Run a tournament.

Before you open the app

Three things decide everything else: a date, a venue and how many courts you have for how long. Courts are the real limit. A 16-pair knockout is 15 matches; on two courts at 40 minutes a match that is a five-hour day.

Work out roughly how many people you can take before you open entries. It is much easier than turning people away later.

Create it

Play → Tournaments → Create. The form opens already filled in with a plausible tournament: a month out, one day, entries closing a week before. Change what you need and leave the rest.

Give it a name people will recognise, pin the venue on the map so it shows up in “near me” searches, and set the entry fee if you are charging one. You collect entry fees yourself. SmashDrop does not take payments and does not take a cut.

A cover photo helps but is not required. Without one it gets a gradient, which is part of the design rather than a gap.

Choose your events

One tournament can run several events at once. Pick the ones you want:

Open events are for anybody. Mixed doubles is a rule about the pair, one of each, rather than about either person. Doubles and mixed entries need a partner named, because you cannot draw a bracket without knowing who the pair is. The partner does not have to be on SmashDrop.

Set the grade and age group

The grade is what you will accept:

This is deliberately separate from a player’s SmashDrop rank. Rank is what the app has measured. The grade is what you are willing to take, and you should not have to learn our ladder to say so.

Age groups are there if you need them:

Open entries

An entry is a request, not a booking. People ask to join and you accept or decline. Your accepted count only moves when you accept, so twenty people asking for sixteen places is normal rather than a problem.

Every entry sits in one of four states: pending while it waits on you, accepted once it is in, declined if you say no, and withdrawn if they pull out.

Entering is free for the player. Nobody needs a subscription to be in your draw.

Got a paper entry list? Add people yourself by name and phone number. They can be drawn, scheduled and scored straight away, and when they install the app with that number their tournament is already waiting for them.

Seed the field

Seeding keeps the strongest entries apart early on. The top seed and the second seed sit in opposite halves, so they can only meet in the final. The top four can only meet in the semis.

You set the seeds. Use whatever you know: last year’s result, a state ranking, their SmashDrop record, or your own judgement. You do not have to seed anybody, and an unseeded field is drawn as it comes.

Make the draw

Three shapes:

Knockout. Straight elimination. Byes go to the top seeds, which is the convention everywhere. A field that is not a power of two gets byes in the first round and those are resolved immediately, so the player appears in round two where people expect to find them.

Round robin. Everybody plays everybody, laid out so each round is a set of matches that can run at the same time on different courts. That is what a club with three courts actually needs.

Groups into a knockout. For a big field. Pick how many go through from each group — 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 or 8 — and the qualifiers are seeded into the bracket so group winners avoid each other early.

Making the draw is a deliberate act. It does not happen the moment entries close, because every organiser wants one last look at the field first. Press the button when you are ready.

Appoint your umpires

You do not have to score every court yourself. Open your tournament, go to Officials, and invite people. There are two roles: umpire and referee.

You invite, they accept. You cannot put somebody’s name against a result sheet without asking — it is their day being spent. They get an invitation and either accept or decline, the same as a buddy invitation. Until they accept, they cannot score anything.

Only you can appoint. An umpire cannot recruit other umpires. An official’s badge is access to every result in the competition, so handing it out stays with you.

Nobody scores a match they are playing in. If you entered your own tournament you keep the badge everywhere except your own matches, and an umpire drawn against somebody in their event loses it for that one match. It is the oldest rule in officiating, and it is the whole reason an official’s word counts for more than a player’s.

The officials list is public. Players can see who is officiating before they enter, and the results sheet names them. You can stand somebody down at any time.

Run the day

Your word settles a result, and so does an umpire’s. A friendly is reported by one player and confirmed by the other, because both have a stake in it. An official does not, so a tournament result stands as soon as you or one of your umpires records it. Asking two players to counter-sign every result in a 32-draw is how a tournament stops running to time.

Enter the games and the winner works itself out. You do not pick a winner, so the scoreline and the result can never disagree.

A knockout tie that ends level is refused. Somebody has to go through, so the app asks you to play a decider rather than guessing.

A walkover is not a result. It advances somebody without pretending a match happened: nothing goes in the table and nothing touches either player’s record, because nobody was on court.

Typed it in wrong? Change it. A finished match stays correctable and the table updates. Re-recording does not credit anybody twice.

Finish it properly

Mark the tournament finished. The draw, the results and both tables stay up permanently — they are the record of something real, and people come back to look at them.

There are two tables, and they answer different questions. The entries table decides the tournament: in doubles a pair is one competitor and the record belongs to the pair. The players table is the same results re-keyed by person, which is the only way somebody in a pair sees their own tournament.

Both run on the standard countback: two points a win, one for a level match, ordered on points, then game difference, then points difference. Four columns and no more, because a table wide enough to scroll sideways on a phone is a table nobody reads.