Organizer’s guide · Chapter 6

The team league

Clubs facing off in encounters — two doubles, a mixed, a singles — with lineups, substitutes and a captain who sleeps better. The interclub format, in full.

What changes

In a team league the unit is no longer the player but the club. You don’t sign up alone: you need a team, with a squad. The standings count teams, the evening is played in encounters — club against club — and each encounter is made of several matches played in parallel across the courts.

It’s the third kind of event, next to the individual league and the tournament: pick “Team league” at creation and the console adapts — team sign-ups, an encounter calendar, lineups.

Team leagues are part of the Club plan, with one division: a club’s or a group’s own league. A championship with several divisions (A, B, C, D, like a regional interclub) needs the Pro plan. On Club, once the division exists, Settings says so in place of the Add division button, with a link to the plans.

The encounter

An encounter isn’t one match but a fixed list of them: say two men’s doubles, a women’s doubles, a mixed and a singles. You compose that list once, in settings (Team play), from the five classic disciplines — men’s and women’s singles and doubles, mixed doubles — and it holds for the whole season: a competition that changed its own shape mid-season would make its standings incomparable.

The club that wins the most matches takes the encounter. Montréal’s interclub plays eight; a small league plays five — the list is yours.

On the player’s side, the session page shows their club’s encounter, not the division: two clubs can play side by side the same night in the same division, and the other one’s matches are not the rest of theirs. And a team that goes by a name is called by it — “ShaBam vs BAMos”, not a list of its fourteen players. It opens on the encounter’s board — both clubs, the count of matches won, how far along it is — then the eight matches in sheet order, each with its score button — any player of the club can enter or confirm the score of any match of their encounter; no “your match” card and no search: in a team league, the encounter is the page. Every settled match carries its own share icon: the card names the pair, their opponents, both clubs, the division, the discipline and the score — as soon as the score is validated, without waiting for the tie to end. And as in every other league, one sheet carries all three cards: Encounter, Match — picking among the rubbers already played — and Season. You come in by whichever button is at hand and move between them without leaving. And once all eight matches are settled, the captain’s link offers the encounter card: the team photo, the score large, the other club named, shared in one gesture — the moment the eight of them are still together is the only one that photo happens in. Win, draw or loss: the card says which, it is not only for the evenings you win.

The encounter calendar

SetRally generates the season’s calendar with the right guarantees: every team plays the same number of encounters, never twice against the same club, at most one encounter per date — and home-and-away balances out as well as it can. Sixteen teams across sixteen Sundays at six encounters each: the kind of puzzle that used to eat your August evenings.

The proposed calendar is a first draft, not a verdict: rearrange the pairings that need it, and the tool tells you what it couldn’t satisfy instead of failing silently.

A session’s Setup page therefore asks for nothing else: it lists the evening’s fixtures, division by division. No format to pick, no matches to generate, no board to rearrange — that belongs to leagues that compose their evening on the day; here the encounters come from the season plan and each club plays one per date.

An encounter’s courts

A fixture can have courts of its own: “BadAces versus Benchwarmers is played on courts 5 to 8.” On a session’s Setup page, each fixture carries a Courts field: the evening’s courts as buttons, the ones you touch being held for that encounter. A line under the buttons says what you just promised (“this encounter’s matches will not leave courts 5 to 8”), and Release all hands the block back in one press. The buttons carry your courts’ names as soon as you give them one, and their number otherwise. Filling the board respects them: the encounter’s matches never leave its courts, and no other encounter comes in.

It is optional, and it belongs to the team league. With no courts picked, the encounter follows its division’s block like everything else on the platform — which is what you want when the gym’s eight courts serve everybody. The Where it is played line next to it stays what it was: a note for captains — “back hall”, an address — that holds nothing.

Two more things once you are on the fixture: Move to another date shifts the encounter within the season — dates where either team already plays are struck out, and an encounter that has started no longer moves. And Add a place writes a word in plain language for the captains — “back hall”, an address — for the evening that is not in the usual gym. That place reserves nothing; only the courts above do.

Captains have nothing to ask for: the encounter’s courts show under the fixture, at the top of their team link, under the names you gave them — “Courts Central · A · B”, never “1 · 2 · 3” in a gym whose courts have names.

The lineup

Before the encounter, each captain opens their team’s link (below) and places their players match by match — the screen checks every seat (a women’s doubles wants two women) and your league’s rules: a cap on matches per player (one for men, one for women) and one match per discipline. When the event reads official levels, every name carries its level, and a player ranked above the division is flagged the moment they are tapped; the singles order is checked the same way, with a button that swaps the two singles. An unknown level never blocks. Depending on the organizer’s setting it warns or refuses. A gender missing from the file never blocks either: the gender rules simply pass over that player, and a stand-in named on the night can give theirs in one tap. Four rules keep the system sporting:

Once saved, the lineup becomes what the matches are called: the player page and the score sheet read “Daigneault / Zagar vs Viau / Benoît”, club second, instead of eight identical “club A vs club B” lines. Until a captain has composed, the two club names hold the line.

Each team has one link, for the whole season — and it is the only one you have to hand out: a team league shows no player link, since this one already carries the schedule, the standings and the scores. Under it the captain names the lineup before each encounter, enters the scores during it, and reads the season table under the Season tab — no account, no second address. The club’s roster is not theirs to keep: it is yours. They may pass it on to a teammate: the captain stays answerable for the score, and is often on court themselves.

A team that signed up online gets its link in the email confirming its place, and whoever signed the team up becomes its contact. For the others — and for any re-send — the link goes by email, to the captain, at the address on the team’s card in Teams. Two ways to send it:

Every email that carries the link — the one confirming the team’s place as much as the sends to the captain — says it is for the team only: passing it to a teammate, yes; sharing it outside the team, no, and the captain alone is responsible for it.

The card then reads “Link sent on…” — or “never sent”, or that an address is missing. Without email, Team link copies the same address, to paste into a message.

When a player can’t make it

A team league never asks who is coming. No invitation to answer, no door check-in, no attendance list: the night has three parts — Set-up, Play, Results — and attendance is the calendar. A club is there because the fixture puts it there.

An absence is therefore settled where it shows, in the lineup. The captain names a stand-in for that encounter only: a name, nothing else — no account to create, nothing added to the club’s roster. If your league caps stand-ins (under Settings), they see their budget before naming anyone — “Stand-ins: 2 of 5 allowed this season” — and the refusal, when there is one, falls when the lineup is saved rather than when the name is typed: it is fielding somebody that spends, not writing them down. And whatever they truly cannot field, they declare; the screen puts a number on it before they send.

For a change that lasts — a player who joined in September, another who left — it is the club’s roster you edit, and that happens in the console, under Teams; at most the players-per-team number you set under Sign-up, twenty at the very most — each club’s card reads “7 / 8 players”. The captain cannot touch it themselves: they write to you, and you decide. What they can do alone is name a stand-in for one evening. As for merging two short-handed teams, that belongs to doubles leagues: in a team league the stand-in plays that role.

Scoring and standings

Every match in the encounter scores like everywhere else in SetRally: the players on court enter the score, the opposing club confirms from their phone, a disagreement goes up to the organizer — or, if you chose it, nobody confirms match by match and the two captains sign the sheet at the end. The captain, meanwhile, sees the encounter as a board — “5 of 8 settled, one score waiting to be confirmed” — without running between courts. The board keeps itself current: scores entered on other phones appear without touching anything, and it stops looking once the encounter is over. A captain’s link always opens the encounter of the day — the next one to play, or the last once the season is done: no list of dates to wade through. Past results are read under the Season tab beside the encounter one: the season standings, one division at a time, with encounters won, drawn and lost, the points, the club’s own row marked in the table, and an arrow per team saying what the last session did to its place (▲ up, ▼ down, – held). Once the club has played an encounter, My card appears in its own row — as in every other league, where the button lives inside the rank you are already reading — and turns it into a card: the rank large, the points, the team photo if the captain adds one. It is the public page’s table, computed once: it cannot say one thing here and another there.

A locked match is fixed under the same setting as everywhere else (Players can fix a score, Scores tab): from their page, the captain taps Fix the score under the match — a match won by walkover too, to the score actually played — and the opposing club approves or refuses from its link. The encounter’s result and the standings recompute themselves.

The organizer fixes from the session’s Results page. It shows each encounter as a block — the two clubs, the encounter score, “Finished” or “6 of 8 played” — that folds once complete and opens onto its matches, each with its code (MD2, XD1…) and the seated players rather than the same two clubs eight times. Fix on a match reopens its pad — empty if the match was a walkover, to enter the score actually played — and the encounter and the standings roll up on their own; the confirmation message says the encounter’s new score. The encounter block itself is not scored: its result is the sum of its matches — and it comes apart both ways. Reset a match and the encounter, if it was finished, goes back to in progress: it stops showing a winner and drops out of the standings until that match has a score again. Enter one and it closes right back. A composition walkover reads “Walkover — club name”, never as a score, and More then History say who wrote what on each match.

The encounter’s result derives itself from its matches, and the club standings pile up session after session with the same league points as the rest of the platform — with one difference: they go to the encounter, not to the matches. The club that wins the night takes its level’s “win” value, whether it was 5-3 or 8-0. The table then reads in nights — wins, draws, losses and points — a 4-4 encounter being a draw. Level on points, these separate clubs, in order: encounters won, the difference between matches won and lost over the season, then the same difference in games. Presence does not apply: a team league has no door to check in at, and paying for it would pay the encounter twice.

The encounter sheet, signed by both captains

Under Settings, Score entry, When the other club confirms: Per encounter. The evening then runs as it does on paper: scores go on the sheet, and the sheet gets signed at the end.

← PreviousStandings and seasonNext →Every setting