How is your league managed? Below I will describe in detail how we run our own league in our club. It would be interesting to hear from others playing in leagues how you are doing it.

Over the years I have participated in numerous squash leagues. Some have been weekly leagues, happening at the same time and place every week. Others have been leagues running over a month or so, where matches are set up in advance, and players are responsible for playing their matches when and where suitable to themselves and their opponents.

The league I have had most success with is a weekly league at a fixed place and time. Despite participation going up and down, this league has more or less been active over my entire squash career (30+ years). While the format has changed somewhat over the time, it has mostly stayed the same.

Typically all players meet up shortly before the matches start. When we know how many players we have, we divide the players into groups. All players are ranked in advanced. We aim for four player groups, played as a mini elimination cup. Number 1 players against numbrer 4, and number 2 against number 3. Then the winners place for the 1st and 2nd spot, and the loser play for the 3rd and 4th spot.

This works fine as long as each group is exactly four players. Which seldom happens. If we can't make proper four player groups, we have some additional variants. If we are 3 or 5 players we instead play a round robing setup, where all players play against eachother. Since 4 matches in a row can be a bit challenging, we typically play best of 3. We typically try to play the matches in an order where the best players meet lastly, giving them the possibility to player a full 5 games match if they want.

If there are 6 or more players we try to make the groups as even as possible. For exactly 6 players we play two groups with 4 players, playing round robin (all against all). For 7 players the 4 top players meet in a mini cup as described already, and the 3 last players play a round robin.

After all matches have been completed players will have a final ranking in the group based on the results. Now it's time to update the actual league ranking, the start ranking to be used in the next round. In our league, the rule is that the loser in each group switches place with the winner in the group below.

Sounds easy, right? Well, it's a bit more complicated. In our league we have some 25 unique players. But not all of them play every week. On average we probably have around 8 players. So when it is time to update the league rankings with the latest round results, we need to consider the players who did not participate in the latest round.

One strategy could be to do nothing with players not participating, and only change player positions based on their existing position in the league ranking. But this can be a bit annoying for active players, who then sometimes move down many places when losing a round.

To encourage players to participate, in our league we also punish players not playing a round. It's a balance. If you have a good player rannked highly, you do not want to punish him to hard if he has to skip a couple of weeks. If you do, maybe he will not want to start again from far down. Everyone wants the good players participating, those are the ones to beat, right?

In our league we have a simple method for punishing players not participating in the latest round. Before we rank participating players, we first remove all players that participated. This leaves a league ranking with gaps where those players were listed. Then we start from the bottom and move players down according to certain rules.

If a player did not participate the last two rounds, we move the player down at least one place if possible. Some times the player will effectively move more place down as some players may not be moved (described shortly). We do this from the bottom up, where players moving down will typically fill the gaps left from the step described in the previous paragraph. If a player has been away for longer than the last two rounds, we do NOT move him further down (we want him back to protect is ranking and do not want to punish too hard).

We have tried other variants of this as well. Like moving a non-participating player down one place the first week he skips a round, and two places the next week again if he skipped again. It's also possible to keep pushing players down every week they do not join.

It also allows manual adjustment from league admins. Some situations require judgement. And when players haven't been playing for many weeks, you can move them to the bottom manually if you want to encourge the active players more (making sure the top spots are filled with people actually playing).

As you can imagine, this is all a bit of work. Which is why we developed the racketrumble app to automate this. The app supports everything described so far, and much more, automating league and round management, invites (email), sign ups, results reporting (also email), match and player statistics and more. Feel free to give it a spin.

You can find more information here:
https://www.racketrumble.com/