People are very busy and unfortunately our players aren’t just hanging out next to their computers waiting for our emails. So how do you get out that important or inspiring message to your team? Thankfully everyone has a phone (yes, we know their could still be a few holdouts they don’t play tennis) and the quickest way to get that last minute message to your team is to call them! How do you call them all at once and not waste 20 minutes calling every player… you can use TennisPoint’s Voiceblast feature.

To voiceblast your team, all you do is call our toll-free 800 number and record your message which you would like to send out to your team. Voiceblaster walks you through recording your message to send to your team and even allows you to listen to it prior to sending and re-record if desired. Once you are happy with your message and send it to all your players, TennisPoint’s Voiceblaster calls everyone immediately and plays back your recorded message.

• If you have multiple teams on TennisPoint, no problem – it prompts you up front for which team you would like to voiceblast.
• If you already have a lineup for an upcoming match, you can choose to only call those in the lineup or call the entire team.
• Your recorded message is also left for their voice mail just in case they don’t answer it.

You can purchase Voiceblast credits in quantities as small as 3 blasts and up to 60 blasts. The credits never expire, so be sure you have have them when you need them.

“Hey all, remember we are playing at X place this coming Saturday”

“Hey all, good luck with the match this Saturday while I am out of town!”

“Guys, we are playing on courts 4 & 5 in this massive complex in the back corner when you get here.

“With the pouring rain we are canceled for today. Please send me an email with your availability this week and if you are out of town.”

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!!!

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

Where is this setting? You can set this when creating or editing a team – same place where you set the “auto nag email settings”.

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!