How to run your padel club league by levels (plus weekly Americanos) without retyping rosters

Most in-house padel leagues don't fail because of the format. They fail on logistics. The club opens sign-ups, someone builds a spreadsheet of pairs, another one for levels, a group chat per division, and every Friday, for the Americano, someone writes the names of the same twenty regulars on a whiteboard again. By week three nobody knows which version of the spreadsheet is the real one. This guide takes one concrete case and solves it end to end: what to decide before sign-ups open, how many rounds you get, what to do when a pair doesn't show up, and how to close the season with promotion and relegation.

The case: 24 pairs, three divisions and a Friday Americano

A club with four courts wants two things running at the same time this autumn:

• A fixed-pairs league split by level, for people who want to compete seriously with the same partner all season.
• A social Americano on Friday evenings, open to whoever turns up, with partners rotating every round.

24 pairs sign up. These are two different activities with overlapping players: plenty of members play both. So the question isn't only which format to use (we covered that in Americano vs fixed pairs), but how to run both without doing the work twice.

Step 1: decide the divisions before sign-ups open

The number of pairs per division drives almost everything: how many weeks the league lasts and how many courts you need each week. In a single round-robin, a division of n pairs needs n − 1 rounds (if n is odd, n rounds, with one pair sitting out each week).

Pairs per division	Rounds (single round-robin)	Matches per round	Notes
4	3	2	Too short: it ends before it gets going.
6	5	3	Good for a 5–6 week block.
7	7	3	One pair sits out every week.
8	7	4	The sweet spot for an autumn or spring season.
10	9	5	Over two months: no-shows start to hurt.

With 24 pairs, the natural choice is three divisions of 8: 7 rounds, 4 matches per division per week, 12 matches a week in total. With four courts, three 90-minute slots cover a full round for all three divisions. A division of 7 or 9 is fine, but know it before you promise dates.

To place pairs in the right division, self-assessment is the least reliable option. A better one is a placement Americano beforehand: you see everyone play in a single session, and the individual standings give you a first ranking you then adjust by eye.

Step 2: one club roster, not one list per activity

This is where most clubs lose their time: every activity keeps its own list of names. The alternative is a single club roster that both the league and the Americanos draw from.

In LeagueMakerApp that's an organization: the club's own space, with its own public page. You add players once (you can paste them all at once, one per line) and build pairs from them. From then on:

• When you create the league inside the organization, you enroll pairs from the roster instead of typing them again.
• In the Americano each player competes on their own: add them once as club participants, and every Friday enroll whoever came.
• The league pairs stay in the roster for next season and for any other club event.

If you had already set the league up as a standalone competition, you don't need to rebuild it: it can be moved into the organization with its pairs and results.

Step 3: the league, one division per category

The three divisions aren't three separate leagues but three categories of the same league: they share a name, rules and page, and each has its own schedule and standings. When you create the competition, pick the league format, type the category names (say "Division 1", "Division 2", "Division 3"; up to six) and, once pairs are enrolled, assign them to their category before generating the schedule.

Two decisions worth writing into the rules before round one:

• Tiebreakers. Padel has no draws, so the table is ordered by wins. The usual tiebreakers are head-to-head, then set difference and game difference. Write it down even if it seems obvious: the argument always comes in the final round.
• No-shows. A pair that doesn't turn up loses by walkover: it's recorded as such, with whatever administrative score your rules set, and marked that way in the schedule. Also decide whether postponements are allowed and until when: without a deadline, the league never ends.

Step 4: the Friday Americano

The Americano is a separate competition inside the same organization: partners rotate every round and scoring is individual. With 16 players and four courts nobody sits out; numbers that aren't a multiple of four still work, but someone rests each round. Since the players are already in the club roster, setting up each Friday's event is a matter of ticking who came, not copying names. The step-by-step is in the padel Americano guide.

One thing that works well for club life: the Americano doubles as a feeder for the league. Whoever shows up every Friday and stands out is the natural candidate to move up a division next season, even if their usual partner never played the league.

Step 5: closing the season, promotion and relegation

After the last round, each division has its final standings. The most common rule in club leagues is simple:

• The top two pairs in each division move up (except in Division 1).
• The bottom two move down (except in the lowest division).
• New pairs join the division that matches their placement Americano.

With divisions of 8, moving two up and two down refreshes a quarter of each group every season: enough to keep the level even without starting from scratch every autumn. If a division ends up lopsided because of dropouts, adjust by hand rather than applying the rule blindly.

When you open the next season, enrolled pairs are copied over; what isn't copied is the category assignment, precisely because it changes. Place each pair in its new division based on the final standings and generate the schedule. Today that reshuffle is manual; applying it automatically from the standings is on our roadmap.

What members see

Everything above is organizer work. What changes for members is that they stop asking in the group chat: the club page brings together its competitions (the league, with each division's standings, and every Friday's Americano), upcoming matches, latest results and club news. Every pair can check when and against whom they play, and the rules are published on the competition itself.

Quick summary

1. Split pairs into divisions of 6 to 8: with 8 you get 7 rounds and 4 matches per division per week.
2. Keep a single club roster and have both the league and the Americanos draw from it.
3. Run the league with one division per category: same rules, separate schedule and standings.
4. Put tiebreakers, walkovers and postponements in writing before round one.
5. At the end, two up and two down per division, and reassign before generating the next season.

If you'd like to see how the club side works before setting anything up, the organizations documentation covers roster, roles and the public page.