Spread the good ones out. That's it. That's the secret.

Three people from other clubs have now asked me "how do you run your mixer" so here's my answer and it's going to disappoint you because it's one thing.

Spread the good players out.

That's it. Honestly. I've been doing this five years and nine out of ten bad nights I've had come down to all the strong players ending up on the same court, or worse, two strong ones against two newbies.

Everyone has a miserable time when that happens. The beginners get pinned against the back fence. The good players get bored and start doing that thing where they serve underarm to be "nice" which is somehow worse. And then I get the looks in the bar.

So: put one stronger player with one still finding their feet, and put them against a pair that looks roughly the same. You don't need ratings or anything clever, you know who's good. I know who's good. You can see it in the warm-up.

And change partners every round. Every round. If someone plays with the same person twice in a night they WILL tell you about it, usually by the biscuits.

Other stuff, quickly, because people ask:

Fours. Doubles needs four a court so you want 8, 12, 16. If you've got 13 (you will have 13) someone sits out each round and you rotate it. Give the sitter-outer the scoring job, it stops them sulking.

Short rounds. Twenty minutes or first to so many games. Long rounds and the mixing doesn't happen.

Have the draw done BEFORE anyone arrives. If people have to ask you which court they're on you'll get asked forty times. I counted once. Forty-three.

Reserves. Someone will cancel at 6.58pm from the car park because they've "just remembered a dinner". Have a reserve. Have two.

Our padel lot do the same on Sundays and the new pickleball group in the sports hall pinched it too, it works for all of them.

We run ours through Rallio now and it does the courts for me (and, yes, it spreads the good ones out, I made sure Jake made it do that), and when someone cancels the next reserve gets told automatically so I'm not ringing round from the car park. But you can absolutely do it with paper. I did for years.

Just spread the good ones out. Please. For everyone's sake.

P.S. Biscuits. A mixer with biscuits is a mixer people come back to. Fine, two secrets.