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!

Yes, this truly becomes a quick and easy way to manage your Flex League Matches!!!

As an ALTA tennis captain it has either happened to you or you know someone who it has happened to — losing points due to accidentally playing a player who is NOT registered in ALTA (altaTennis.org).  ALTA is understandably very strict about playing a non-registered player.  The rules specifically state that player must be registered before midnight the night before scheduled play — so for a Saturday morning match, a player must be registered in ALTA’s system by 11:59pm Friday night.

So what happens if you play a player who is NOT registered?  You lose the point from that match if it was won, but will also lose all points above it as well.  For instance, an unregistered player plays at line 4 and wins along with line 5 winning as well — the team will forfeit the points from line 4 & 5 to the other team.  Now lets compound this another step farther, with the mailed in scorecards, the coordinator might not alert you to the infraction for another week and could result in another week of point losses!  Unfortunately it could mount up to 4-10 points forfeited and also take a team out of contention for division winner and playoffs!  A really big bummer!

TennisPoint.com now alerts you [captain] when a player is NOT confirmed with our ALTA Roster Confirmation!

Lets walk through the specifics of the TennisPoint ALTA Roster Confirmation System. After creating your team & schedule, you will see a message like the following:

The first step is to click on “Click here to confirm players” and you will be prompted to enter your ALTA Team confirmation number and the captain’s ALTA number.  Example here:

Once you click on “Submit –> Player Confirmation”, TennisPoint will import in your ALTA roster from altaTennis.org and auto-match your players based off player ALTA # and full name.

After all the processing you get a nice confirmation page letting you know all the details like this:

You will notice based off the screen shot above that 3 players weren’t “auto-matched” and the captain has the ability to match these players up manually.

What about creating a lineup though for a match?  This is the important part because we show the captains who is NOT confirmed so that a player can be confirmed/registered BEFORE playing and keep the points won!

You will notice in the image to the right (the drop down to the right is shown in the create lineup page), the section stating “NOT Confirmed as ALTA Registered” and these player(s) need to be confirmed in TennisPoint as ALTA Registered first.

We have a feeling that the TennisPoint ALTA captains will REALLY appreciate this peace of mind!!!  Any questions around this powerful new feature let us know.

Have great matches out on the courts!

TennisPoint Member Services

All,

We have created a new blog to allow everyone to stay informed to the new details that we are creating. We will still send out an email to captains/players monthly with updates about what new features we have pushed live. We will also list them here in real-time so that people are able to view them sooner.

What will we have here? We will give users tips on how to better use TennisPoint.com to manage their team. We will also information on upgrades, features and system upgrades (small planned downtimes).

Comments or Questions? Yes, please do go ahead and post your questions or comments as well — we do welcome them!