For organizers
A person sets up your first ladder with you
There is no wizard on this page. You tell us about your group. Then somebody at Deuce Ladder builds the ladder with you, runs your numbers to see whether they hold up, and tells you if they do not.
That is deliberate, and it is temporary. Self-serve setup is coming. It is not here yet because what separates a ladder that fills from one that empties out is almost never the software. It is whether ten or twelve specific people join in the first fortnight, and there is not much a setup wizard can do about that.
One thing you should know before you read any further, because you are the one carrying the risk here. Deuce Ladder is new. Your city probably has no ladder on it. Your country might not either, and the city page for your town may not exist until your ladder creates it. Apply and you are very likely the first person near you doing this. So read everything below as a promise about work we will do alongside you, not as a hint that there is already a crowd waiting.
The failure mode is documented, not guessed at. The vendor with more ladder installations than anyone else says so in its own organizer guide:
Stale players who never respond to or issue challenges are the reason ladders fail.
Source: ladder software vendor organizer guide, captured July 2026
That is a software company saying, in its own documentation, that its software is not the deciding factor. Ours is not either. The deciding factor is whether ten or twelve people who can reach the same courts are in it and playing.
How to start a tennis ladder, in the order it happens
This part is not specific to Deuce. Run it on a spreadsheet and you still do the same six things in roughly the same order, and the order matters more than the tool does.
Last reviewed {{HOWTO_REVIEWED}}. The numbers in it, the ten-player floor and the season lengths, are the ones in our own ruleset, and they change here the day they change there.
1. Count the players you can name. Not the club membership list, which is a fiction in most clubs. The people you could text tonight and hear back from. Ten is the floor. Twelve is about where the thing starts running without you, because at twelve there is always somebody worth challenging who happens to be free on Thursday.
2. Work out your court supply before anything else. How many courts you can reach, how many hours a week they are gettable, and whether booking is members-only, public, or pay-per-hour. Court hours are a hard ceiling on the number of matches your ladder can physically produce. Fourteen players sharing one court on Wednesday evenings will spend the season waiting rather than playing. Court hours are the number organizers skip past, and they are where most ladders quietly stall out.
3. Sort your players into level bands. One ladder spanning a beginner and an open player will lose the beginner inside a month. Get this wrong and it is recoverable: a band can be added to a running ladder, and when a player lands on your ladder page whose level sits below your lowest band, Deuce forwards their request to you rather than turning them away. Adding a band mid-season is a great deal easier than starting a second ladder from scratch. On Deuce, everyone uses the same five plain descriptions, players and organizers both:
- New to competitive tennis: can rally and serve, has never played a match where the score counted
- Plays social sets: weekend tennis with friends, sets that finish 6-4 either way
- Plays club matches: holds a spot in a club team, or plays regular competitive singles
- Plays at the top of the club or above it: open events, county or sectional level, former college player
- Has a rating and knows it: NTRP, UTR, WTN, an LTA rating, an ITN, a national federation ranking, or a club level
4. Set the rules and write them down once. Challenge range, how long a player has to answer, how long they then have to play, match format, what happens when somebody goes away for three weeks. Written down badly, these become arguments. Written down at all, they mostly do not.
5. Pick a season length and an end date. Six, eight, ten or twelve weeks. Open-ended ladders stop mattering to the people on them somewhere around week ten, and that is the reason sixteen weeks is not on the list.
6. Seed the order, then let the first round fix it. Your guess at the starting order will be wrong in places. That is fine and it is expected. What matters is that a misplaced player can correct it by playing, rather than by lobbying you.
How the format works, start to finish The full ruleset
On Deuce, steps 2 through 6 get done with you on a call. Step 1 stays yours. No software is going to make those ten phone contacts on your behalf, and any product that implies otherwise is selling you something.
Who this is for
- A club pro or committee member running a ladder for members, or reviving the one that stopped being updated in about April.
- A volunteer captain with a group chat, a standing Saturday game, and a spreadsheet you have had enough of.
- A park or public courts regular who knows fifteen people by first name and nothing else about them.
- A company or campus group that wants something competitive without needing everyone free on Tuesdays.
- A coach whose students have taken lessons for years and never played a match that counted.
You do not need to be a club, and you do not need a booking system or a website. A budget is not required either, and neither is affiliation with any association.
Who this is not for, yet
The first case is fewer than ten players you can name. Ten who might be interested does not count. Ten you could text tonight and expect a reply from does. Under ten, a ladder produces mismatches, stalls, and burns the credibility you spent asking people to join it. Come back when you have a couple more names, or leave your details on the player page and we will tell you if somebody else nearby starts one first.
The second is a group where nobody will send the first challenge. Ladders need players who act without being told to. If your group only plays tennis when you personally arrange each match, month one of a ladder will not change that, and you will end up doing the arranging on a new screen.
If one of those two is you, we will say so. A dead ladder with your name on it costs you more than a month of waiting costs you, and it costs us more than a lost signup does.
The application, field by field
If you have read this far, this is the part that takes five minutes.
Eleven questions plus a free-text box at the end. You can answer every one of them from memory.
| Field | Type | Required | Why we ask |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your name | Text | Yes | You are the organizer on the ladder page |
| Yes | Where the reply goes | ||
| Phone or WhatsApp | Text | No | Faster for the setup conversation. Skip it if you would rather not |
| City | Text with postcode option | Yes | Sets the city page your ladder appears on, and the time zone for every deadline |
| How many players you can name | Number, with bands under 10, 10 to 15, 16 to 30, 31 to 60, 60 plus | Yes | The single strongest predictor of whether a ladder survives. Drives one ladder or several |
| Level range | Multi-select of the same five plain descriptions players see, plus a free-text note | Yes | Determines how many level bands you need. A group spanning beginner to open needs two or three |
| Courts you can get | Number of courts, plus how many hours a week, plus whether booking is members-only, public, or pay-per-hour | Yes | Court supply caps match volume. This is where most ladders actually stall |
| Singles, doubles, or both | Select | Yes | Doubles ladders rank fixed pairs for the season, and the rules differ. We need to know before we build |
| Target start date | Date, plus "as soon as possible" | Yes | Sets the season dates and how hard we push the fill |
| Season length | Select: 6 weeks, 8 weeks, 10 weeks, 12 weeks, not sure | No | "Not sure" is a fine answer. We will recommend one |
| Existing ladder to move over | File upload (.xlsx, .csv) or a Google Sheets link | No | If you already run one, we import the standing order so nobody re-earns their rung |
| Anything else | Free text | No | Where the useful information usually is |
That is the whole application. No company size, no budget question, no "how did you hear about us," no phone number gate.
After you apply, four windows
Within one business day, a reply from a person. Not an autoresponder pointing you at a help center. It will name the one thing about your group we want to talk through, and nine times out of ten that is either your court supply or how wide your level spread is.
Within three business days, a 20-minute conversation. A call if you want one, messages if you would rather. We go through your player count, your courts, your level spread and your start date, and at the end of it you get a straight answer on whether to run one ladder or two. If we think you are short, we tell you where and by how many.
Within two business days of you sending names, your ladder exists. Configured and seeded, with a public standings page at a permanent URL and your rules printed on it. You also get an invite link and a QR code, which exist because half the people you need to reach will join from a photo of a noticeboard rather than from an email.
Your first challenge goes out inside two weeks of applying, assuming you get your names to us in the first week. Hold us to that one in particular.
Those four windows were last reviewed July 2026. They are set against how many applications one person can genuinely answer in a day. If the queue ever runs longer than that, this page says so with a real revised number before you apply rather than after.
And if a window gets missed anyway, reply to the thread and say so. There is no support tier and no ticket queue to escalate through. Missing one of these is a failure we would rather hear about from you on day two than discover in a churn report in October.
The specific work a person does with you
Concierge usually means a sales call, so here is the actual list.
Tells you one ladder or several. Past roughly twenty players, a single ladder starts producing matches neither player wants, because the spread between the top and the bottom of one long ladder gets too wide for the challenge range to bridge. Two bands of fifteen usually generate more played matches than one ladder of thirty. This is a judgment call from your level spread, not a formula, and we will tell you which way we are leaning and why.
Sets your rules, then argues with you about them. Challenge range, response window, play window, match format, rematch cooldown, decay rate, absence policy, season dates, playoff or no playoff. Our defaults are five rungs up, 48 hours to respond and ten days to play, because that is the working consensus across still-operating club ladders. Then we tune them to your courts. If you only get four hours of court time a week, a ten-day play window is the wrong number and we will change it.
Seeds the starting order. Send levels if you have them, in any format: NTRP, UTR, WTN, an LTA rating, an ITN, a national federation ranking, your own club level, or a list in the order you think they would finish. If you have none of that, we start you alphabetically. Every player's first challenge reaches any rung inside their own band, on every Deuce ladder, with no way to turn it off, so the ladder sorts itself in two weeks. That is faster and much less political than you guessing.
Moves your spreadsheet over by hand. Say what this is and is not. It is not an instant import and there is no upload button that does it for you. You send the sheet in whatever shape it is in, a person here reads it and does the parsing pass, and then you approve the result before a single player sees it. Your standing order becomes the starting rungs, and whatever match history is in the sheet comes across as played matches, so nobody has to re-earn a rung they already earned once. Any entry that is not a valid tennis scoreline comes across as a result with no scoreline attached, because we will not invent numbers to make an import look tidy.
Then there is the writing, which is the part organizers underestimate every time. Explaining a ladder to twenty people over text is harder than it sounds, so we hand you the words: a joiner email that explains the format, a one-page printable explainer carrying your ladder's real rules, and the paragraph you paste straight into the group chat.
Watches the first three weeks with you. We can see whether challenges are going out and, more to the point, whether they are turning into played matches. When those two numbers come apart, that is the early warning sign, and it usually means the play window is too short for the courts your group can book. If your ladder is quiet in week two we tell you the specific thing to do about it, because week two is when a ladder decides whether it is alive.
The full ruleset How rungs and ratings move
Bring a list of names
A list of names, and that really is all of it. First name, last name, email. Screenshot your group chat member list if that is easiest. Send the spreadsheet if you already keep one. Photograph the signup sheet taped up in the clubhouse and we will type it in ourselves.
Optional, useful if you have it:
- Levels or ratings, in any format
- Your current ladder or league standings
- Which courts you use and roughly when they are free
- Phone numbers, if your group answers texts and ignores email
You do not need a website, a booking system, a logo, a constitution, or a payment method.
The thing you are worried about, and it is not setup
Not setup. Nobody has ever quit organizing because configuring a ladder was hard. The fear is sending a message to twenty people, putting your name on it, and having four join.
So take the fear seriously and answer it in order.
Software does not fill a ladder. Nobody here is going to pretend otherwise. Ladders fill because you ask people you already play with, face to face or by name in a chat. A poster on the clubhouse wall gets read and then ignored, whereas most people find it genuinely hard to say no to the person they hit with on Saturday mornings.
Ten is the floor and twelve is the target. Those are two different numbers doing two different jobs. Ten is the point below which we will not build you a ladder, because below ten the same people play each other over and over and it stops being interesting. Twelve is where a ladder stops needing you, because at twelve there are always two or three people worth challenging who are free this week. You will find your twelve in the people already standing at your courts: the regulars, the Saturday morning group, the social hitters who have never played anything with a score, and the parents killing an hour at the side of a junior lesson.
There is one thing we do that you cannot do for yourself. Your ladder gets a public standings page that is indexed, readable with no login, listed on the city page for {{CITY}} and carried in the browse directory. Players searching for a ladder near them find yours without you lifting a finger. At launch, do not expect much of it. That channel is slow and it will not fill your first season. It compounds, though, and it is the reason every standings page on Deuce is public rather than behind an account.
Before any of it, we tell you if we think your group is too small. Read that as the promise it is. Losing your application costs us less than putting your name on a ladder that empties out in six weeks, because a failed ladder in a city makes the next one there harder for everybody, including us.
You do not have to take our word for the arithmetic either. Put your player count, your court hours and your season length into the simulator and it shows you the match volume to expect and the point where the ladder stalls. No account, no email, and it runs in the page.
How much of your week this costs, for the next ten
The question nobody asks on the call and everybody wants answered. The split works out like this.
Week one asks something real of you. Getting ten or twelve people to actually join means texting them one at a time, then chasing the four who meant to and forgot. Budget an hour, spread over a few days. We write the messages for you. You are the one who sends them, because a text from you gets answered and a notification from a tennis platform gets swiped away.
After week one the load falls away, because a ladder does not need you to arrange the matches. Players challenge each other directly. The deadlines are run by the software, and the standings redraw themselves the moment a score is confirmed. What is left on your plate is a handful of decisions a month, most of them small: approving somebody's request to join, granting an absence asked for outside the usual valve, deciding whether a disputed score stands. In an ordinary week that is about fifteen minutes.
Two things stay yours, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. When two players fall out over a score, you are the one they both look at. The published penalty for falsifying a score exists partly so that you have a rule to point at instead of an opinion to defend. The other one is the quiet week. If the ladder goes still in week two, somebody has to say something in the group chat, and that somebody is you. We will tell you when the moment has arrived and roughly what to say. The message still has to come from a person your players know.
What running one looks like day to day
When the season ends, nothing resets
Your standings carry over, which is the part organizers do not expect and it matters more than it sounds.
A club ladder run on a spreadsheet usually resets every year, because the sheet gets archived, the volunteer changes, and nobody wants to defend last year's order. So every spring the ladder cold-starts, the same arguments happen again, and the players who were on it in October have to be recruited a second time.
On Deuce the ladder is a permanent page. When a season closes, the final order becomes the starting order for the next one, the played matches stay readable at the same URL, and you choose the next season's length and start date. Players who drift off do not have to be re-sold on the format, only on the date.
Closing a ladder for good is also fine, and the page stays up afterward with its final standings on it rather than turning into a dead link. Somebody will search for it in two years. An archived page is more use to them, and to you, than a 404.
Why this is not self-serve yet
Two reasons, both practical.
The first ladder is the only genuinely hard one, and the choices that decide whether it works do not look important while you are making them. A twelve-day play window against two hours of court time a week produces walkovers instead of matches. One ladder stretched from beginner to open produces four people quitting in month one. A person catching either of those on day one costs nothing. A form that does not catch them costs you your first season.
The second reason is that we are still learning what the defaults should be. Every application teaches us something about court supply, level spreads and season lengths that a dropdown would have flattened. When the defaults are right, setup goes self-serve and this page turns into a form. It gets logged when it does. What has shipped so far →
There is a real cost to you in this. You wait a day or two instead of clicking your way to a ladder the same evening. And if talking to somebody is the part you would rather skip, write that in the free-text box. We will configure the whole thing from your answers and send you the link.
Money, and what applying commits you to
Last section, and probably the first thing you scrolled down here to find.
Pricing is not published yet. There is no number on this page and none is going to be invented to fill the gap, because a made-up figure on an application page is how you lose an organizer permanently.
What is settled is this. You see the price before you are asked to commit to anything. There is no demo call standing between you and the number. Applying costs nothing, and applying is not agreeing to anything. If we decline, or if you read the reply and change your mind, say so and your application and your list of names get deleted. We do not keep a pipeline of people who said no.
One more thing worth doing before you hand over a list of your friends' email addresses: go and look at the thing you will be given. Every ladder on Deuce has a public standings page, and the directory is open with no account. What lands in your group chat is a page like those, with your rules on it and your players in it.
Browse real ladder pages → Pricing → Common questions → How we handle your data →
Other pages, depending on which of these you are
You want to play, not organize. Find a ladder near you, or find out honestly that there is not one yet. Find a ladder →
You want to see the format first. Every ladder on Deuce has a public standings page. Browse ladders →
You manage a club or sit on a committee. Several ladders, member retention, court utilization, branding, member data. For clubs →
You coach. Getting students into matches that count. For coaches →
You want the bookkeeping detail before you apply. What leaves your plate, and what runs itself. For organizers →