A person sets up your first ladder with you

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.

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

Steps 2 through 6 get done with you. Step 1 stays yours: no software makes those ten phone contacts for you.

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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.

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The application, field by field

Eleven questions plus a free-text box.

No company size, no budget question, no "how did you hear about us," no phone number gate.

Bring a list of names when you have one: first name, last name, email. Screenshot the group chat, send your spreadsheet, or photograph the signup sheet and we will type it in.

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After you apply, four windows

Within one business day, a reply from a person. Not an autoresponder pointing you at a help center. It names the one thing about your group we want to talk through.

Within three business days, a 20-minute conversation. A call, or messages if you would rather. You get a straight answer on whether to run one ladder or two, and if we think you are short, by how many.

Within two business days of you sending names, your ladder exists. Configured and seeded, with a public standings page at a permanent URL, your rules on it, an invite link and a QR code. Half the people you need will join from a photo of a noticeboard.

Your first challenge goes out inside two weeks of applying, assuming your names reach us in the first week. Hold us to that one in particular.

Last reviewed July 2026. If the queue runs longer, this page says so with a real revised number before you apply rather than after. If a window gets missed anyway, reply to the thread and say so.

In that time a person tells you whether to run one ladder or several, sets your rules starting from five rungs up, 48 hours to respond and ten days to play, seeds the order, writes your joiner email and the paragraph you paste into the group chat, and moves any existing spreadsheet across by hand. You approve that import before a player sees it, and an entry that is not a valid tennis scoreline comes across without one: we will not invent numbers to make it tidy.

The full ruleset How rungs move

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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. We write the messages; you send them, because 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; we tell you when that moment arrives and what to say.

Open the ladder simulator What running one looks like

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Why this is not self-serve yet

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. A person catching either costs nothing; a form that does not catch them costs you your season. If talking to somebody is the part you would rather skip, say so in the free-text box and we will configure it from your answers.

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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 and your list of names get deleted on request. Before you hand over your friends' email addresses, go and look at what you will be given.

Browse real ladder pages Pricing Common questions How we handle your data

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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 →