The team league

Clubs facing off in encounters — two doubles, a mixed, a singles — with lineups, substitutes and a captain who sleeps better. The interclub format, in full.

What changes

In a team league the unit is no longer the player but the club. You don’t sign up alone: you need a team, with a squad. The standings count teams, the evening is played in encounters — club against club — and each encounter is made of several matches played in parallel across the courts.

It’s the third kind of event, next to the individual league and the tournament: pick “Team league” at creation and the console adapts — team sign-ups, an encounter calendar, lineups.

The encounter

An encounter isn’t one match but a fixed list of them: say two men’s doubles, a women’s doubles, a mixed and a singles. You compose that list once, in settings (Team play), from the five classic disciplines — men’s and women’s singles and doubles, mixed doubles — and it holds for the whole season: a competition that changed its own shape mid-season would make its standings incomparable.

The club that wins the most matches takes the encounter. Montréal’s interclub plays eight; a small league plays five — the list is yours.

On the player’s side, the session page shows their club’s encounter, not the division: two clubs can play side by side the same night in the same division, and the other one’s matches are not the rest of theirs. And a team that goes by a name is called by it — “ShaBam vs BAMos”, not a list of its fourteen players. It opens on the encounter’s board — both clubs, the count of matches won, how far along it is — then the eight matches in sheet order, each with its score button — any player of the club can enter or confirm the score of any match of their encounter; no “your match” card and no search: in a team league, the encounter is the page.

The encounter calendar

SetRally generates the season’s calendar with the right guarantees: every team plays the same number of encounters, never twice against the same club, at most one encounter per date — and home-and-away balances out as well as it can. Sixteen teams across sixteen Sundays at six encounters each: the kind of puzzle that used to eat your August evenings.

The proposed calendar is a first draft, not a verdict: rearrange the pairings that need it, and the tool tells you what it couldn’t satisfy instead of failing silently.

The lineup

Before the encounter, each captain gets their lineup link and places their players match by match — the screen checks that every seat gets the right profile (a women’s doubles wants two women). Three rules keep the system sporting:

• Both halves are sealed: you only see the opposing lineup once both are submitted. Nobody sets their team in reaction to the other.
• Editable until the first shuttle: as long as no score is in, a captain can fix their half. The moment a match starts, the lineup becomes a record, not a plan.
• Forfeits are declared, with their price: a club that can’t field a match says so, and the screen states the consequence before submitting — “2 matches go to your opponent before the first shuttle.” No surprises at the net.

Once submitted, the lineup becomes what the matches are called: the player page and the score sheet read “Daigneault / Zagar vs Viau / Benoît”, club second, instead of eight identical “club A vs club B” lines. Until a captain has composed, the two club names hold the line.

The session roster

On the organizer’s side, each session has its roster: who’s coming, who declined, who hasn’t answered — fed by the players’ RSVPs. An absent player can propose their substitute while declining; you accept in one tap and the sub takes the spot for that session only. Two short-handed teams the same night? Merge them for the session — and unmerge just as easily.

Scoring and standings

Every match in the encounter scores like everywhere else in SetRally: the players on court enter the score, the opposing club confirms from their phone, a disagreement goes up to the organizer. The captain, meanwhile, sees the encounter as a board — “5 of 8 settled, one score waiting to be confirmed” — without running between courts.

The encounter’s result derives itself from its matches, and the club standings pile up session after session with the same league points as the rest of the platform — with one difference: they go to the encounter, not to the matches. The club that wins the night takes its level’s “win” value, whether it was 5-3 or 8-0. The table then reads in nights — wins, draws, losses and points — a 4-4 encounter being a draw; level on points, the match score separates them behind the scenes. Presence does not apply: a team league has no door to check in at, and paying for it would pay the encounter twice.