Badminton Club Championship Software
Singles, doubles and mixed on one Saturday, with the same names in three draws
A badminton club championship puts three events into one day: singles, doubles and mixed doubles. The draws are small, but the same members enter two or three of them, and BWF regulations give a player 60 minutes between matches. That rest rule shapes the day more than the number of courts. JudgeMate runs each event as a category on a shared pool of courts, with a rest setting per side, seeds, scores entered from the court and a public results page.
One Saturday, six courts, three events
Take a typical club field: 16 in singles, 12 doubles pairs and 8 mixed pairs. Several members play all three.
08:30 Check-in. The singles groups and the first round of both doubles draws are already on the public page.
09:00 Singles groups start: four groups of four, six matches per group, 24 in total.
09:30 Doubles and mixed first-round matches take the courts the singles leave free. This is where a paper day goes wrong: a player who has just finished a singles match is called for doubles ten minutes later.
12:30 The last group results are in. With 30-minute slots and 60 minutes of rest, a singles player's three group matches take at least three and a half hours from first serve to last point.
13:00 Singles quarter-finals, doubles quarter-finals, mixed semi-finals.
16:00 Finals, spaced so that a player in two finals gets the full interval between them.
The rest rule is the constraint. BWF General Competition Regulations (GCR 11.4) entitle a player to at least 60 minutes between two matches, and the referee may cut that to 30 only in exceptional circumstances. National rules can be shorter: the Polish federation's sporting regulations give 30 minutes, which may be cut to 15 for a player entered in three events to keep the tournament running. Decide which rule your club follows and print it on the entry form.
Draw sizes, seeds and byes
Formats. Singles with 16 players works well as groups plus a knockout: four groups of four, two through from each, an eight-player bracket. Doubles and mixed with 8 to 12 pairs are faster as a straight knockout. JudgeMate offers one to four groups and takes 1, 2, 4 or 8 through from each (4 and 8 only with a single group). A new badminton draw ranks its groups by BWF GCR 16.2: matches won, the head-to-head result for two tied players, game difference and then point difference for three or more, and a draw of lots last. Another rule set can be picked in the settings.
How many seeds. Seeding is optional, and GCR 11.8.1 caps the number of seeds by the number of entries: at most 2 below 16, at most 4 for 16 to 31, at most 8 for 32 to 63. In the example that allows up to 4 seeds in singles and up to 2 each in doubles and mixed. Seed by your club ranking or last year's results, and say which.
Byes. GCR 11.5.2 sets the number of byes as the gap to the next power of two. Twelve doubles pairs fill a 16-line draw, so there are 16 − 12 = 4 byes and only eight pairs play in round one.
In JudgeMate a singles seed is the player's start number; in doubles you set the Seed field on the pair. Seeds sit on fixed lines (1 and 2 can only meet in the final) and the byes go to the top seeds first. In groups plus knockout the seeds head the groups and the rest are spread in a snake. If two training partners land against each other in round one, swap one of them with a player from another first-round match before it starts. You do not have to redraw the whole event.
No third-place match. Under GCR 15.4 a player who loses a match does not play again in the same event, so tournaments run under the BWF regulations have no bronze match. Leave the third-place option switched off.
Courts, rest time and scores from the court
One pool of courts. Courts belong to the event, so singles, doubles and mixed draw from the same six. Schedule singles first. When you then auto-schedule doubles, its matches are placed around the singles slots already taken, and the same happens for mixed.
Rest per side. The court schedule has a rest setting from 0 to 120 minutes, shared by all categories of the event. Set it to 60 for the BWF rule, or 30 for the Polish national rule. The scheduler then keeps a singles player apart from their own next singles match, and a pair apart from its next doubles match.
What you still check by hand. JudgeMate treats a player in singles and the same player's doubles pair as two different sides. It does not know that the singles winner of group B is also half of doubles pair 3. After the schedule is built, go through the members entered in two or three events and move any match that comes too close. Open the match and change its time or court.
Scores from the court. A match with a scoreboard attached has a referee QR code that opens its score panel. Without a scoreboard, you enter the result in the match yourself. If you switch on Players report results in the category settings (it is off in a new category), one side enters the score of a group match and the other side confirms it. Knockout matches, here all of doubles and mixed and the singles knockout, are closed by you or a referee. Group tables and brackets update as soon as a result is confirmed.
Match length. Until 3 January 2027 the standard BWF match is best of three games to 21. From 4 January 2027 the Laws switch to best of three games to 15, with 3×21 kept as an alternative. Set Points per set and Sets to win for the whole draw or for one match. On 15, the live scoreboard moves its prompts with the distance: interval at 8, change of ends at 8 in the third game, and the game ends at 21 if the score reaches 20-all.
Setting the championship up in JudgeMate
Allow 30 minutes the week before.
- Start from badminton in the create menu and create the event.
- Add three categories: Singles, Doubles and Mixed. Singles is the default draw type; in the other two, switch the draw type to Doubles. Nothing checks gender, and with open registration a pair is accepted automatically while places are free. Look through the mixed pairs before the draw and fix or remove any that do not fit.
- Pick the format per category: Groups + knockout for singles with four groups and two advancing, Knockout for doubles and mixed.
- Open registration. In doubles one player creates the pair and the partner joins it; a player without a partner can mark themselves as looking for one. Set an entry limit if the hall is tight: extra entries go onto a waiting list.
- Give the seeds their numbers and generate each draw.
- Add your courts, the start time and a 30-minute slot. Set the rest to 60 minutes and auto-schedule the categories one after another, singles first. Do it before the first result is entered: once a match has a result it keeps its slot.
- If you attach scoreboards to matches, print their referee QR codes for the control desk.
On the day, close the singles group stage when the last group result is confirmed, and the bracket fills itself. For the rules behind each step, see the badminton tournament organiser guide and how badminton scoring works.
What JudgeMate does not do for a badminton championship
- No person-level rest check across events. Rest is kept per side. A member in singles and doubles is two sides, so those clashes are yours to spot.
- No team ties. A club match of several singles and doubles counted as one result, as in a league fixture, cannot be entered as one match.
- No BWF or national ranking, no payments, no notifications. Seeds come from your own numbers. Entry fees are recorded as paid or waived, and the money is collected the way your club already does it.
- The export shows match results, not game scores. Tables, podium and bracket export to CSV or PDF, and each match appears only as games won, such as 2-1.
Set up your event
Free for organizers. No athlete cap. No commission on registrations. See badminton features · Organizer guide
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