Draw the park once, and every court has a place
The committee traces its own ground on the aerial photograph: the outline, tennis, padel and pickleball courts at their true size, the clubhouse, the paths and the gate, and the floor plan of a hall with courts under a roof. Published, the map gives every court a place a player can be told.
Courts at true size on the real ground, halls with floor plans, and a way in.
Drawn on the real ground, in metres
The map is a survey rather than a sketch. The committee finds the club’s address, and the aerial photograph of that ground appears under the canvas: in the Netherlands the national aerial survey, elsewhere satellite imagery, both fetched by SetMatcher’s own server so that no visitor’s browser ever talks to a map company. A plain background is there for a committee that would rather draw without it.
The ground is drawn in five stages, in order: the outline of the park, the courts, the buildings and paths, the indoor halls, and a review. A tennis court is 18.3 by 36.6 metres, a padel court 10 by 20 and a pickleball court 6.1 by 13.4, and a court cannot be drawn at any other size, which is what keeps a map honest. Courts are placed one at a time or as a row, turned, duplicated, tidied into line, and given a number, a surface and lights.
The draft saves itself on every change, and two committee members with the builder open cannot overwrite each other: a save names the version it was built on and is refused when that version has moved on. Undo and redo are there, and so is starting over.
A hall has a floor plan of its own
A hall is a footprint on the map and a floor plan inside it: up to five levels, each with its courts, its rooms (a reception, changing rooms, a gallery) and its stairs, and a door on one of its walls. The courts inside are the same courts as outside, at the same true sizes, so an indoor court on the sheet is an indoor court on the map.
The map keeps the run-off a court needs beside it and behind it, and says so when two courts are closer than that, indoors or out. That is a warning rather than a refusal, because a real hall is sometimes tighter than the rules would like and the committee knows its own hall.
Publishing checks the map, then names the courts
A map is published when it passes the checks a player would notice: an outline, exactly one entrance, every court numbered and no number twice, nothing drawn on top of anything else, every hall with a door and at least one court on a floor. What it merely warns about, it publishes anyway: a court outside the outline, a court no path reaches, a court with no surface.
Publishing writes the club’s courts. A court on the map that carries the name of a court on the club’s sheet becomes that court, so a club that already books its courts does not get a second set; a court the club did not have yet is made. From then on the map and the sheet name the same courts.
And each court gets a sentence: which row it is in, which position, which side of the path, and whether it is indoors and on which floor. That sentence is what a player is told, and it is worked out from the drawing rather than typed by anybody.
What a player sees, and what the map does not do
A player opens the published map with the courts numbered and nothing else, and the committee can look at the map exactly as a player will before publishing it. A draft can be shared with somebody who is not on the committee, to be looked at rather than changed.
The map does not schedule anything. The order of play on a tournament day is planned onto the courts of the group running the event, not onto the club’s map, and a booking on the sheet is a booking on a named court rather than on a drawing. The map is there so that a court has a place, and a person can be sent to it.
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