Box leagues for padel clubs
A booking is an hour. A box league is a month of them: pairs of a level, everyone playing everyone, and a table that moves every time somebody walks off court.
No card, no password · Your league is running in a few seconds
| Pair | PE/TG | CD/MH | DF/KI | JW/AN | RK/NO |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| P. Ellery & T. Grant | 3-6 6-4 10-8 | 7-5 6-7(4) 10-6 | 6-4 6-4 | 6-1 6-4 | |
| C. Duarte & M. Hale | 6-4 3-6 8-10 | + | 6-4 6-2 | 6-3 6-4 | |
| D. Farrell & K. Iyer | 5-7 7-6(4) 6-10 | + | 2-6 4-6 | 6-3 6-2 | |
| J. Whitlock & A. Nasser | 4-6 4-6 | 4-6 2-6 | 6-2 6-4 | 6-4 4-6 10-7 | |
| R. Kaur & N. Owusu | 1-6 4-6 | 3-6 4-6 | 3-6 2-6 | 4-6 6-4 7-10 |
The problem
Your booking system fills a court for an hour and then forgets the four people who were on it. Nothing in it gives anybody a reason to book the next one, and the ones who drift are the ones nobody noticed drifting.
Sixteen players, a good night, a winner. By Friday the only record is somebody’s photo of a whiteboard, and next month you are back to a WhatsApp thread asking who is free and who is any good.
New members ask who they should play. The answer is somebody’s opinion. Mismatched pairs turn into people who came twice, and no coach can be in every one of those hours to fix it.
Tennis · Padel · Squash · Badminton · Pickleball
How it works
Put pairs into boxes of a level, and every fixture appears the moment a roster is saved. They book their own courts, exactly as they do now, and the only new thing is where the score goes afterwards.
Your players, every week, without you
They tap the link in the group, tap their name, and they are in. No account, no password, nothing to install, and it works on whatever phone they already have.
Walk off court, put the score in. Their opponent gets asked to confirm, and until they do, it counts for nothing. Nobody has to take anyone's word for it, and you are not the referee.
Forgot to confirm? After three days it confirms itself. That is the nagging job gone too.
The other pair has to confirm this.It won't count towards the table until they do, or until it confirms itself in three days.
Your club, all season, on its own
The moment a score is confirmed the standings recalculate: points, bonus sets, head to head, set difference, the lot. Anyone with the link reads every box, every result, every season. No login just to look.
So “what's the table?” stops being a question. It is a link, it is always right, and nobody had to crop a screenshot to answer it.
Still want it in the group chat? Share drops the standings straight into WhatsApp, current to the second.
| Pair | P | W | L | BS | Pts | Games | Sets | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | P. Ellery & T. Grant | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 18 | 47–34 | 8–2 |
| 2 | C. Duarte & M. Hale | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 12 | 33–23 | 5–2 |
| 3 | D. Farrell & K. Iyer | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 7 | 24–18 | 3–2 |
| 4 | J. Whitlock & A. Nasser | 3 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 6 | 24–34 | 2–5 |
| 5 | R. Kaur & N. Owusu | 4 | 0 | 4 | 1 | 5 | 27–46 | 1–8 |
5 for a win in straight sets · 4 for a win in a decider · 2 for a loss having won a set · 1 for a loss with none won · 0 for a match nobody played.
5 pairs, 4 matches each, maximum 20.
Ranked on points, then the match between them, then sets conceded a match, then game difference, then matches won. Pending scores are not counted until confirmed.
That's the whole loop
Five minutes to set up, five minutes at the end to sort out who goes up and down. In between, the only thing you have to do is play.Two sets + championship tiebreak
A padel season opens on doubles boxes without being asked, and a pair is one entry: one row on the sheet, one line in the table, one place to go up or down from.
You choose your partner when the box is rostered and play the season together. The sheet has five pairs on it, not ten players, and the standings read the same way your members already talk about the league.
Two sets and a championship tiebreak, or best of three full sets if that is your club’s format. Pick it when you create the season, and every score is checked against what that format can actually produce.
Five points for a win in straight sets, four if it went to the championship tiebreak, two and one for the losses. That is the table above, and it is the one the club rule pages publish. Two pairs level on points are separated by the match between them and then by fewest sets conceded a match, which is also what those pages say, and it is an average rather than a total because a box where one pair has played twice and another five times is a normal round.
Sometimes that is not enough. Record the match as unfinished, put the sets in as they stood, and there is no winner to name because there was not one. Both pairs score the same. If the two of you go back and play the rest of it, enter the whole thing the ordinary way and it replaces what was there.
Record it as a walkover or a retirement and the points land where they should. With the unfinished match above, that is three ways to record a match that did not end in a score, and none of them invents one. A pair that cannot get a court all month is not a 6-0 6-0 that never happened.
Top two up, bottom two down, and both numbers are yours. A pair that has outgrown its box moves up next month instead of winning it for the third time while everybody else stops entering. Boxes have names as well as numbers, so Division 1 and Mixed are what your members read.
Set a minimum and the rollover keeps to it: a pair short of it is not promoted however it finished, and the pair below goes up instead, so the boxes stay the size they were. A pair that played nothing goes down. You are told who that applies to, by name and with their count, before you go live.
One button saves the season as a spreadsheet, a tab for each box and one with everything on it. Nothing here feeds Playtomic or an LTA rating, so that file is where your season lives after it ends.
All year round
A box is five pairs and a month. The ladder is every player in the club, all year, with whoever they walk on with: one place each, a rating of your own, and any four members can play a match that counts.
Press start and everyone already in a box is on the ladder as themselves, so who you rostered with for the season has nothing to do with who you play with on a Thursday. Anyone you add to a box later joins without being asked.
Then it runs the way your boxes do. Four of you play, one records the score and either of the other side confirms it. All four ratings move as you walk off court, and every match says what it was worth. A club that keeps standing partnerships runs a ladder of pairs instead, with one rating between the two of them.
Each side plays as the average of its two ratings, and both partners move by the same amount. Win, go up. Win with a weaker partner, go up more. On every paid plan.
| Rank | Player | P | Rating | Form | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1▲1 | T. ElleryW3 | 22 | 1418 | ||
| 2– | M. Duarte | 19 | 13821369 settled | ||
| 3▲2 | R. Farrell | 20 | 1341 | ||
| 4▼1 | A. Whitlock | 17 | 1316 | ||
| 5– | P. Kaur | 18 | 1288 | ||
| 6▼2 | J. Sowden | 15 | 1270 | ||
| 7– | L. Brunoresting −30 | 8 | 1249 | ||
| 8new | N. Ferrer | 2 | 1212 |
Movement is places over 30 days · form is the last five · the trend line is their rating over time · purple is a score waiting on the other player, and it counts already.
Club tournaments
A padel championship is a doubles championship. Pairs enter as one entry, the draw is seeded and byed to the regulations, and the bracket keeps itself between club nights.
Put the entries in and press one button: seeds on their lines, byes where the regulations put them, and a play-by date on every round unless it is all played in a day. Players enter their own scores and the bracket keeps itself.
One player link covers every event, a plate catches everybody who loses their first match, and finals day gets a published order of play.
On every paid plan. The knockout, the plate, groups into a knockout, and the americano: partners rotate, everybody scores as an individual, and the table is there on Friday.
Full sets through the early rounds, and your club’s own tiebreak decider from the semis if you want the evening to end on time: each round carries its own format.
Tennis club, two new courts
Most new padel in Britain is going in beside tennis courts. The people using it are often not your tennis members, and a padel league is the cheapest way to turn a court booking into a club membership.
Padel runs as its own league, with its own boxes, its own admins and its own link. Your tennis season carries on untouched, and nobody has to learn a second system, because it is the same one.
Two courts and a booking page fill up in the evening and sit empty on a Tuesday. A box league puts named fixtures on those Tuesdays, and members who have a match to play book courts your booking system was never going to sell.
Whoever runs the padel side rosters the boxes and pastes a link into the group chat. That is the whole job. The scores come in from the people who played them.
Questions
About five minutes. Create the league with a club name and an email, no card and no password. The first time you sign in it walks you through the whole thing on practice data and then clears that out, so the only real thing you type is which pairs are in which box. Then you paste one link into the group chat and your members take it from there.
In the boxes, yes. A pair is the entry, so you choose your partner when the box is rostered and play the season with them. That is the box league most padel clubs run. The ladder goes either way: pairs that stay together and hold one rating, or rotating doubles, where partners change from match to match and the rating is yours. Your americano works like the rotating ladder: enter as individuals, partners rotate every round, and everybody scores for themselves. All of it sits in the same league, with the same members in all of it.
It takes no payment for a court, ever. On the club plans it does keep the court diary your own members book on, so a fixture and a court live in the same app. What it is not is a booking page for the public: if visitors book with you, keep the system that sells them a court. The layer this is really about is the one above both: who is playing whom this month, what the score was, and where everybody is in the table.
Yes, and you choose whose. A ladder of pairs gives each partnership one place and one rating between them. A rotating doubles ladder gives every player their own: partners change from match to match, each side plays as the average of its two ratings, and both partners move by the same amount, so winning with a weaker partner moves you further. Either runs all year beside the boxes. Nothing here feeds your players’ Playtomic level or their LTA padel rating.
Yes, as two leagues: a league runs one sport at a time, so your padel has its own boxes and its own address, and each is billed separately. Members of both are just members of both.
Neither. They tap the link in the group chat, tap their pair, and they are in. It works on whatever phone they already have, and there is nothing to install for somebody who plays once a month.
A WhatsApp group and, if somebody is keen, a spreadsheet. Padel is new enough in Britain that most clubs have no incumbent tool at all, which means the thing a box league replaces is one person keeping a grid.
Yes, on any paid plan: knockout draws seeded to the regulations, a plate for first-match losers, groups into a knockout, and an order of play for finals day. Players enter their own scores, the same as a box. The championships, in full.
In a league, a player is a name on a table and that is the whole record: no email, no phone number, no date of birth, no account. There is nothing to collect from a child, because nothing is ever asked of them. A club plan adds a membership register, which holds what your club already holds on paper and never feeds any of it into a box. Safeguarding, written down.
One box of up to 15 players is free, for as long as you want it, and it is the whole product rather than a trial of it. After that every paid plan runs the same thing — as many boxes and seasons as you like, 8 club ladders, the championships, promotion and relegation and career records — and what you pay is set by how many members your club has. It starts at £120 a year or £12 a month, for a club of up to 125. Every paid plan carries a sponsor line on the league page, which is the one item here a club can turn straight back into money. See what is in each. The case for your committee. How the sponsor line works.
Have a look
Put one box of pairs in, paste the link into the group chat and see what a month looks like when there is a table at the end of it. No card, nothing to install.
That table goes on your own club website too. Two lines to paste.