Pickleball leagues that run themselves

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 how many boxes you want, singles or doubles, and who is in each. Then you paste one link into the group chat.

Yes, in fixed pairs. A doubles box is pairs rather than players: you choose your partner when the box is rostered and stay together for the season. Everything else is identical, and a club can run a singles box and a doubles box in the same season. A box never rotates partners inside itself, and it should not: a table built on a pair means nothing if the pair changes every week. Rotating partners and ranking players individually is the social night instead, which is its own thing and runs alongside the boxes with the same members in both.

The competitive half of it, yes. Put the names in, say how many courts and how many rounds, and it deals the partners: everybody plays with everybody before anybody plays with anybody twice, sitting out comes out even, and you tap the scores in courtside. A mexicano re-deals each round off the table so the games tighten as the evening goes on. What it does not do is your peg board and your rotation for social games, and it is not trying to.

Not on its own. The rating here is your club’s own: everybody starts on 1200, it moves on the first match rather than after a qualifying run, and it costs nothing to have. What the league gives you is the file. Every confirmed result saves as a spreadsheet, a tab for each box and one for the ladder, a row a match, with the date, both sides, the game scores and whether it was a walkover. Save the tab you want as a CSV and that is the shape a bulk upload wants. It carries player names rather than DUPR ids, so whoever uploads matches people up at that end. One upload a round, rather than one a match.

Neither. They tap the link in your group chat, tap their name, and they are in. It works on whatever phone they already have, and there is no password to reset for somebody who plays once a fortnight.

A league runs one sport at a time, so a club that plays pickleball and badminton runs a league for each, and each one is billed separately. Within a league you can run as many boxes as your plan allows, singles and doubles side by side.

A paddle rack, a group chat and somebody's spreadsheet. Open play sorts out who plays whom on the night, and nothing carries between nights, so the box league is usually the first thing anybody writes down at all.

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.