Running a Club Championship

The annual club championship is usually the biggest event in a club's year, and the hardest one to organise. It is not one competition — it is a dozen. Men's Singles, Women's Singles, Mixed Doubles, Under-15, Over-50, a novice grade, and whatever else your club has always run. Each has its own entrants, its own draw and its own champion, but they share one entry form, one schedule and one results sheet.

A championship in ServeLeague holds all of them together. You set it up once, players enter every event they want in a single pass, and each event runs on the night you scheduled it. This tutorial walks through the whole cycle, from creating the championship to publishing your champions board.

Before You Begin

Make sure you have:

• A club set up on ServeLeague (see Setting Up Your Club)
• Your players on the club roster (see Importing Players in Bulk)
• A rough idea of your events and which nights they will be played on
• Your club on the Club plan or above — championships are included there

If you only need a single one-off competition, such as a Saturday open with one draw, a tournament is the simpler tool. See Running a Tournament, and the "Championship or tournament?" section at the end of this page for how the two compare.

Step 1: Create the Championship

From your club admin dashboard, open Leagues and choose Create League. Alongside the league formats you will see a separate Championship card. Choose it.

You only need two things to start: a name, such as "Riverside Club Championships", and a short description that players will read when they enter. You can add the playing dates and the finals night now or come back to them later.

Behind the scenes ServeLeague creates one competition that will hold every event. You never have to create a separate league per event, and you never have to keep a dozen draws in step by hand.

Step 2: Add Your Events

An event is one competition inside the championship: Men's Singles, Open Doubles, Under-19 Girls, and so on. Add as many as your club runs. For each one you set:

• Name — what players will recognise it as on the entry form
• Type — singles, doubles, or mixed doubles
• Category — open, A grade, junior, veteran, novice, or a rating-capped grade, which is what groups the events on the championship page
• Night — the date it will be played
• Entry fee — charged per event, so a player entering three pays for three

Set your format defaults once and every event inherits them. Most clubs run group stages followed by knockouts, so everybody gets guaranteed matches rather than being knocked out in twenty minutes. Any single event can override the default if, say, your novice grade is better as a straight round robin.

If your club runs the same programme every year, add the events once and the championship becomes the template for next year.

Step 3: Open Entries

Players enter through one form. It lists every event they are eligible for — their age group, their grade, and singles or doubles — and they tick the ones they want. For a doubles or mixed event they name their partner as they tick it. When they are done, they pay for the lot in one go.

That single pass is the whole point. On paper, a player fills in one sheet and somebody transcribes it into six lists. Here the six lists build themselves, and every one of them stays in step when a player withdraws.

A few things worth setting before you open entries:

• Entry limits per event, with a waiting list once an event fills
• Closing date, after which the form stops accepting entries
• Age and rating checks, which flag a player who has entered a grade they are not eligible for rather than silently accepting it

You can also take entries the way many clubs still do: on paper. If you collect a written entry form, type or paste the names in and ServeLeague matches them against your roster, creating any player it has not seen before.

Whichever way entries arrive, you can review the entry list for any event, add a late entrant, or withdraw somebody without touching the other events they entered.

Step 4: Run Each Night

Championship events are played across several nights, not all at once. When a night arrives, start the events scheduled for it. Their draws open together and the club is ready to play.

Seeding comes from your players' current ratings, so the strongest entrants are kept apart in the group stage without anyone having to argue about who should be top seed. Groups feed into the knockout automatically as they finish.

Scoring on the night does not need an app, an account or a password. Your championship has one four-digit scorer number. Whoever is running a table enters it, sees the matches currently in play, and enters the score. There is nothing to install and nobody to add as an admin.

If a night runs late or an event does not finish, you can close it and pick it up another night, or reschedule it entirely. Nothing else in the championship has to move.

Step 5: Finals Night

Most clubs save the deciding matches for one night. Set a finals night when you create the championship, and once the qualifiers are known you can start every final together, so the club has one evening with all the best matches on at once.

Finals night is also the moment a paper system usually falls apart, because somebody has to work out who qualified from six different draws. Here the draws have already done it.

Step 6: Champions, Results and Ratings

As each event finishes, its champion and runner-up are recorded and published to the championship page and to your club's champions board. Anyone can look up who won what, this year or five years ago.

The results page can be printed or circulated as it stands, so you have something to read out at prizegiving and something to send to members the next morning.

Because championship matches are real matches, every one of them feeds your club ratings when the championship is finalised. A player who has a breakout championship carries that into next season's league grading, instead of the result living in a spreadsheet that nothing else reads.

Championship or Tournament?

Both exist, and clubs use the words interchangeably in everyday speech, so it is worth being precise about which tool fits.

Run a championship when:

• You are running several separately entered events that belong together, such as Men's Singles and Mixed Doubles at the same club champs
• The events are spread across more than one night
• Players should enter several events on one form and pay once
• It is your annual club championship and you want a champions board

Run a tournament when:

• It is a single competition, even if it has seeded grades or divisions
• It runs as one event, typically on one day
• You need a one-off competition that is not part of the club's annual programme
• You are entering results from paper draw sheets after the fact

Both use the same competition engine underneath — round robin, knockout, group plus knockout, group crossover and full placement are all available either way, and the scoring and ratings behave identically. The difference is scope: a tournament is one competition, a championship is a collection of them with a shared entry form, schedule and results page.

If you set up a championship and later decide a single event would have been enough, nothing is lost — the event inside it behaves exactly as a tournament would.

What's Next

• Running a Tournament — for single one-off competitions
• Importing Players in Bulk — get your roster in before entries open
• PDF Exports and Match Sheets — print draw sheets for the control desk