Run your tennis club
from one app.
Tennis is the sport where the roster is the rule. A high school lineup is an order rather than a list, it has to run from strongest to weakest, and whether today’s order is legal depends on what the order was at the last match. Almost nothing else a coach does in this sport is as consequential as getting that sequence right.
What a tennis season asks you to keep track of
An order, and its history. A varsity lineup is commonly three singles slots and two doubles teams, so seven players, and those slots have to be filled in order of decreasing strength: the number one singles player is at least as strong as number two, who is at least as strong as number three, and the same holds for the doubles teams. That is not a seeding convention. It is the rule the lineup is checked against, and the check is not a judgment about talent, it is a comparison with what you did last time.
How far anyone may move is a local rule, and it has a memory
A singles player does not jump from five to two because they have been playing well, and a doubles team does not either. Movement between consecutive matches is capped, and the cap applies across a window rather than to one match, so a coach who wants a player several slots higher by the county match has to plan the route from wherever that player is today. How far and for how long is the part we will not tell you: the documents stating it carry two organizations’ branding, every state writes its own in other sports, and we could not establish whose rule it is. Read the one your matches run under, because the order you may submit this week depends on it.
The order is usually settled by playing for it
Most programs run challenge matches on a team ladder, weekly or monthly, on the principle that the player who wins should hold the higher slot. It is the fairest way to answer a question that is otherwise the coach’s opinion, and it is also a second schedule: a ladder that runs every week books courts and a coach’s hours in the weeks the team is not playing anybody else. Programs that skip it are not being lazy. They are choosing between two kinds of argument.
Whose rules these are, and where to find them
This is the one sport we write about where the national federation does not write the rules. The federation points at the USTA’s rule book, and the USTA did not write them either: the Rules of Tennis belong to the International Tennis Federation, and the USTA is a member that may propose amendments rather than make them. So the document you want is the USTA’s published handbook of rules and regulations, which is where a high school coach and a club coach are sent by different routes to the same place. It also explains something that looks like a mistake and is not: a page carrying both the federation’s and the USTA’s logos is the normal state of high school tennis material, so you cannot use the branding to work out whose rule you are reading.
The junior eligibility date belongs to whoever sanctions the event
Rostered declares 1 January for tennis, which is the USTA standard the app cites, and it builds your divisions from that. Whether it is the date your events actually run on is a question for the body sanctioning them: junior tennis is also described as moving a player on the month of their birthday, and we could not establish which rule applies where. So read the one your tournaments use rather than inheriting ours. Where an event straddles a boundary, its start date is usually what decides.
What a roster can say about a tennis player, and what it cannot
Singles and doubles are not positions, they are formats, and a tennis player is not really either one for a season. We hold one value per athlete, so a roster here can tell you how somebody is mainly used and nothing about the order they are used in. That is the honest limit, and in this sport it is a bigger one than in most: the order is the part that carries the rule.
Rostered does not hold a ladder, a challenge-match result or last match’s lineup, so it cannot tell you whether the order you are about to submit is legal. That check is a function of history rather than of anybody’s current record, which is the same shape as a pitch count and a quarters-per-week limit, and it is the third time this season’s research has landed on it. We are also not scoring your match.
What we are for is everything around the order. One schedule for the program, with matches and practices attached to the teams they concern, so a family with a varsity player and a JV sibling sees their own week. Who has answered for the bus. Twelve division templates arrive configured, which matters more in a sport whose junior side has twelve age boundaries a year than it does anywhere else.
What tennis clubs get
- Formats
- Singles, Doubles
- Youth ages
- 8 to 18
- Governing bodies
- USTA, NFHS
- Also included
- Polls, volunteer jobs, release forms, in-app club email, translation, locations with the forecast.
- Cost to families
- Free. No ads.