For organizers
Start a tennis ladder for your group
There is no wizard on this page. You tell us about your group in one application, we review it, and your ladder opens for players the moment it is approved. We get in touch only if something needs clarifying. Deuce Ladder is new, so you carry the risk: your city probably has no ladder on it yet.
Apply
Already have a Deuce Ladder account? Sign in and the application opens here.
Sign inFirst, an account.
A ladder belongs to an account, so applying starts with one: your name, your address and a password. It costs nothing and it builds nothing. The application is the next screen, and the ladder opens for players once we approve it.
How to start a tennis ladder, in the order it happens
This part is not specific to Deuce. Run it on a spreadsheet and you do the same six things in the same order, and the order matters more than the tool.
1. Count the players you can name. Not the membership list, which is a fiction in most clubs, but the people you could text tonight. Ten is the floor, twelve is where it runs without you.
2. Work out where they will play. Court time you hold caps match volume: fourteen players sharing one court on Wednesday evenings will spend the season waiting. Holding none is fine. Players find their own courts and agree the venue in the challenge thread.
3. Sort your players into level bands. One ladder spanning a beginner and an open player loses the beginner inside a month. It is recoverable: a band can be added later, and a player below your lowest band has their request forwarded to you. Everyone on Deuce uses the same five descriptions:
- New to competitive tennis: can rally and serve, never played a match where the score counted
- Plays social sets: weekend tennis with friends, sets that finish 6-4 either way
- Plays club matches: holds a spot in a club team, or plays regular competitive singles
- Plays at the top of the club or above it: open events, county level, former college player
- Has a rating and knows it: NTRP, UTR, WTN, LTA, ITN, a national ranking, or a club level
4. Set the rules and write them down once. Challenge range, how long to answer, how long to play, match format, what happens when somebody goes away for three weeks. Written down badly these become arguments. Written down at all, they mostly do not. The tennis ladder rules template sets them out as 13 numbered clauses you can copy.
5. Pick how the ladder runs. A fixed season of six, eight, ten or twelve weeks with a published end date, or open-ended with none. Twelve weeks is the ceiling: a longer season stops mattering around week ten.
6. Seed the order, then let the first round fix it. Your guess will be wrong in places. What matters is that a misplaced player corrects it by playing rather than by lobbying you.
How the format works The full ruleset
Your application answers steps 2 through 6, and the rules stay yours to change in the ladder's settings. Step 1 stays yours too: no software makes those ten phone contacts for you.
Who this is for, and who it is not
A club pro reviving the ladder that stopped being updated in April. A volunteer captain with a spreadsheet you have had enough of. A park regular who knows fifteen people by first name. A company or campus group. A coach whose students have never played a match that counted. You do not need a club, a booking system, a website, a budget, courts of your own, or any association.
It is not for two groups yet. Fewer than ten players you can name, where ten who might be interested does not count. And a group where nobody will send the first challenge: if your group only plays when you personally arrange each match, a ladder will not change that. If one of those is you, we will say so.
The application, field by field
Ten questions plus a free-text box, after the account step. Your email is the one you signed up with, so the form does not ask for it twice, and your name arrives already filled in.
| Field | Type | Required | Why we ask |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your name | First name and last name, two fields | Yes | You are the organizer on the ladder page. Filled in from your account, and yours to correct |
| Phone or WhatsApp | Text | No | Used only if we need to reach you about the application. Skip it if you would rather not |
| Where the ladder plays | Who it is for (a city, a tennis club, several clubs, a company, a school, another group), the group by name, the city, the country | Yes | Sets your geo pages and the time zone for every deadline. Any country, and a city ladder counts as much as a club one |
| Who can see the ladder | Open or private, and a password if private | Yes | An open ladder is found by strangers in your city. A private one is behind a password you hand out, and you approve every player who asks to join |
| How many players you can name | Number, banded | Yes | The strongest predictor of whether a ladder survives |
| Level range | Multi-select of the five descriptions players see, plus a note | Yes | Sets how many level bands you need |
| Courts you can get | Courts, hours a week, access type, or "no fixed courts" | No | Caps match volume where you hold court time. Blank means players sort out their own |
| Singles, doubles, or both | Select | Yes | Doubles ladders rank fixed pairs, and the rules differ |
| Target start date | Date, plus "as soon as possible" | Yes | Sets the season dates |
| How it runs | Fixed season of 6, 8, 10 or 12 weeks, open-ended, or not sure | No | "Not sure" is fine. We set it from your other answers when we approve the ladder |
| Anything else | Free text | No | Where the useful information usually is |
No company size, no budget question, no "how did you hear about us," no phone number gate.
Your account is a name, an email address and a password, and nothing else is asked for at that step. Creating one puts you on no ladder, publishes nothing and starts no billing.
After you apply
We review it. If something needs clarifying, we email you or call the number you gave. Otherwise there is nothing for you to do, and no call to book.
Once it is approved, your ladder is live. It sits on the account you applied with, with a standings page at a permanent URL and your rules on it. Players can join and challenge from that moment, and one email tells you, with the link to share. Half the people you need will join from a photo of a noticeboard.
From there the settings are yours: the challenge range, starting from five rungs up, 120 hours to respond, thirty days to play, level bands, seasons and invitations.
The full ruleset How rungs move
The thing you are worried about, and it is not setup
Nobody has ever quit organizing because configuring a ladder was hard. The fear is sending a message to twenty people, putting your name on it, and having four join.
Software does not fill a ladder. You find your twelve by asking people by name: the regulars, the social hitters who have never played anything with a score, the parents killing an hour beside a junior lesson. Nobody was ever recruited by a poster on a clubhouse wall. And we tell you first if we think your group is too small, because a failed ladder makes the next one in that city harder.
Week one asks something real of you. Budget an hour across a few days to text twelve people one at a time and chase the four who forgot. Send them yourself: a text from you gets answered, and a notification from a tennis platform gets swiped away.
After that the load falls away, because a ladder does not need you to arrange matches. A few small decisions a month: a request to join, an absence, a disputed score. About fifteen minutes a week. If the ladder goes still in week two, somebody your players know has to say something, and that somebody is you.
Open the ladder simulator What running one looks like
Why every application is reviewed
The choices that decide whether a first ladder works do not look important while you are making them. A twelve-day play window against two hours of court time produces walkovers. One ladder stretched from beginner to open produces four people quitting in month one. We read every application before it goes live, and we get in touch only when an answer looks likely to sink the ladder. Otherwise it opens as you described it.
Money, and what applying commits you to
Pricing is not published yet, and no number will be invented to fill the gap: a made-up figure on an application page is how you lose an organizer permanently.
What is settled: you see the price before you commit to anything, there is no demo call between you and the number, and applying costs nothing and agrees to nothing. If we decline, or you change your mind, your application gets deleted on request. Before you apply, go and look at what you will be given.
Browse real ladder pages Pricing Common questions How we handle your data
Other pages, depending on which of these you are
You want to play, not organize. Find a ladder →
You want to see the format first. Browse ladders →
You manage a club or sit on a committee. For clubs →
You coach. For coaches →
You want the bookkeeping detail before you apply. For organizers →
If your group needs fixed boxes and round-end promotion, read the box league rules guide before choosing Deuce. A challenge ladder serves a different format.
Playing in Vancouver? The Vancouver tennis ladder guide covers public courts, indoor bookings and local competition.
Playing in Ottawa? The Ottawa tennis ladder guide covers public courts, club competition and winter indoor costs.