How do you run a tennis tournament at your club?

This is the difference between organising tennis and organising almost anything else. A football match ends after 90 minutes. A tennis match ends when someone wins two sets, and nobody can tell you in advance when that will be.

So the planning runs backwards. Count your courts, count the hours between your first serve and the moment the lights go off, and divide by a realistic match length:

Match format	Realistic length	Matches per court in 8 hours
Best of 3 tie-break sets	75–110 min	4–6
Best of 3, match tie-break in place of set 3	60–80 min	6–8
Short sets to 4, no-ad	35–50 min	9–13
One set to 6 with a tie-break	30–45 min	10–14

Three courts across a Saturday therefore hold somewhere between 15 and 40 matches depending on the format alone. Write your number down before you announce a draw size, because everything below is a consequence of it.

A knockout draw of N players needs N minus 1 matches. That is the whole arithmetic, and it is unforgivingly small:

Draw	Matches	Rounds
8	7	3
16	15	4
32	31	5
64	63	6

A round robin is the opposite shape. Eight players play 28 matches, sixteen play 120. Round robin is the fairest format ever invented and the reason club tournaments do not use it above eight entries.

Groups plus a knockout is where most one-day events land, and for a good reason: it guarantees everyone three matches instead of the one that a first-round loss buys, then produces a champion in an afternoon. Sixteen players in four groups of four is 24 group matches plus seven in the bracket — 31 in total, the same as a 32-draw knockout, but nobody drives home after 40 minutes.

If your entry list does not fill a power of two, you do not need to turn anyone away. The draw carries byes, and they go to the top seeds first.

The instinct when the schedule will not fit is to cap entries. Shorten the format instead. The ITF has already sanctioned the shorter shapes in Appendix VI of the Rules of Tennis, so none of them is a house rule you have to defend:

No-ad scoring. At deuce, one deciding point settles the game and the receiver chooses which side to take it from. It removes the deuce spiral, which is the single largest source of variance in match length. In mixed doubles the player of the same gender as the server receives it.

Match tie-break to 10 in place of a deciding set. At one set all, a first-to-10 tie-break decides the match. There is a 120-second set break before it and the order of service simply continues. This is the most common shortening in club and junior tennis, and it typically saves 20 to 30 minutes per match.

Short sets to 4 games, with a tie-break at 4–4 or, if the organiser prefers, at 3–3. Useful for a group stage where you need every court to turn over predictably.

A 10-point tie-break at 6–6 in the final set rather than playing it out. Even the majors adopted a version of this, and it removes the one match that can eat your evening.

Announce which of these you are using before the event, not on the day. Rule 6 requires the set method to be announced in advance, and it specifically requires you to say whether the final set is a tie-break set or an advantage set.

Open registration on the public event page and let players enter themselves. Tennis draws default to singles, where the entry list is simply the list of people. Doubles is a switch on the category, and it changes what an entry means: a pair, with one player creating the team and the other joining it by name.

The entry that breaks most sign-up sheets is the player without a partner. In a doubles draw, give them a way to mark themselves as looking for a partner, so they land on a list you can pair before the draw instead of texting you the night before.

Decide early whether entries are automatic or need your approval. Automatic fills a field faster. Manual approval lets you balance levels, which matters far more at a club than at a ranking event, where the ranking has already done that job for you.

In JudgeMate an organiser can also enter their own tournament — the roles stack, so you keep the console and still appear in the draw.

A draw exists to stop the two best players meeting in round one. Everything else about seeding is detail.

The ITF sets the number of seeds by draw size: 2 seeds in a draw of 8, 4 in a draw of 16, 8 in a draw of 32, and 16 in a draw of 64 or larger. More seeds than that stops being protection and starts being pre-arrangement.

Seed 1 goes on the first line of the draw and seed 2 on the last, which puts them in opposite halves and means they can only meet in the final. Seeds 3 and 4 are drawn into the two remaining quarters, seeds 5 to 8 into the eight remaining eighths, and so on down.

Byes go to the highest seeds first. This surprises people who expect a random draw to be random throughout, but the logic holds: a bye is compensation for being ranked highest in a field that did not fill, and spreading byes randomly would hand one to a player who then meets a seed fresh in round two.

At club level you rarely have a ranking to seed from. Seed from your own start list — the order you enter players in is the order the draw treats as strongest — and be open that you did it that way.

This is a topic with more depth than one section allows. The detail sits in our guide on tennis seeding and draws.

Publish the order of play before anyone arrives. Then hold one rule: a match is not finished until the result is recorded.

The cheapest way to keep that rule is to stop being the person who records it. A QR code per match opens the score panel for that match, so whoever is at the net enters the result and the next round is not waiting on you to walk the courts with a clipboard. Print the sheet of codes and tape one to each net post.

Treat courts as scheduled resources rather than as a thing you allocate in your head. Enter your courts, a start time and a slot length, and let the schedule assign matches and flag the conflicts — the same player drawn onto two courts at once is the error that costs you twenty minutes of apologising.

Keep one court off the schedule if you can afford it. It absorbs the overrun that always arrives in round two, and it gives late players somewhere to warm up without pushing a match back.

In a knockout the bracket answers itself. In a group stage you need a tie-break rule and you need to announce it before the first ball, because two players level on matches won is the most common argument of a club tournament.

The conventional order is matches won, then sets won and lost, then games won and lost, then the head-to-head result. Head-to-head first sounds fairer and breaks down the moment three players are level in a circle.

The table and the bracket update as results are confirmed, so the standings are done when the play is. If you would rather not show a running table — some organisers find it changes how the last group matches get played — you can keep results hidden until the end.

Publish while people are still at the club. A final draw sheet that goes up the same evening is the cheapest advertising your next event will ever get.