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

With Fall ALTA just around the corner we thought it would be a good idea to review the ALTA Sandbagging rules since their is really tooooooo much confusion around this and the examples on it are very vague unfortunately. Let us review the existing rules that are in place from ALTA:

1. A previously played (win or lose) pairing can only go up OR down 1 line together — ie: line 2 to 3.
2. Regardless of previously winning or losing, a single player in a NEW pairing can only go up OR down 2 lines — ie: line 1 to line 3.
3. A losing pair can NOT be moved up 1 line while a winning pair goes down 1 line — aka true sandbagging by possibly putting the weaker line up higher and the stronger line lower trying to get a win/point.

Well that really is not that many rules - granted we are only talking about sandbagging rules (Adult ALTA rules & Junior ALTA rules) and they can get really complicated quickly as the season moves along. Let us look at a good example:

A little information about the image above… Each match day has 5 lines each with 1 pairing (10 people). I labeled the pairings with letters and colored them green for a WIN and red for a LOSS — Purple is an ILLEGAL move. The assumption is that I have to create a lineup for week 4…. so lets analyze the details week by week:

• Week 1: All the pairings are new so anyone can play with anyone anywhere — EASY.
• Week 2: Now the rules start kicking in since pairings have been created and player lines defined.
  • Pair B moved down 1 line - legal since the pair went down 1 line and the pairing above them (line 2) was a NEW pairing (Pair X)
  • Pair Y is also a new one at line 5 which is fine as well
• Week 3: Pair X moved from line 2 to line 1 which was a legal move
  • Pair B moved up 1 line from week 2 which was a legal move as well
  • Line 4 has an illegal move since one player from pairing A moved from line 1 to line 4 — the lowest the player could go down was to line 3.
    • If this was truly played then the team would lose points for line 4 AND line 5 — wow that would suck!
• Week 4: LOTS going on here with the proposed lineup!
  • Line 2 is an ILLEGAL move (Pair A last at line 1 for week 2 and Pair X previously at line 1 for week 3) when Pair B is moved above since the pairing (B) lost in week 2. If we go back up to our ALTA sandbagging rules above these moves violate rule 3.
  • Line 3 stayed in the same position so no problem.
  • Line 4 stayed in the same position (last paired together on week 2) so no problem as well.
  • Line 5 is an ILLEGAL move as well since the pair was together on week 1 at line 3 and can ONLY go up/down 1 line. Notice that this rules goes back to the LAST time played together and in this case it was on week 1.

You will notice by the examples above that it can get pretty crazy real quick! Imagine also have a good lineup (all 5 lines) created correctly and have one of your players in line 2 say they can not play last minute — if you do not use a software like TennisPoint will you remember all the previous weeks to ensure a legal move?

Why is it important to NOT make an illegal move? It is VERY important because from the line where the error was made and above, ALL points earned will be stripped! For instance, if an illegal move happened at line 2 and lines 2, 3, 4 & 5 won that day then your coordinator will be calling you to tell you about your illegal move and that all points earned for lines 2 - 5 will go to your competitor!

When creating my lineups on TennisPoint do I have think about it? You will want to think about it for planning purposes and TennisPoint will perform sandbagging check to keep you safe as well!

ALTA Captains can now send out scorekeeper emails directly from the application. The form used to send out emails is still the same email form with now a place to record the scorekeepers email and have it saved for future use as well. Another great feature is the captain does not need to worry about giving out lineup details either, becuase the points reported are purely aggregated totals.

Example email:

Personalized email text from captain…

Match #3 on 6-15-2008

• Terrell Mill TC [Smith]: 3 Pts
• Avalon Tennis Center: 2 Pts

How do you send out this email:?

1. In the lineup grid click on Email Points/Lineup

2. Fill in the Scorekeepers Email

3. Enter in your email details (subject & body)

4. Select the Scorekeeper Email Radio Button at bottom and then click Send Email Button.

All of your teams are auto-archived off approximately 10 days after the LAST scheduled match… regular season or playoff date.

Yes, you can still view the team though and all the details for it… you now have a drop down at the top of the “All Matches” page which states: “Completed Seasons”. You can select any/all past matches and reference them as much as you like. The great thing is your stats are NOT archived off and stay in your Stats view season after season.

If you did happen to set some facilities in your schedule for playoffs and did NOT play them, then this date will still be used for the last day. Here is a good example:

Last Regular season match play: 5/9/2008

Playoff match date with a facility (schedule edited and place holder put in): 5/16/2008 & 5/30/2008

Your team will auto-archive 10 days AFTER the last scheduled match (5/30/2008). If you want to speed up this auto-archiving process, edit the team’s schedule and delete the playoff matches that were NOT played… then the new “last match date” is back to 5/9/2008.

Yes, you can now make the other players availability private to only the captains and coaches. The default setting is for the availability of each player on the team, to be visible to all team players.

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

Do you happen to have a player or two that forgets to set their availability for matches? Now you can setup your team to automatically email those players that haven’t set their availability for an upcoming match. The great thing is the captain(s) can create a custom email to the players with no set availability and even define the time before the scheduled match to send the email. Here is a screen shot of that area when creating/editing a team:

An example would be…. I want to send out an email 9 days before our next scheduled match to players who haven’t set their availability. My Email would look like this:

“John,

Please take 2 minutes and set your availability for upcoming matches on TennisPoint.com. I would like to create the lineup ASAP.

Click here to login automatically into your account and click on “Set Availability” please.

Thanks,
Jeremy”

NOTE: The personalized yellow highlighted text above will be INSERTED by TennisPoint when the email is sent. All that you need to do is put in your “generic” message and yes you can have fun with this message since the ONLY one that will see it is you and the “offending” player.

Well for those teams that are making it into ALTA playoffs… CONGRATS!!! For the teams that have made it to the playoffs before know that ALTA uses averages of the line numbers each player has previously played — when you win a line, you get the number for that line and if you lost, you add a .5 to it. For instance, if a player played line 1 and won the first week and played line 1 the second week and lost, the player would have a calculation like this: (1 + 1.5)/2 = 1.25 for that players average.

When creating each line, you take the averages from all the previous matches played for both of that players at that line combined.

To some this may seem a little complicated. The great thing is TennisPoint.com handles all the playoff calculations for you.

If you want to view the averages for all your players or even export the numbers to an Excel Spreadsheet, go to the “Create Lineup” or “Edit Lineup” page and click on the “View ALTA Playoff Numbers” link. You will then get a page like this:

Normally the captain has to take the numbers above (from image) and put them into a spreadsheet and spend tooooo many hours playing with the lineup to ensure all the “player averages” are in the correct order — smallest to largest.

TennisPoint.com makes creating your playoff lineups VERY simple and painless as well! If you would like to start planning BEFORE you have your playoff schedule from the coordinator, edit your schedule and put in a facility for the first playoff (remember you can edit it once the coordinator give you your official competitor without affecting lineups). After you submit your changes to the schedule, (the addition of the facility name for playoffs) you will notice that Playoff 1 shows up in your “all matches” view. Now when you click on Create Lineup you will notice the ALTA playoff Numbers in there based off the players you choose. Here is a snippet of the create lineup:

FYI, the demo account has already had the schedule updated so that the Playoff 1 is visible in there (it has a facility name for the competitor). Feel free to play around with the account since the data is reset every hour.

Any questions about the creation of lineups for playoffs let us know.

Regards,

TennisPoint.com Staff

We have all been there before when you have to default a line… sometimes a few too many are on vacation. Tennispoint makes it easy now for you to still create a lineup and correctly show the default without any players getting mad at you for having them in there.

When you you select the players in the drop down for creating a lineup look at the VERY bottom of the list. You will notice a player call “Defaulting Line”. Select the defaulting line player for both of the entries if it is a doubles line. FYI, no sandbagging checks will be made for the defaulting line either or mess up your playoff points calculations if you make playoffs.

FYI, for those that created their own default players to do this you no longer need to, but will still need to keep those default/retire players in there for this team

In the past we would manually edit a team’s details (division, level, etc) and now you can now edit your team’s details on your own. You will notice that the team names on top of the matches are boxed in now and captains are able to click on the “edit team” link on the top right corner.