Tournament hosting is of paramount importance for tennis club management. It gives players valuable development experience, it promotes your club’s growth, and it can help pad your pocketbook. But planning a tournament is no walk in the park.  

Coordinating an event of that magnitude takes time, but we’ve broken out the five most important steps and outlined some strategies for optimizing the process. Check it out.

Step 1: Pick a Date

Before tackling any other to-do list items for your tennis tournament, you have to choose a date. As a rule of thumb, start with a date that works for you and your team, then reach out to potential participants to make sure their schedules are clear for that date.  

You want to set yourself up for success, and that means choosing a date that accommodates the maximum number of people. In addition to syncing up with your known potential participants, ask if they have anyone in their circles that they could recruit for the tournament.  

Since you won’t know the play times until you reach step 3, go ahead and ask your players to block off the entire day once you get confirmation of their participation. This allows you and your team to be flexible and to create a fair tournament.  

Step 2: Draft the Schedule

From a day-to-day operations perspective, tennis club leaders are pros when it comes to scheduling. Leverage that strength when hosting tennis tournaments.  

Once you have a date set and you’ve confirmed a number of players for the event, it’s time to get to work on drafting the schedule. The good news is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel here! There are plenty of round robin tournament schedules online to base yours off of.  

With the skeleton bracket in hand, begin by assigning times and courts to each match. If you’re managing multiple referees, it might also be worth noting the refs’ placements on this schedule for your internal team.

Step 3: Finalize the Schedule

Once you have an outline drafted and a good idea of who’s participating, you can start plugging in players or teams. The fairest way to approach this is by assigning each player or team a number and using a random number generator to determine who goes in which slot. You can also go old school and draw names from a hat.  

However you choose to approach the scheduling process, you should end with a bracket that shows each player or team’s first match, as well as their match start time.  

Step 4: Distribute the Schedule

Get the word out! The best way to contact players (and their parents, if you’re running a junior tennis tournament) is often email and text message. Make sure to get confirmation from each player that they’ve received the schedule, they know their match times, and they don’t have any conflicts that would result in a forfeited match.  

Step 5: Play On!

It’s time to hit the courts. Play each scheduled round in order, then tally the wins and losses as the teams or singles play.  

The most efficient way to run a tournament is to have multiple courts running games simultaneously, but if there are budget or court availability limitations, rotating between one or two courts will work fine.  

At the end of the tournament, the player or team with the most wins takes the cake, but in the event of a tie, you can use percentage of wins to losses or the result of the match between the two tied players as a tie breaker.  

Is Your Software Up for the Challenge?

Planning and hosting tennis tournaments is a hefty task for you and your team. To minimize the hours you pour into the tournament preparation process, you need a powerful tennis club management platform that’s streamlined and easy to use.  

‍Ready to take your tennis club management to the next level? Schedule a demo with Club Automation.