Clayside

Box leagues for squash clubs

Your box leagues, without the hour a month

Squash clubs have run boxes for fifty years and you do not need selling on them. This is the version where the scores arrive on their own, the table is right at midnight, and the round rolls over in two minutes.

Create your first season Look at a demo season

No card, no password · Your league is running in a few seconds

The problem

What running squash boxes costs one volunteer

01

The results come in one at a time

A scrap of paper behind the bar. A text on Sunday night. “Played Tom, won 3-1” with no games in it. You are the only person who knows the round is half done, because you are the only person the results reach.

02

The sheet on the wall is already wrong

Printed on the first, out of date by the third. Anyone who wants the real table asks you, and the real table is a spreadsheet on your laptop that nobody else can open.

03

Then there is rollover night

Type up a month of results. Work out who goes up and who comes down. Redraw five boxes, slot in the three people who joined, email the lot. England Squash calls it an hour a month. It is never an hour.

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How it works

You set the round up once. After that it is your players.

Say how many boxes and who is in them, and every fixture appears the moment a roster is saved. Your members book their own courts and play as they always have. The only thing that changes is where the score goes afterwards.

Your players, every week, without you

Players enter scores, their opponent confirms

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.

Your club, all season, on its own

The table moves on its own

The moment a score is confirmed the standings recalculate: points, bonus games, head to head, game 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.

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.

Best of 5 games to 11, won by 2

Squash scoring, and the rollover that follows it

The season is set to a squash format and every score is checked against what that format can produce. Then the part nobody volunteers for happens on its own.

Best of five to 11, won by two

11-9 goes in. 11-10 is a game still being played and it is refused. Past 11 you win by exactly two, so 13-11 is a game and 13-10 never happened. Best of three is a format too, and so is PAR to 15 if your club or your county league still plays it.

A point a game, if that is your table

Pick the table your club already publishes: a point for every game won, a point for turning up, England Squash’s bonus for playing all four. That last one is the table above, and 38 is what a box of five is worth on it, which is England Squash’s own figure. Or set the nine numbers yourself.

The court ran out before anybody won

A booking is 40 or 45 minutes and it ends. Record the match as unfinished, enter the games as they stood including the one you were in the middle of, and there is nobody to name as the winner because there was not one. Both sides score the same. Published club tables carry 2-2 and 1-1 as rows, and so does ours.

Conceded, injured, never played

Somebody pulls out at 2-1 down. Somebody cannot get a court all month. Record it as a walkover or a retirement and the points land where they should, instead of a 3-0 that never happened going on the sheet to keep the table tidy. With the unfinished match above, three outcomes cover every match that did not end in a score.

Promotion and relegation, worked out for you

Top two up, bottom two down, and both numbers are yours to change. When the round closes, next month’s boxes are built from the standings rather than from you reading five tables and typing names into a new grid.

Play two, or you stay where you are

Set a minimum and the rollover keeps to it: short of it you are not promoted however you finished, and the next player down goes up in your place, so the boxes stay the size they were. Play nothing at all and you go down. You are told who that applies to, by name and with their count, before you go live with it.

Boxes the size your club runs

Five is the usual, four when half the club is away, six or seven when the league fills up. Set the size per box and the fixtures redraw themselves. Somebody joining mid-round goes straight into a box. Boxes have names as well as numbers, which is where your racketball box goes.

And the round leaves as a file

Every confirmed result saves as a spreadsheet, with a tab for each box and one for the ladder: a row a match, with the date, both names, the game scores and whether it was a walkover, a retirement or a match that ran out of time. If your club reports somewhere else, that is the round in one file instead of one evening.

All year round

And a ladder, for the matches the round has no room for

A box is five people and a month. The ladder is everybody, all year: your member who missed the round, the one who is between boxes, the pair who fancy a rematch on a Thursday. Every match counts towards a rating.

A minute to start, nothing to maintain

Press start and everybody already in a box is on it. Anyone you add to a box later joins without being asked, so there is no second list to keep up to date.

Then it runs the way your boxes do. Two players sort a match out between themselves, one records the score and the other confirms it. Both ratings move as they walk off court, and every match says what it was worth.

Nobody has to understand the maths to enjoy it. Win, go up. Beat somebody good, go up a lot. On every paid plan.

Look at a demo ladder See more about the ladder

Club tournaments

Club tournaments, plate and all

One draw for the night of the year: scored to 11, win by two, with a plate underneath it so nobody’s championship is over in twenty minutes.

The draw is made for you

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 plate takes first-match losers, so a player whose first match was round two is still caught by it.

Look at a demo tournament See more about tournaments

Best of three in the early rounds, best of five where it counts: each round is scored its own way, and every score is checked against its round’s rules.

For the committee

What a round is worth to the club

Your courts cost the same whether anybody is on them or not. A box round is the cheapest thing a squash club can do to put names against the empty hours.

01

Every box is a month of bookings

Five players in a box is ten matches, and every one of them is two members finding a slot on your court sheet. Five boxes is fifty. Set a box to play everyone twice and it doubles, and none of it needs a coach, a competition or anybody at the desk arranging it.

02

The members playing are the members who renew

A player in a box has a match to arrange this month and a table worth looking at. The ones who drift are the ones with nothing in the diary, and they drift quietly enough that nobody notices until the renewals come round. The ladder covers the weeks between rounds, which are the weeks the courts go quiet.

03

A new member finds their level before they give up

Somebody joins in October, gets beaten 3-0 by a county player twice, and is gone by Christmas. In a box they play four people of roughly their own standard, and by the end of the round both they and you know where they belong.

Taking it to a meeting? The case for your committee is one page, written to be forwarded without editing.

The other half

And the membership, where the club is the club

A lot of squash is played on courts the club does not own, and where that is true this is not for you. Where your club is affiliated and keeps its own members, Clayside can keep that register beside the boxes and collect the subs by Direct Debit into the club's own account, with your own categories and your own membership year.

What the membership half does, and what a club plan costs. The leagues work exactly the same either way.

Questions

The things squash clubs ask first

How do we set it up?

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 the round has and who is in each of them. Then you paste one link into the club chat and the scores start coming to the table instead of to you.

Does this replace SquashLevels?

No, and nothing here reports to it on your behalf. SquashLevels is a national rating built from matches across every club that sends them in. The ladder here is your club’s own: everybody starts on 1200, it moves from the first match, and it is there to give your members somebody to play. If your club reports to SquashLevels, carry on. What has changed is that you are not typing the round out a second time to do it. 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 names, the game scores and whether it was a walkover, a retirement or unfinished. The file carries player names rather than SquashLevels accounts, so whoever uploads still matches people up at that end.

How does the rollover work?

When a round closes you press one button and next month’s boxes are built from the standings. Top two up and bottom two down to start with, and both numbers are settings. You can move somebody by hand before you go live, which is what you will want the month somebody comes back from injury.

Our boxes are not all the same size. Is that a problem?

No. Each box has its own roster, so four in one and six in another is normal, and the fixtures for each are generated from the names in it. A player joining mid-round goes into a box and gets their fixtures immediately.

What about Squash 57 and racketball?

A box in the same round, with its own name on the tab. Call it Racketball and that is what your members see. It is played to the round’s format, which works because most clubs score it exactly as they score squash: best of three or five games to 11. It promotes and relegates within itself like any other box. If your club scores racketball differently from squash, that is a second league rather than a second box, and it is billed separately.

Do players need an app or an account?

Neither. They tap the link in the club’s 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 the member who plays one round a year.

How does it compare with the free league apps?

Tap Leagues is the one squash clubs meet most: it is free, it has iOS and Android apps, and there is more in it than there is in Clayside, including thirteen sports and a challenge ladder. The difference is what it asks of your members, which is an account each.

Can we run our club championships on it?

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.

Is it safe for our juniors?

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.

What does it cost?

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

The next round can start without you typing anything

Put one box in, paste the link into the club chat and see what a month looks like when the results come to the table instead of to you. No card, nothing to install.

Create your first season Look at a demo season

That table goes on your own club website too. Two lines to paste.