Racket Stories

They've painted pickleball lines on court six

2026-10-17T20:48:00+01:00

I turned up for Monday juniors and there were new lines on court six.

Blue ones. Inside my tennis lines. Like someone had drawn a smaller, worse tennis court inside the real tennis court and hoped nobody would notice.

I noticed.

Courts from above. Court six is the one that's been vandalised. Legally, apparently.

Nobody told me. That's the first thing. Twenty-two years I've coached on that court. I know where the dip is by the far tramline. I know which bit of the fence the balls go through. And on Monday at 4.15 there's a whole extra set of lines and a man from the committee saying "it's only paint, Terry".

It is not only paint. Try telling eight-year-olds which line is the baseline when there are four candidates. Freddie served into the kitchen. I didn't even know there WAS a kitchen. Apparently it's the bit near the net where you're not allowed to volley. In pickleball. Not in tennis. In tennis you're very much allowed to volley near the net, it's the whole point, I've spent two decades trying to get people up there.

I asked Mel about it, because Mel runs the pickleball on a Saturday and Mel thinks this is brilliant. Mel said "Terry, it's 40 people every Saturday who weren't playing anything a year ago". Which, fine. I'm not saying it's not popular. I'm saying it's on court six.

And the noise. Pock. Pock. Pock. It's like coaching next to a woodpecker.

And the ball. Plastic, with holes in, like a toy you'd get in a cracker. One of them rolled into my junior basket on Saturday and Freddie hit it at Amelia and it went about two feet. He was delighted. Amelia was delighted. I put it in the bin. Mel took it out of the bin.

The committee's line is "shared use". Malcolm said it to me at the bar with the face he does when he's already decided. Shared use means tennis Monday to Friday and pickleball on Saturday mornings, and the lines stay down all week because you can't paint them every Saturday. So I get the lines all week. Shared lines. Not shared use. Shared LINES.

I've started coaching on court five instead. Court five has the dip in a different place and the floodlight that flickers. I'd rather have the flicker.

Anyway. The juniors keep asking if they can "have a go at the pickle one". I've said no. I've said no four times. Freddie's mum asked on the WhatsApp if Mel does lessons. Mel does lessons.

They're still my lines on court six. The proper ones. The white ones.

P.S. I had a go on Thursday after everyone left. Just to see. It's harder than it looks. I'm not discussing it further.

Nineteen meetings and it still can't tell me who wants a game

2026-10-13T21:14:00+01:00

Nineteen. I have sat through nineteen committee meetings about club software. My wife keeps count. I have spent less time at my own children's weddings.

And after nineteen meetings, the system we chose still cannot tell me who wants a game.

It can do the till. It can do the membership direct debits. It can do the floodlights, mostly. It does court bookings, it does the accounts, it does something with payroll that only the general manager understands. We paid somebody a frankly upsetting sum, years ago, to make it "integrate" with something else, and now nobody dares touch it in case the lights go off on court four.

It cannot tell me who wants a game.

The point of the whole exercise, in case the committee had forgotten.

Last month a new member came up to me in the bar. Nice chap. Three months in. He said "I've paid for a year and I've played twice". Twice! And everything in that building was working perfectly. He'd paid, he'd booked, the gate had let him in. Every box on the committee's list ticked. He just couldn't find anyone to play with, and nothing we'd bought had the faintest interest in helping him.

That is the whole problem. Every system we've ever looked at puts the admin first, then the payments, then getting in the door, and the actual PLAYING is somewhere at the bottom with a note saying "see WhatsApp". Levels, finding a game, socials, ladders: all left to goodwill, which in practice means Bev.

People don't stay members because the invoicing is tidy. They stay because they found people to play with. I've been saying this for eleven years. I'm saying it again.

So here's what I said at meeting number nineteen, and I'll say it at twenty. Leave the business system alone. It's taken years to bed in and I'm not living through another changeover. Put something next to it, with the club's name on it, that just looks after the playing.

Jake, who built the app our socials and ladders already use, has started offering a version of it, Rallio, that a club can put its own name, logo and colours on, on its own web address. They call it "white label", which I had to look up. The bit that made the committee unfold their arms was that it plugs into what we've already got: booking a court from inside a ladder challenge, only current members able to sign up, logging in with the login people already have. No replacing anything. Our own level groups. One leaderboard across the whole club (the squash section immediately asked whether we could beat the tennis section on it; we can).

We haven't decided. We're a committee. We don't decide things, we minute them. But meeting nineteen was the first one where we spent forty minutes on getting members playing and only five on the till.

Still can't tell me who wants a game though. Yet.

P.S. If your club has got out the other side of this, please find me by the squash courts. I'm the one in the knee support.

46 sorries

2026-10-05T21:58:00+01:00

Forty-six. That's how many times I said sorry at Tuesday's mixer. I counted. I count things when I'm nervous, it's a whole thing.

46 sorries in two hours. That's one every two and a half minutes.

how I imagine I look. how I actually look: apologising

Third week. I'd FINALLY got to the point where I could keep a rally going, like four whole shots sometimes, and then the draw put me on court two and the two people on the other side were… not messing about.

First serve went past me before I'd moved. Next one hit the back fence. By the fourth game I was quietly praying the ball would go anywhere except at me and then obviously a volley came at me from about three feet away and I made a noise I didn't know I could make.

Sorry. Sorry! Sorry, sorry. Oh god sorry.

And here's the thing that got me. THEY were saying sorry too. "Sorry!" every time they hit a winner. "Sorry, I'll ease off." Then they'd ease off and serve really gently and it'd clip my partner's frame and go into the dark and everyone would say sorry about THAT. Half the conversation on that court was four people apologising to each other for something none of us had done.

Nobody did anything wrong! That's my whole point. The man who hit that volley wasn't being horrible, that's just how he plays. I wasn't being rubbish on purpose. It was just a really bad match-up and we all paid for it in sorries.

I nearly didn't go back. Genuinely. I'd been going to tell my friend padel wasn't for me.

Graham (he writes on here, he's very good at explaining things over a pint) says most people at a club are somewhere in the middle and the people at the edges, beginners like me and the really good ones, have the worst time if nobody thinks about who plays who. Which makes sense. The good players don't want my 46 sorries either. They want a proper game.

Our club just turned on levels in the app they use for sessions (it's called Rallio). You can put in a rating if you've got one, which I don't, or the club puts you in one of its groups, which are called things like "Improvers" and "Thursday Group 2" which made me laugh. And then when Bev does the draw she can actually see who's who and not stick me on court two of doom. It moves as you play too, and apparently socials only count half so one terrible Tuesday doesn't wreck you. Good. Because Tuesday was terrible.

Anyway. Nobody should have to say sorry 46 times at something called a SOCIAL.

Next Tuesday's goal is under thirty. Will report back.

P.S. My partner from court two messaged after to say "we all started there, you'll be fine". I was not fine. But it was very kind and I've saved the message.

"How hard can it be?" (Sunday sessions, a cautionary tale)

2026-07-07T18:40:00+01:00

March committee meeting. Any Other Business. Sue announces she is moving to Norfolk and somebody will need to take on Sunday mornings.

Long silence. Somebody coughs. The treasurer studies the biscuits with great intensity.

And I hear my own voice say: "Well. How hard can it be?"

The courts at 9pm. I am usually still sorting out Sunday at this point.

I would like to formally withdraw that remark.

I had assumed running Sunday mornings meant unlocking the ball cupboard and saying good morning. What it actually means is: telling everyone it's on, finding out who's coming, finding out who's ACTUALLY coming as opposed to who said they were, fitting them onto the courts, making up the pairings, keeping a reserve list, ringing round when someone drops out at ten past eight, and writing the results down somewhere people can see them. Every week. Including the weeks I'm not well, and the weeks I'm at a christening.

The christening. Let me tell you about the christening. My granddaughter's, in May. Sunday morning. I had handed Sundays to nobody, because there was nobody, and the whole thing lived in a spreadsheet only I understood and a WhatsApp group only I read. It very nearly didn't happen. I was in a pew texting reserves.

That is the problem in one sentence: it was all in my head. One person. If I'm not there, it doesn't happen. That is no way to run anything.

The club has a booking system, naturally. It cost a great deal of money and it can take my £12 for the floodlights in about four seconds. It cannot tell me who wants a game. Not its job, apparently. Nobody's job, apparently, except mine.

So after the christening I spent several evenings looking at apps, and I will save the next poor volunteer the trouble. Most of them are booking and payments for the people who run the business. You want one that's for the people running the play. Something that takes sign-ups and keeps a reserve list ON ITS OWN and moves the next person up when someone drops out, without me. Something that does the pairings so they're fair. Something that works for squash and tennis and the rest (the table tennis section will want in, trust me). And above all something people can join WITHOUT a password, because half my Sunday regulars would sooner give up squash than create a password.

Bev pointed me at the one Jake built for our club, Rallio. It does all of that. It took me fifteen minutes to set up, though I was also making toast.

The first Sunday a reserve moved up on its own I was, as it happens, in church again. I have never been so moved in church.

So. How hard can it be? Very. Unless you stop it all living in one person's head.

P.S. Sue, if you're reading this in Norfolk: we're fine. Absolutely fine. Do visit.

“It’s just a spreadsheet” (it was not just a spreadsheet)

2026-06-29T23:16:00+01:00

AGM, last October. Someone says "we should have a ladder". I say, and I remember the exact words, "I can do that, it's just a spreadsheet".

It was not just a spreadsheet.

not my rackets. mine have more tape on

The ladder itself is dead simple. List of names. Beat someone above you, you go above them. Brilliant. Everyone loved it for about three weeks.

The spreadsheet is what nearly killed it. Every challenge, I logged. Every result, I put in and moved everyone round. Every "did Phil accept yet?", I chased. Every challenge nobody answered, I had to decide what to do about. Updating rankings on my phone at my cousin's wedding. DURING THE SPEECHES. My girlfriend has not forgotten.

Then I had flu for a week in February and didn't update it, and that was that. Table was wrong, people stopped trusting it, people stopped challenging, by March it was basically dead. Nothing wrong with the ladder. The ladder was fine. It was me being the ladder that wasn't fine.

So if you're about to say "it's just a spreadsheet" at your AGM, don't. Or do, but know what you're signing up for.

Things I'd tell past me, in no order:

Decide how far up people can challenge BEFORE you start. Two or three places. I didn't and week one someone at the bottom challenged the club champion and it was carnage.

Decide what happens when someone ignores a challenge. Because someone will. Phil is currently 4th and has been 4th since May and accepts nothing. There needs to be a time limit after which he just loses the spot. (Phil, I love you, but.)

Write the scoring down. One set? Best of three? Tiebreak? You'd think people would just agree on court. They don't.

Half the committee wanted a box league instead and we spent a whole meeting on it (Graham minuted it, four pages). Short version as I understand it: box league = small groups, everyone plays everyone in a few weeks, guaranteed games, but way more organising and you can't really join halfway through. Ladder = play when you like, join when you like, but lazy people can sit on a spot (PHIL). We went ladder. I'd still go ladder.

We moved it onto Rallio in April and the bit I care about is the table now just moves on its own when someone puts a score in. Challenges that nobody answers expire on their own. I'm not doing it at weddings any more. That's genuinely all I wanted.

Anyway. It was not just a spreadsheet. Don't say it's just a spreadsheet.

P.S. Phil, if you're reading this, I've challenged you twice.

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

2026-06-29T08:05:00+01:00

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.

‘They said it was a friendly.’ This. This is what we're avoiding.

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.

It was only meant to fix Thursdays

2026-06-25T19:12:00+01:00

Bev has asked me about six times to write this so here it is. Short version: I tried to fix one evening of tennis and it got out of hand.

"Anyone fancy social tennis Thursday 7pm? Courts 3 and 4. First 8 to reply."

That message, or one like it, went out every week at our club for years. And then the noticeboard. Look at the noticeboard.

Our noticeboard. Somewhere in there is an email address for enquiries. Good luck.

After Covid our socials went mad. Five a week at one point, six courts, twenty-odd people a night, total beginners and people who'd been playing together since the nineties all in the same session. And one person running the lot, out of pure love for the club, on a secret Excel spreadsheet with some bits of script bolted on that broke if you looked at it.

They'd post the pairings as a screenshot. Half the group wouldn't see it. Same pair together three rounds running. A strong player stuck with two complete beginners all night. Nobody's fault. Doing fair doubles rotations across six courts in your head is genuinely hard, I don't think people realise how hard. Someone tried ChatGPT and it put the same bloke on two courts at once.

I build software for a living so I thought, I'll just do the pairings bit. One weekend. Type in names, press a button, get courts. That's all it was supposed to be. Fix Thursdays.

The organiser loved it. People said the games felt fairer. Then someone asked if it could do a reserve list. Then ratings. Then ladders (Dan has thoughts). Then knockouts. Then someone at the padel end asked if it worked for padel, and it did, because if you're moving people round courts the sport barely matters.

That's how you end up with an app called Rallio that's on phones and has other clubs on it. I didn't plan that. I wanted Thursdays to work.

The one thing I didn't expect and still think about: nobody minded much being paired with someone better or worse than them. What they HATED was playing the same person twice. Against you in round one, with you in round three. That annoyed people far more than ability ever did. So that's what the thing ended up being best at. Not repeating.

Also nobody wants to sign up for anything. Ever. So now it's just a link in the WhatsApp. You tap it, you see your court. That's it.

Thursdays work now. The organiser still runs them, they just don't need the spreadsheet. The noticeboard is still a crime scene. One thing at a time.

P.S. Bev would like it on record that she "thought of half of this". Fair.

Thirteen. It was thirteen people that broke it.

2026-05-14T20:31:00+01:00

Six of us was lovely. Eight was fine. Ten was fine-ish. Twelve I was coping.

Thirteen people turned up on a Thursday in March and I had a clipboard, a biro that didn't work, and absolutely no idea what I was doing.

6.55pm, every Thursday, give or take a brother-in-law

I keep coming back to this because I think it's the thing nobody tells you. When there's six of you it's a LIST. You know who's coming, there's one court, you played with Sarah last week so you play with Tom this week, done. When there's twelve or thirteen it's suddenly a system, and nobody asked me if I wanted to run a system. I wanted to run a tennis night.

What actually went wrong, in the order it went wrong:

The replies. They come in over four days in no order. In, out, maybe, maybe-now-no, "can I bring my brother-in-law" (Raj, I'm looking at you). I'm holding all of that in my head. I'm holding it in my head at work.

Then the courts. If I don't actively stop it, the same four end up on court one every week, the ones who reply first. New people end up together because I don't know who else they'd suit. A month of that and the whole group's set like concrete and none of us meant it to.

Then I can't remember who played who. Did Tom and Sarah play together last week? Three weeks ago? The only record is my head, so the answer is "probably" and probably isn't good enough when Sarah's asking.

All three of those are the same problem really, which is that all of it lives in ONE person. Me.

The thing that fixed it, honestly, was making the list public. That's the big one. The minute "who's coming?" is a private question in my DMs I've lost. Now there's one list, everyone can see it, people put themselves on and take themselves off, reserves are on the same list underneath, and when someone drops out the next one moves up. I don't decide. I don't phone anyone. It just moves.

We do it through the app Jake built (Rallio) and it also does the first go at the courts for me, which I can fiddle with. I didn't realise how much of my week was the blank page, just staring at thirteen names going "right, who goes where". Now it's "does this look ok" and nine times out of ten it does.

We're about thirty on a Thursday now. I'm still me. I've just stopped being the thing everything has to go through.

The list. Make the list public. That's my whole advice.

P.S. The biro still doesn't work. I keep it in the bag out of spite.

i just want a game on saturday

2026-05-12T22:03:00+01:00

That's it. That's the post. I just want a game on Saturday.

Not a lesson. Not a league. Not a "social" where I play a 6-0 against a lovely lady who started in March and then get told off by the organiser for "not easing off" (I was easing off, Bev). Just one game, one hour, someone about my level, Saturday morning.

Saturday 9am. Twelve courts. where IS everyone

I have been trying to get this one simple thing for about ten years.

Here's what happens. Wednesday I think, I'll sort Saturday. I message Tom. Tom's at a christening. I message Raj. Raj is "maybe, depends on the kids". I post in the club WhatsApp which has 140 people in it of which 138 have never spoken. Nothing. Friday night Raj says the kids have a party. Saturday I go for a run instead and feel sad about it.

Every week. Every single week.

And asking is the bit that actually grinds you down. Getting a "ah can't this week" isn't a big deal on its own, but get it every week for a few years and you just stop asking. I stopped asking for most of 2024. Played about six times.

People keep telling me "there's an app for finding partners". Yes. I've tried them. You swipe through strangers who all say they're "3.5-4.0" (they are not), you have the awkward "so what level are you REALLY" chat, then you still have to find a court, then you do it all again next week. It's the same problem with more steps.

The ONLY thing that's worked is the ladder. I don't ask anyone any more. I'm just on it, I say when I'm free, and people near me challenge me or I challenge them, and the result goes in and that's it. Nobody has to be brave. It's not me asking Tom for the fourth week in a row. It's just "you're next to me on the ladder, Saturday?"

Ours runs on Rallio now (Jake at our club built it, and also writes on here), and I've played more Saturday tennis this spring than in the whole of last year. I don't really care which ladder you use though honestly. Just get on one. Stop asking. Be the person who's available instead of the person doing the asking.

All I wanted was a game on Saturday. I've got one now. Took ten years.

P.S. lost my first ladder match 6-1 6-2 to a man in his seventies called Derek. he was very nice about it. that was worse.

I would like to play tennis at my own tennis night please

2026-05-08T21:47:00+01:00

It's twenty to ten on a Wednesday and I'm stood at the hob counting to fourteen.

Twelve yeses, one "probably", and Keith. Keith has replied with a thumbs up. After five years I know a Keith thumbs up means yes unless it rains, or his knee goes, or there's something good on BBC Four. So that's thirteen and a Keith. Which is either three courts or three courts and a sit-out and I won't know which until about 6.55 tomorrow.

This is me. I don't own the hat but otherwise this is me.

Here is my point and then I'll stop. I would like to play tennis at my own tennis night.

That's it. That's the whole post really. I started running Thursdays in 2019 because Margaret moved away and nobody else put their hand up, and somewhere along the line it turned from "Bev sends a message on Tuesday" into a second job I do from the kitchen, the train, the car park, and once (Sue will confirm this) the dentist's chair.

I collect the names. I chase the maybes. I work out who's on which court so it's not the same four on court one every week (it is always the same four on court one if I don't do it, the ones who reply fastest). I remember who played with who. I don't always remember who played with who. I collect the £4 for balls. I am the reserve list. I am the leaderboard. I am, basically, a spreadsheet with a forehand.

And then I get to the club and I spend the first half hour sorting people out and the second half hour sorting out the people who came late, and by the time I get on court it's ten to nine and the lights go off at nine.

I've started calling it organiser fog. It's not stress exactly. It's just always THERE. Something to count, someone to reply to, a bit of paper that mustn't get lost. You don't notice it on people. What you notice is that eighteen months later the organiser quietly stops and the group quietly stops with them. I've watched it happen twice at our club. Wednesday ladies' doubles, gone. Sunday padel, gone, the minute Martin moved to Bristol. Nobody stopped liking tennis. The person carrying it just put it down.

I'm not putting it down. I just want to put SOME of it down.

None of the jobs I listed need to be me. Counting heads doesn't need to be me. Moving a reserve up when someone drops out definitely doesn't need to be me. Jake at our club (he builds apps, he's on here too) keeps nodding very hard when I say all this, so watch this space I suppose.

Right. Keith's just changed his thumbs up to "maybe 🤔". Back to counting.

P.S. If you organise something and you're reading this at the hob, have a biscuit. You're not bad at it. It's just a lot.