The dink.one League Manual

A league is one event with a season attached. That sounds like a technicality and it is not: it means everything you already know about running an event here — registration, payment, check-in, scoring — works the same way inside a league, and the league layer only adds the parts that are genuinely league-shaped, like fixtures and standings.

Four things stack up, and it is worth being able to name them because the console uses these words:

This is the one decision that changes everything downstream, because it decides what an "entry" actually is.

Most leagues want teams. Pairs and individuals exist for formats where a roster would be overhead rather than help — a singles ladder, a fixed-partner doubles season.

None of this needs to be final. Rough numbers are enough to get set up, and everything here can be changed before you publish.

Start where you would start anything else — the events list in your manage console. Create the event, then turn on team play. That reveals the league console: seven tabs covering teams, schedule, courts, standings, playoffs, compliance and settings.

Everything you run lives on that one list with its status on the row, so a season in progress, a one-off tournament and a draft you have not published yet are all visible together rather than in separate places.

A session is one scheduled time teams play. Say how many the season runs and that single number drives the schedule, the standings, the public page and what players are told they are paying for.

If your league does not run on a clean weekly cadence — a skip week for a holiday, a double-header — set the count to the number of times people actually play, then adjust individual dates on the schedule. The count is the truth; the calendar is the arrangement.

You can charge the team, charge each player, or both. What a team owes is whichever figure is larger, so "both" behaves as a floor plus a per-head rate rather than double-charging.

Whichever you pick, members can pay their own share and the captain can settle for anyone who will not. That combination is what stops the captain fronting the whole entry and chasing it back all season.

You can cap a team's average rating, band individual players, or both. As captains build rosters they see where they stand against your cap, and entries arrive flagged rather than needing you to work it out.

Both warn rather than block, and that is deliberate. A hard block refuses the newcomer with three matches and a wide confidence band — who is exactly the player you want in a social division — while doing nothing about the experienced player who has simply not logged results here yet. Judgement beats arithmetic on this one, so we give you the arithmetic and leave the judgement to you.

Three settings decide how a result becomes official, and they are worth setting deliberately because changing them mid-season is visible to everyone.

For a social league, let captains report and count results provisionally — people want the table on the drive home. For anything where the table decides promotion or prize money, wait for confirmation.

Share one link. A captain follows it, claims a team, names it, and starts inviting players. They can build the roster while waiting for your approval, so nobody is blocked on you.

A player can hold one claimed team per league, enforced with a lock — two people racing to claim the same side cannot both end up captain, and the loser finds out at the moment they try rather than after building a roster.

Captains are doing you a favour and the software should act like it. They get their own console covering the four jobs, and a needs-attention list so they are not holding a season in their head.

Worth telling captains up front: they can add a co-captain. Captaining alone for a whole season is how people quietly stop volunteering.

Open the Teams tab, look at the roster and the eligibility read-out, then approve or decline with a reason. The captain sees the decision either way.

A team over your cap is a conversation, not an automatic no. Approve them into a higher division, ask the captain to change the roster, or decline — but say which, because "declined" with no reason is how you lose a team for next season too.

You can let a team in after entry closes, as long as it is before fixtures are generated. After that it is a rebuild, so it is usually kinder to hold them for next season than to move everyone's dates.

Short rosters sort themselves out more often than you expect. Captains can add players mid-season, and there is a confirm cutoff a few days before the season starts precisely so a captain discovers they are two short in time to do something rather than on the night.

Connect once, from Billing. You do it in Stripe rather than here, and we never see your bank details. One connected account covers every league, club and facility you manage — it is priced per operator, not per entity.

You can set prices before verification finishes. A paid tier saved early is held as a draft and switches itself on when Stripe confirms, so you are not blocked waiting.

You can run a whole season on a free account. The plan changes our percentage and unlocks two specific features — bookable court reservations, and private groups that stay out of public listings. Everything else works on Free.

The switch pays for itself on volume rather than features. Going from 10% to 3% saves $70 on every $1,000 collected, so Basic breaks even somewhere around $290 a month collected through us. Work it out on your own numbers.

Each team gets one balance. What they owe is the larger of your team minimum and your per-member rate times their confirmed active roster. Everything that reduces it reconciles against that single number: member payments, captain payments, offline payments you record, credits, and waivers.

That means a captain can look at one figure and know where they stand, and so can you. There is no separate ledger per player to reconcile at the end.

An overdue balance blocks the captain confirming their final roster. It never forfeits the team. That is a deliberate choice: forfeiting a team over money punishes eleven players for one person's card being declined.

The person who paid files the request; you approve or decline it against a preview of what your published policy says should happen. You can approve a different amount if the circumstances warrant it.

Publish your refund policy before the season, not when the first request arrives. Every refund argument we have seen came from a policy that existed only in the organizer's head at the moment it was needed.

Close entry once you know who is in, then generate. Read the grid before publishing — this is the cheapest moment to change your mind, and the only one before people start planning around it.

Publishing announces the schedule to every registered team. Re-publishing sends the announcement again, so make your edits and then publish rather than publishing and iterating.

Above the fixture list is a panel that flags the things that quietly ruin a season. They are all cheap to fix before publishing and expensive afterwards, which is the whole reason it sits there rather than in a report you would never open.

Treat a clean health panel as the bar for publishing. It is a short list and it is right more often than it is annoying.

Individual fixtures edit without touching anything else. Captains are notified when something they are in moves.

If the season start date itself moves after fixtures exist, you get a one-click prompt to shift week one and everything after it. Take it — editing thirty fixtures by hand is how a schedule ends up internally inconsistent.

Cancel the session and a make-up is appended automatically. You choose whether the rest of the season stays put and the make-up goes on the end, or everything shifts forward a week. Extend is the default and surprises fewest people.

Weeks already played, in progress or completed are never moved, and neither are playoff weeks. If only one fixture is affected rather than the whole night, reschedule that fixture instead — cancelling the session is for when nobody plays.

Captains set availability and commit a squad. Players get notified they are on. People turn up and play. Someone reports the scores. The table updates. If nothing is broken, none of that touches you.

Your job on a normal week is the standings tab and the needs-attention list. Everything that actually requires an organizer — a dispute, a team that has gone quiet, a fixture with no result three days on — surfaces there rather than needing you to go looking.

Results move through four states. The reason for the chain rather than a single "enter score" box is that a league table people do not trust is worse than no table, and trust comes from the losing captain having agreed.

Unconfirmed results auto-confirm after 48 hours. That is the pragmatic bit: without it, one unresponsive captain freezes a fixture forever and you end up entering results by hand to unstick the table.

You can override any result at any point, and an override is recorded as one. Nobody has to take your word for it that the table is right, which is exactly the position you want to be in during a promotion argument.

A dispute surfaces in your needs-attention list with both versions side by side and who submitted what. Talk to both captains, then set the result and mark it official. Most disputes are a transposed set score, not a disagreement about who won.

Fix it in the week it happens. A disputed result sitting for a fortnight becomes a standings argument, and by then two more weeks have been played on top of a table that was wrong.

You can give someone a specific job without giving them everything. Each hat is separate, so the person entering scores on a Tuesday never sees your Stripe balance.

The most valuable one to hand out is scoring. It is the job that has to happen on the night, in a hall, on a phone — and the person best placed to do it is almost never you.

It happens in most seasons. You have a range of responses short of the nuclear one, and which you pick should depend on whether they are coming back.

Suspend a team for a week and their fixtures are handled without wrecking the table. Withdraw them and their remaining fixtures resolve consistently for everyone else — nobody ends up with a different number of played weeks by accident. Reinstate is there when the captain reappears, which is more often than you would think.

Seed a bracket from the final table, or seed it by hand if the table does not tell the whole story. The bracket publishes to the same public page the season used, so nobody has to be told where to look.

Playoff weeks are protected from schedule shifts, so a make-up week added late in the season cannot quietly push your final into a week when half the teams are away.

Record what each place gets and who won it. The ledger is a record, and a public one — it settles the "what did second place actually get" question that comes up every single season.

State the prize structure when you open entry, not at the end. People decide whether to enter partly on what is at stake, and a prize announced in week ten reads as an afterthought no matter how generous it is.

Complete the season and the table freezes, the public page keeps working as an archive, and every result stays on the players' records. Nothing is deleted, and the URL you shared all season keeps resolving.

For the next run, create a new season under the same league. Your settings carry, your courts carry, and returning captains keep their teams — which means your second season costs you an evening rather than a weekend. That is the compounding bit, and it is the main reason to put the setup effort in once.

Everyone who plays in your league joins your club as a member. When the season ends they are still there — reachable, still holding their history with you. A league that ends and disperses its players has to be rebuilt from scratch every time.

That is the whole argument for running it here rather than in a spreadsheet and a group chat. The spreadsheet does the standings; it does not leave you with a membership afterwards.

Send a message to your members, or to just one league, and it reaches them in the app and as a notification. No mailing list to maintain, no group chat that half of them muted in March.

Use it for the things that genuinely matter — a facility change, entry opening for the next season, a weather call. Broadcast fatigue is real and it is one-way: once people mute you, the weather call does not land either.

A daily scan looks for the patterns that suggest results are not what they appear to be — implausible score patterns, matches between accounts that only ever play each other, ratings moving in ways that do not fit the play behind them.

Anything it finds comes to you as a flag to review, never as an automatic penalty. A machine noticing a pattern is a reason to look; it is not a finding, and treating it as one would eventually punish somebody who did nothing wrong.

Every confirmed result moves the players' ratings, weighted by how much the result can be trusted — a league match with both captains agreeing carries far more weight than a self-reported casual game. The rating shows a confidence band rather than a single number, because a rating from four matches genuinely is less certain than one from forty, and hiding that produces false confidence.

This matters to you for one practical reason: your league is where the trustworthy results come from. Players get a rating that means something because of leagues like yours, which is a decent thing to tell people who are deciding whether to enter.

None of this is required and none of it costs extra beyond the plan you are already on. It is here because most people running a league end up wanting at least one of them by the second season.

Every one of them shares the same members, the same payment setup and the same console. Nothing needs setting up twice.

We would rather lose a signup to an honest list than win one and disappoint someone in week three. Everything else in this manual works today; these do not.

If one of these is a hard requirement for your league, tell us. What organizers actually block on is the best evidence we have about what to build next.