Flex Leagues Now Supported
Flex Leagues are now supported in TennisPoint….but what is a Flex League?
A Flex League is a league which normally has a 1 or 2 week window to play a match and all players on both teams agree on a match date/time. In comparison, USTA leagues define all details about the match – where to play, which teams are playing and what time they must start — even with strict rules around being late. These strict time rules, fostered the creation of “Flex Leagues” where players get to set their own time to play and there are many great Flex Leagues – K-Swiss (UltimateTennis.com), LeagueTennis.com and T2Tennis.com and several others out there.
Getting 2 people to agree on a play time for their match is normally fairly easy, but getting 4 (doubles) to agree to a play time can be challenging. This gets compounded when players play in multiple Flex Leagues and we all have busy lives!
Up until today, players would try and schedule each Flex League match through email and phone calls, but we all know this isn’t the most effective way. In email, it is unfortunately easy to confuse match opponents and potentially end up incorrectly scheduling a match and possibly even have to forfeit the match due to this mistake.
The TennisPoint Power Scheduler is now available to help with these scheduling challenges! How would I use TennisPoint to manage your Flex League Matches?
1. Create New Team: Assuming you are already a TennisPoint member (if not signup here), then you will want to “Create a New Team”. This is a small form which gets the key details like which League, Doubles or Singles, number of matches and even doubles playing partner.
2. Create Team Schedule: When submitting your team, you can setup your match schedule. You will need to input the “play by” date, home or away, your opponent’s facility and your opponent emails. This step is VERY quick since we already have all the details about the facilities already in the databae and features like “auto-populate dates” mean you only need to select 1 date truly!
3. Please Set your Availability: To set the days you are available to play a match, we have created very quick and intuitive scheduler where you can check which days/times work for your scheduling your play time.
If your playing doubles, your playing partner does the same thing and can quickly see the dates you are available. Yes, the green boxes below are what my partner checked as available match times – very quick and easy!
4. Email Dates to Opponents: For doubles, once you both have agreed to X number of play times, then you need to email your opponents your available dates/times.
UH OH, Do my opponents need to be TennisPoint members? NO, we know that everyone isn’t a TennisPoint member yet! In the email, each opponent gets a custom URL which allows them to select their availability and schedule the match! When an opponent clicks on the URL, they will see custom page where they can choose the match time!
5. Once the match start time is set by all players, everyone gets an email with the agreed match date and start time with all the details like location and even directions there!
What are the gray and yellow balls on the scheduler? When you already have a match scheduled, we mark those time slots to ensure you can’t double book your matches!
