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 7-5 | 6-4 6-2 | 6-3 6-4 | |
| D. Farrell & K. Iyer | 5-7 7-6(4) 6-10 | +4-6 5-7 | +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 pairs, every week
Either partner taps the link in the group chat and picks the pair’s name. No app and no password, on whatever phone is in their bag.
Two sets and a championship tiebreak go in as they finish, and the pair across the net confirms. An unconfirmed score does not count, so a disagreement stays between the two pairs and never lands on you.
Left unconfirmed, a score goes through after three days, unless your club sets another number.
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 box, all month
Each confirmed result re-sorts the box: points, bonus sets, head to head and set difference. Anyone with the link sees every box, with no sign-in.
Pairs stop messaging you to ask where they stand. The link answers it, at any hour.
Share sends the box table to the group chat in one tap.
| No. | 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 is the month
Rostering the pairs takes minutes, and so does agreeing who goes up when the month ends. In between, the pairs just 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. Put boxes in groups and Division 1 and Mixed are what your members read, each counting its own boxes from 1.
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. Results do not go to Playtomic or an LTA rating yet, so that file is where your season lives after it ends. If you want them sent across, tell us and we will build it.
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 close to each other on it can play a match that counts.
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.
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.
New courts
A court booking is an hour. A league is a month of them, and the players in it come back, which is the cheapest way there is to turn a booking into a regular.
Somebody who booked once has no reason to come back. Somebody with a box, a partner and a match next week has three, and they tell their friends where they play.
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. Give the league a name and an email address. No card goes in and no password is set. 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.
On the club plans it keeps the court diary your own members book on, so a fixture and a court live in the same app. It takes no payment for a court yet, and it has no booking page for visitors yet. If you want either, tell us and we will build it with you. The layer this is really about is the one above the bookings: 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. It does not feed your players’ Playtomic level or their LTA padel rating yet; if you need it to, tell us and we will build it.
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. A junior in a padel box is a name with scores beside it: no email, no phone number, no date of birth and no account. On a club plan, the register holds what the club already keeps on paper, behind its own permission, and a junior never gets a sign-in. Safeguarding, written down.
One box of up to 15 players is free, for as long as you want it: the live table, and the players putting their own scores in. 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. 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.
Your club has its own address. Open it and sign in there with your email. There's no password.
If you set the club up, tell us and we'll look it up.
Play in a box? Tap the link in your group chat, or ask whoever runs your league. Still can't get in?