick the sport and the format when you start the ladder.

The sport is fixed after that: a squash ladder and a tennis ladder are two ladders, and you can run several. The scoring is not. Change it whenever the club wants, because every match records the format it was played under.

No. It is the club's own number, earned on your club's ladder, and it means nothing anywhere else. SquashLevels, the World Tennis Number and DUPR own that job, and we do not feed them.

If your club reports results to one of those, the spreadsheet export gives you every match with dates and scores to work from.

The league owner can clear any score, and can record a match for any two players. Clearing one works every rating out again from scratch, so a wrong score fixed today leaves no mark on the ratings from last month.

That is worth knowing about the whole design: no rating is stored anywhere. The ladder is worked out from the list of matches every time it is read, which is why fixing the list fixes everything.

The ladder is part of every paid plan. The cheapest is £120 a year, and there is nothing extra to buy and no per-player charge.

Every new league starts on our top plan with nothing locked off for 14 days, so you can put a ladder up and see it working before you decide anything. A free One Box club still sees the ladder tab, and pressing it says what it would cost.

Putting it to a committee? The case for your committee is one page you can print or forward: what it costs, what it replaces, what happens to your members’ data and what happens if you stop paying.