Compared with the LTA tool

LTA Box League Manager and Clayside

If your members want their box results counting towards their World Tennis Number, use the LTA's tool. It is the only thing that does that. Clayside does not, and plenty of clubs run both.

Create your first season See a live demo

No card, no password · One box is free for good

In one paragraph

The short answer

Box League Manager is the LTA's own tool, built with Visual Reality, and it does one thing Clayside cannot: results submitted through it go to the LTA and count towards a player's World Tennis Number. If that matters to your members, that is the end of the argument and you should use it. There is no published charge for it, and it comes with the Results Manager access an LTA-registered venue already has.

What it asks in return is that every player has an LTA account and signs in to enter. Clayside asks for a tap on a link in the group chat, and holds nothing about a player except their name.

Checked on 26 July 2026. Where every fact here came from.

Both of them, fairly

What each one is

Box League Manager

The LTA describes it as a tool to help organisers, officials and coaches record results when running internal box league competitions. Organisers work at competitions.lta.org.uk with an LTA member login.

Access is applied for. The LTA's published eligibility is accredited coaches, people who have completed a competition organiser course, or people who have completed a basic referee course, working from registered venues or as a recognised club official. The tool then comes automatically with Results Manager access at a registered venue.

Clayside

A box league your club sets up in about five minutes, on a web address of its own. Anyone at the club can start one. There is no application, no accreditation and no course.

Players are added by you and enter their own scores from a link. Their opponent confirms, and a score nobody confirms confirms itself after three days. Results go nowhere except your club's own table.

Row by row

Side by side

LTA Box League Manager and Clayside, compared feature by feature
What	Clayside	LTA Box League Manager
What it costs the club	Free for one box of 12. Paid plans from £75 a year	No published charge. It comes with Results Manager access at an LTA-registered venue [4]
Who can set it up	Anyone at the club. No application, no accreditation	An LTA Accredited Coach, someone who has completed a competition organiser course, or someone who has completed a basic referee course, working from a registered venue or as a recognised club official. Access is applied for [2]
What a player needs	A link. No account, no password, nothing to install	An LTA account, signed in at competitions.lta.org.uk [5]
How a player joins a box	You add them	The player enters, and the organiser accepts or rejects the entry [5]
Who enters the score	Either player, from the link	The player, signed in [4]
Does the opponent confirm	Yes, and it confirms itself after three days	No. Once a player has submitted a result, only the organiser can change it [4]
Correcting a result later	Any time. The history is kept and nothing is hard-deleted	While the round is in progress. Once the round is completed, no further amendments can be made [4]
Rounds	Boxes run as long as you want. A new season is drafted when you press the button	A new round cannot be created until the current one has ended [4]
Promotion and relegation	Drafted from the final standings, with the tie-breaks and anomalies written out, and you can move anyone before it commits	Yes. You set a maximum number of promotions and relegations, and place players by drag and drop [4]
An all-year rated club ladder	Yes, on Premier and above	No continuous rated ladder. The LTA tool runs boxes in rounds, and lists them under both Box Leagues and Ladders [4]
Results count towards the World Tennis Number	No	Yes. Results are sent to the LTA automatically and included in a player's World Tennis Number calculation [4]
What the club holds about a player	A name	Name, LTA number, group, position, phone and email [4]
What opponents see about each other	Nothing. There is nothing to see	Each other's contact details, taken from LTA Advantage membership, emailed when matches are generated [5]
Sports	Tennis, padel, squash, badminton and pickleball	Tennis [1]
Doubles	Yes. A pair is one entry in the box	Yes [4]
Getting your own data out	One click, all of it, as one file	Not published [4]

Straight answer

When to use the LTA's tool instead

Your members care about their World Tennis Number. This is the whole argument and it is a good one. No other box league tool feeds it, and we are not going to.

Your club already runs LTA competition and the organiser has Results Manager access. The tool is there, it is included, and the people who would run it have already done the course.

You want the club to hold LTA numbers, phone numbers and email addresses against players, because your organisers arrange matches on players' behalf. Clayside holds a name and cannot do that.

Your box league is a sanctioned event and needs to look like one on a player's record.

The other side of it

What Clayside does that Box League Manager does not

The difference your members will feel is what happens before the first match. On the LTA's tool a player signs in to competitions.lta.org.uk, enters the box league, and waits for you to accept the entry. On Clayside they tap a link in the group chat, tap their name, and they are in.

Clayside asks the opponent to confirm a score, and confirms it automatically after three days if nobody does. Box League Manager takes the score from whoever submits it first, and after that only the organiser can change it. A wrong score there is an email to you; here it is a rejection with a reason, and the history is kept either way.

We hold a name. That is the whole record. The LTA holds a name, an LTA number, a phone number, an email address, a membership and a ranking, and it shows the contact details to the opponent so the two of you can arrange the match. Neither is wrong. They are different trades, and a club with juniors in its boxes should know which one it is making.

And there is the rest of the club. Clayside runs padel, squash, badminton and pickleball boxes in the same season as the tennis, plus one all-year rated ladder that carries on between seasons.

Side by side, at one club

Clubs that run both

The common shape is a rated competition on the LTA's tool for the members who want their World Tennis Number moving, and a bigger, easier internal league on Clayside for everybody else. The two do not talk to each other and do not need to.

Be honest with yourself about the cost of that: a member in both plays two leagues and enters scores in two places. It is double entry, and there is no way around it while one of the two is sending results to a national rating.

What it buys is reach. The members who will make an LTA account and sign in are a subset of your club, and the ones who will not are usually the ones the box league was meant to keep playing.

Compared with

Spreadsheet · ClubSpark · LTA Box League Manager · Tap Leagues

Questions

Questions about the LTA Box League Manager

What is LTA Box League Manager?

It is a tool built by the LTA with Visual Reality to help organisers, officials and coaches record results when running internal box league competitions. Organisers run it at competitions.lta.org.uk, and results submitted through it are sent to the LTA.

Is LTA Box League Manager free?

The LTA publishes no charge for it. Its own support pages say the tool is available automatically to everyone with Results Manager access through an LTA-registered venue, so for a registered venue it comes with access you already have. A separate per-team charge quoted on the LTA's Competition Management System page is for inter-club leagues run through Online League Planner, not for box leagues.

Who can get access to LTA Box League Manager?

The LTA's published eligibility is accredited coaches, people who have completed a competition organiser course, and people who have completed a basic referee course, in each case working from a registered tennis venue or as a recognised club official. Access is applied for through a short form.

Do Clayside results count towards the World Tennis Number?

No, and they are not going to. Nothing your club records in Clayside is sent to the LTA or to anybody else. If a national rating is what your members want from a box league, the LTA's own tool is the one that does it.

Do players need an LTA account to use Box League Manager?

Yes. A player signs in at competitions.lta.org.uk, opens the box league the organiser sent them or searches for it by name, and enters. The organiser then accepts or rejects the entry. On Clayside a player taps a link and taps their name.

Can a club run Box League Manager and Clayside at the same time?

Yes, and some clubs will want to: the LTA tool for the members chasing a World Tennis Number, Clayside for the wider internal league. The two are separate, so a member in both enters their score twice. That is a real cost and worth deciding on deliberately.

Does LTA Box League Manager have a club ladder?

Not a continuous rated one. The LTA's tool runs boxes in rounds, with promotion and relegation between them, and lists that under both Box Leagues and Ladders. Clayside's club ladder is a different thing: one rating per player, recomputed from every match ever played, running all year beside the boxes.

Sources

Where this came from

Everything above about LTA Box League Manager was read on 26 July 2026, on these pages:

Two rows are deliberately hedged. The LTA manual labels a control "view the public page of the Box League", but whether that page opens without an LTA sign-in could not be confirmed from outside, so the page makes no claim about it. Export of a club's own data is not documented in either guide, so that row says "Not published" rather than "No".

Product and company names on this page belong to their owners. Clayside is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any of them. We check these pages three times a year. If we have got something wrong about your product, tell us at hello@clayside.app and we will fix it.

Have a look

See what a season looks like

The demo is a full season with real fixtures, real standings and a doubles box in it, and you do not need to sign in to read it.

Create your first season See a live demo