What a committee actually does with it, through one season
Members arrive in autumn, teams go in over the winter, the season runs through the spring and the committee changes in the summer. For each of those, SetMatcher has a part: the register, the team entries, the fixtures and the table, and the handover.
Autumn, winter, spring and summer, in the order a committee meets them.
Autumn: the register
Members are invited by email, one at a time or up to two hundred at once from a spreadsheet with five columns: email address, first name, last name, membership type and your own reference. The preview says what each line will do before anything is sent, and it never says whether an address already has an account here.
Nobody becomes a member until they accept with their own account, which is what keeps the register accurate: it is a list of people who said yes rather than a list of addresses somebody pasted. The membership types are yours to name, and a type that members still hold cannot be deleted.
Winter: the teams and the league
Teams are entered for the season and each squad is picked from the register, so nobody is typed in twice and everybody who plays already has a rating. A player may be in only one team per division, which is the rule every federation has and the one a spreadsheet never enforces.
Members can also put their own names down for a team through a link the committee shares, which turns the most tedious evening of the winter into a list that fills itself. Everybody on the committee can do all of this, because being an administrator of the club makes somebody an administrator of everything the club owns.
Spring: the season runs itself
The fixture list is made for you, with home and away balanced. The table updates after every result, counted the way your own federation counts it rather than the way one country counts it, and promotion and relegation are worked out at the end of the season.
A result entered by one side is confirmed by the other, and confirms itself after seventy-two hours if nobody objects, so the committee is not chasing anybody for a scoresheet. Every result also feeds the club’s own ranking for that sport, which is one list for the whole club rather than one per group.
Summer: the handover, and the club’s own page
When the committee changes, the club, a group or a competition is handed to the new person, and nothing changes until they accept. That is the whole of the succession problem solved: the club always has exactly one owner, even in the fortnight when the old treasurer has left and the new one has not yet said yes.
Summer is also when the club’s own page earns its keep, because that is when new members look. A club on SetMatcher Club can put its ranking, its fixtures, its results and a live board straight onto its own website with a snippet it pastes once, so the club’s site shows this season rather than last season’s screenshot.
Where to read next
More on the subjects you have just read about.
Your first match is one tap away.
Free for players. Clubs get a register, a park map, court bookings and lessons.