Running the session
The heart of a league: create the sessions, check people in, generate the night’s play, fill the courts — and let players enter their own scores.
Create the sessions
New session asks for three things: the date, the courts, and — if you want one — a PIN. Courts can be a count (“4 courts”) or real names (“Centre court, Back court”) — the names follow through everywhere, all the way to the Arena.
For a whole season, Add as a series creates the sessions in one go: every week, every two weeks, twice a week… You adjust or delete the exceptions (holidays, closed gym) afterwards.
Invitations and attendance
Before the session, invite the group by email: each player gets a link and confirms their attendance in one tap, with no account. You watch the answers come in from the console — enough to know on Wednesday whether Sunday needs six courts or four.
On the day, you take arrivals: check people off from the console, or let players flag their own arrival from the session’s check-in page. Someone shows up unannounced? Add a walk-in team slots them into the running session — drop-in, for tonight only.
Only players who have arrived go into match generation. Taking arrivals isn’t paperwork — it’s what guarantees no match gets created for someone who stayed home.
Generate the night’s play
Each division picks its formula, session by session:
- Pools only — everyone plays, the night’s standings are the verdict.
- Pool + playoffs — a pool phase, then the best cross into a bracket, all within the same session.
- Open night — no structure up front: pairings form through the evening from whoever is free, favouring those who’ve played least and avoiding rematches. The formula for relaxed club nights.
One button generates the matches from who’s there. Don’t like the result? Regenerate freely until a match has been played.
Three things trade against each other: guaranteed games (does an early loser still play?), total time, and an undisputed winner. Pure knockout is shortest but sends half the room home after one match; pools alone get everyone playing without crowning anyone convincingly; pool + playoffs pays both — the safe bet for a group of 12 to 32. And for a no-stakes club night, the open night beats everything else.
Fill the courts
Fill the courts assigns waiting matches to free courts, oldest first, and never puts the same person on two courts. The queue shows who’s waiting and why — “Mireille is still on court 2” — so nobody has to come ask you.
Players enter their own scores
This is the feature that takes the pencil out of your hands. Every match has its self-scoring link — shown as a QR code or sent to the players:
One side enters the score from their phone, game by game — each game appears in the Arena the moment it’s entered.
The other side confirms: “Alex entered this score. Is it right?” One tap, and the score locks, the standings update, the court frees up.
Disagreement? The match flips to Score disputed and waits for your ruling — you settle it from the console in thirty seconds.
Confirmation itself is a setting (the Scores tab): mutual confirmation is the default behaviour, and you choose whether an unanswered score locks itself after a few minutes or stays open until confirmed. For a group that trusts itself, turn it off — the first score entered is final.
Scoring formats
The format says how many games and to how many points — “3 games to 15”, “2 to 21”, and so on. Set it once for the event, then refine where needed: a division that plays differently, playoffs longer than pool play, a shortened session because the gym closes at 9.
And if your group doesn’t want rules, free mode records scores exactly as players declare them, no validation — the standings compute the same.
Fixing a score
A locked score isn’t carved in stone: from the console, reopen the match, correct it, lock it again. Standings, brackets and league points recompute themselves.