Everything you need to run your club with CourtsOS

Getting started & your links

Every club gets its own web address. Nothing to install — it all runs in a browser.

Your club lives at YOUR_CLUB.courtsos.com. That single address opens the organiser app, where you build and run events. The other screens are all pages under the same address — open each one on the device that needs it (a laptop to organise, a TV for the display, an iPad on each court).

Unlocking the organiser tools

The Club, Setup and History tabs are protected by a short passcode so players sharing the screen can't change your setup. The first time you open one on a device, you'll see the keypad below. Enter your club passcode once and that device stays unlocked — tap Lock Admin (top-right) to re-lock it.

YOUR_CLUB.courtsos.com

1 The Club tab

Set this up once. It's your club's identity, your courts, and the links for your on-court iPads.

Club

Club identity & branding

• Club identity — your club name, shown top-left across every screen.
• Club logo — a path or web link to your logo image. It appears beside your name (the CourtsOS splash screen stays as-is).
• Theme colours — pick a club colour, a button colour and a light/dark tone. CourtsOS builds the entire palette — cards, pills, borders and text — so every screen looks like it belongs to your club. Use Advanced to fine-tune individual colours afterwards. See every colour you can change →

Courts

Name each court exactly as your players know it (“Court 1”, “Centre Court”, “Glass Court”…). For each one, choose Doubles or Singles and tick it on or off. Only ticked courts are used when you generate matches, so you can drop a court mid-session without re-doing your setup. Your plan includes a set number of courts — the panel shows how many you're using.

Court screens (per-court iPads)

Each court gets its own link and QR code here. Put an iPad on the court, open its link (or scan the QR), and that screen shows the court's current and next match and lets players enter the score for that court. These follow your live address, so they just work.

2 The Setup tab

Where you build an event. CourtsOS asks one question at a time, in the order the answers matter — and tells you what each one changes before you answer it.

Setup · step one

How the flow works

Three things are on screen the whole way through, and they are worth knowing about before you start:

• The step rail, on the left. Every step shows the answer you gave it — “Cup”, “3 in use”, “20 players” — so you can see the whole event at a glance. Click any step you have reached to jump straight back to it; nothing is lost.
• Your event so far, on the right. The same answers as a running summary, with anything you haven't set yet marked not set.
• Readiness, underneath it. The plain-English answer to “can I start yet?” — the same line the classic panel shows, so the two can never disagree.

Under each step's controls there is a What this changes box. It is not decoration: it does the arithmetic for the answer you have actually given — how long a game to 24 points takes, how many players your ticked courts seat, roughly how long 20 rounds will run. Read it and you rarely need this guide.

The steps

Which steps you get depends on the format — a Cup gains a draw step, Interclub gains a clock, Match Play skips the roster entirely — but the order is always the same:

Naming the event

The Name & branding step takes a tournament name — “Saturday Social”, “Padel League UK Finals”, whatever your players call it. It is optional, and it's separate from your club's name and from the format: those two already appear on every screen, and this sits above them.

Once you've set it, the name appears on:

• your own top bar, so you can see at a glance which event you're running;
• the big display board, as the headline, with the format just underneath;
• the TV scoreboard, under your club's name;
• History, as the title of the finished event — a club remembers “Saturday Social”, not “Americano, 12 August”;
• the downloaded results summary and the results email.

Courts

Tick the courts in play today, name them, and say whether each is doubles or singles. Unticking one keeps it in your club setup for next time — nothing is deleted.

Setup · courts

Court names carry through to every board, every court iPad and the arrival sheet, so it is worth naming your show court here rather than counting along a row later. A singles court seats two rather than four, and the ranked formats (Beat the Box, Rule the Court) use doubles courts only.

Player vs Partnership

The Partners step asks whether players keep a partner:

• Shuffle every round — CourtsOS redraws the pairings each round so nobody repeats a partner until they have to. Points follow the individual, so the leaderboard is one long personal ladder.
• Fixed partnerships — players choose a partner when they sign in and stay together all day. The leaderboard ranks pairs, and only doubles courts are used.

Some formats are shuffle-only (Rule the Court, Beat the Box, Punk and Interclub) and skip the step. Match Play, Tiebreak 10s and Cup skip it too: the first two take their names on court, and a Cup's teams are fixed pairs you enter yourself.

Your players

Paste a column straight out of your spreadsheet — one name per line — or add them one at a time. The list builds up beside the box as chips, each with an × if you mistype one.

Setup · players

These names populate the sign-in sheet rather than the draw itself. Anyone who does not tap in is left out, and a late arrival can be added mid-event without rebuilding a round — see the Courts tab.

Length, and rounds that move on by themselves

How many rounds to generate — a ceiling, not a commitment, since you can finish early at any point — and whether CourtsOS should move the event on without you.

Setup · length

On Automatic — the default — the next round starts by itself a few seconds after the last court reports, so nobody has to stand at the organiser screen. The final round always waits for you, because ending it archives the event, downloads the summary and can email the results.

Review & launch

The last step lays the whole event out on one page with an edit link on every line, and anything still outstanding named at the bottom. The button then does one of two things, depending on the format:

• Lock & open sign-in — for the roster formats. The sign-in sheet opens on your arrival screens and nothing is drawn until you start the first round, so late arrivals are no trouble.
• Lock & start — for Match Play, Tiebreak 10s and Cup, which enrol nobody. The setup is pushed to every screen: the display boards come out of promotions, and each court iPad picks up its match settings.

Setup · review

The classic panel

Everything above is also available on a single long page. Switch to classic setup, at the foot of the step rail, changes to it and Guided setup changes back; the choice is remembered on that device. Both drive the identical settings — it is a matter of taste, and anything this guide describes can be found in either.

On a laptop or an iPad in landscape the classic page is two columns: your event settings scroll down the left and your roster sits in a fixed rail on the right, so you can see who is loaded while you change the settings. On a phone it becomes one column.

3 Tournament formats

Ten ways to run an event. Pick one at step one of Setup — each is a card with a one-line description, and CourtsOS then asks only for the settings that format actually needs. Most formats include a short walkthrough video in their card below.

Mexicano

Pairings by current standings

The competitive cousin of Americano. After each round the active players are ranked, then matched by standing — 1st + 4th play 2nd + 3rd on each court — so the leaders are always pushed. Great when players want a genuine contest rather than a pure mixer.

CompetitiveRanked by pointsPlayer or Partnership

Watch the walkthrough

Setup · step one

Rule the Court

Winners move up, losers move down

A king-of-the-court ladder. Courts are ranked (climbing towards the Diamond court); winning pairs move up, losing pairs move down, and the winning and losing pairs split each round so partnerships keep changing. Fast, noisy and very social.

Court hierarchyPlayer mode only

Watch the walkthrough

Setup · step one

Beat the Box

Two-stage boxes of four

Built for exactly 8, 12 or 16 players. Stage 1 plays fixed groups of four (three rounds per stage, one doubles court per box); after each stage players regroup by performance for Stage 2. At the end of a stage you choose whether to continue or finish.

8 / 12 / 16 playersGroups of fourPlayer mode only

Watch the walkthrough

Setup · scoring

Punk

Multi-venue Americano · one leaderboard

For a club spread across single-court sites. Each enabled court becomes its own venue running an independent Americano; players pick their venue when they sign in, and every venue advances on its own with byes as needed. You get an overall winner (by average points per round) plus a winner at each venue. Punk runs entirely from the on-court iPads — no central operator needed.

Multi-venueRuns from court iPadsPlayer mode only

Setup · venues

Match Play

Traditional games & sets, scored on court

For proper matches rather than a rotation. Tick the courts in use; each court is scored on its own iPad and shown live on the /scoreboard TV. There's no player roster to load — you just run the matches and the scores flow to the screens.

You set the format once and it goes to every court. Number of sets (1, best of 3, 5 or 7), set length, both tiebreaks, how the match ends and what the final set is — all chosen here and pushed out, including to courts whose screen is already open. The iPad is left asking only for names and who serves. (A court can still change its own match under Match settings before it starts.)

Set length

There are three:

Set length	How it plays	Good for
6 games	The standard set — first to 6, won by two, tiebreak at 6–6.	Proper matches, when there's court time.
Short 4	The same rules over four games: won by two, so 4–3 plays on to 5–3, and a tiebreak only at 4–4 (to 7, by two). A set taken at 4–4 reads 5–4.	Real tennis scoring in about half the time.
Fast4	First to 4 with no advantage set — a tiebreak at 3–3, decided 4–3.	The tightest schedule; every set ends on a fixed number.

Short 4 and Fast4 are easy to confuse, and their difference is exactly the two-clear rule — which is why the TV board and the court's own format chip name the one being played: a 5–3 set under a “Fast4” label would read as an error.

Singles courts

A court set to Singles on the Club tab is scored as singles on its own iPad — two players, a two-slot serve order — and shown that way on the board. That's the Club tab's decision, not the iPad's, so it can't be changed by accident mid-event.

Games & sets6 games · Short 4 · Fast4Best of 1 / 3 / 5 / 7Singles or doublesNo roster neededScored per court

Setup · Match Play

Americano Interclub

Two clubs · one Americano · club vs club

Two clubs play one Americano where every pair is two players from the same club and every match is club vs club. Mark visiting players with a * after their name (everyone else counts as the host club). It runs for a set time — the server deals each reshuffled round — and you get a club-vs-club total plus an overall player ladder. Set the visiting club's name, crest and colour so the two sides are easy to tell apart on the board.

Two clubsTime-boxedVisiting name/logo/colourPlayer mode only

Watch the walkthrough

Setup · clock

Cup

Fixed teams · groups & knockout

Your championship day. Pairs enter as fixed teams, play a group stage, and the best of them go through to a knockout with a plate for the rest. It is the only CourtsOS format where a team stays together and wins its way through a structure — every other format reshuffles a pool of individuals.

The whole group stage is dealt the moment you press Start, so the schedule is printable from minute one and every court knows its afternoon. Each court iPad then opens on its own next fixture with the four names already in it. Matches are games & sets, using the same controls as Match Play.

You do not have to work out the shape yourself. Tell CourtsOS how many courts and how many teams and it ranks the days it can actually deal — groups of three up to six, or one round robin for the whole field — with a Use this button on each. A field that doesn't divide neatly is fine: seven teams is a group of four and a group of three.

Fixed pairsGroups → knockout + plateAny entry from 6 upGames & setsScored per court

Watch the walkthrough

Setup · Cup

Everything about running a Cup, step by step →

Tiebreak 10s

One tiebreak decides the match

Tie Break Tens, on your courts. There are no games and no sets — each match is a single tiebreak to 10 points, won by two. A match takes about ten minutes, so a club night gets through a lot of them.

The court taps Spin for serve and CourtsOS nominates who starts. From there the first server serves one point, everyone after that serves two, and the players change ends every 6 points — all counted for them.

It is an Americano whose every match is one tiebreak: load your roster and CourtsOS draws the pairings round by round, exactly as it would for a points game, and the tiebreak's points feed the same leaderboard. Tiebreak Tens is also available as a match type inside Match Play and Cup, which is the type-it-on-court version.

First to 10, by two≈10 minutes a matchDrawn from your rosterSingles or doubles

Setup · Tiebreak 10s

Everything about running Tiebreak 10s →

4 Running a Cup

Your championship day, end to end — fixed pairs, a group stage dealt to the courts, a count-back, and a knockout that fills itself in as results land.

Prefer to watch it? There's a five-minute Cup walkthrough with the other format videos →

A Cup is different from every other CourtsOS format. Elsewhere you load a roster of individuals and CourtsOS reshuffles them each round. Here, pairs enter as teams and stay together, play their group, and win their way through a draw. Nobody has to keep a sheet: CourtsOS deals the fixtures, works out the tables, and resolves the knockout.

Setting one up

1. On Setup, pick Cup.
2. At Courts, name and tick the courts you're using.
3. At the Draw shape step, say how many teams you expect. CourtsOS ranks the days it can deal on your courts — take one with Use this, or set the shape by hand underneath.
4. Set the match format — sets, set length, tiebreaks — exactly as for Match Play. You can give each round its own if you want to.
5. Enter your pairs in draw order: the first three are Group 1, the next three Group 2, and so on.
6. Press Start Cup. The whole group stage is dealt at once and you land on the Fixtures tab.

Let CourtsOS work out the shape

Sizing a cup is the fiddly part, and it is the part CourtsOS will do. The Draw step asks for one number — how many teams? — and, against the courts you have ticked, offers the three best days it can actually deal, each with what it costs: how many matches, the fewest anyone is guaranteed, how many are knocked out after the groups, and how many rounds the group stage runs to.

Setup · Cup · draw shape

They are ranked the way an organiser would rank them: nobody going home after the group stage beats anything else, then a shorter group stage, then the most guaranteed matches. Nothing here is a stored table of good answers — each card is worked out by the same code that deals the fixtures, so a shape it suggests is always one Start Cup can deal.

Pasting your teams in

Use Paste names… and paste a column of names straight out of your spreadsheet — which is what a spreadsheet actually copies. CourtsOS pairs consecutive lines into teams and tells you what it's about to make before you commit. (A line that already holds two names, separated by a comma, a tab or an &, is taken as a whole pair on its own.)

Setup · Cup · paste names

What shapes are possible

Any entry from six pairs up can be drawn. Groups can hold three, four, five or six teams — or you can put the whole field in one round robin (see below). A field that doesn't divide exactly is not a problem: it splits into balanced groups of at most the size you picked, the earlier groups taking the extra team, so seven pairs in groups of four is a group of four and a group of three — never four, four, four and one, which would strand a team with nobody to play.

The one hard rule comes from the knockout. It crosses partner groups — 1 against 2, 3 against 4 — so a group's winner and runner-up can only meet again in the final, and that needs an even number of groups whose qualifiers come to a power of two. Four groups of three send eight teams into the quarter-finals; three groups cannot be crossed at all. When your numbers can't make a draw, CourtsOS says so on the Setup tab and names the sizes that would work — “11 teams in groups of 4 makes 3 groups (4 + 4 + 3) … Groups of 6 (6 + 5) would work, or one round robin”.

These are the shapes CourtsOS puts first for each entry, with what the day costs. Every number here is the engine's own, for three courts:

A round is one turn of all your courts, so multiply by your match length to size the day: a single tiebreak runs about 15 minutes, a Fast4 or Short 4 match about 30, a best-of-three about 50.

One round robin, and where you cut to the finals

Set Teams per group to All and the whole field becomes one group. Everyone plays everyone, the table is cut in half, and the top half play for the cup while the half below it play for the plate — seeded highest against lowest, so the top two can only meet in the final. It is the shape to reach for when the entry is small and the court time is long: eight teams gives everybody seven matches before a knockout instead of three, and the semi-final seeding comes off the whole field rather than off whichever opponents landed in your group.

Setup · Cup · one round robin

Two dials come with it:

• Matches each — leave it on All for a full robin, or cap it. Three matches each out of a possible five is a sensible club evening. On an odd field one team rests each round, so some play one fewer, and the panel says so.
• Finals — Auto takes the largest bracket the field supports. Or choose it: Top 2 is a straight final, Top 4 is semi-finals. The places below the cut take as many as make a plate bracket, so six teams cutting at four still gives 5th and 6th a plate final.

Choosing the fixtures yourself

On the one-round-robin draw, Fixtures offers Auto or Choose. Choose opens a list of team-v-team pickers, in the order they will be played, with a running count of matches per team so you can see the balance. Rematches are allowed — a deliberate second meeting is a real thing to schedule.

Setup · Cup · choose your fixtures

Every team needs at least one match: a list that leaves somebody out is refused by name, because a team with no matches has nothing to rank on. This is the one-group draw only — where there are groups, the groups already decide who meets whom.

Who plays for the plate

The plate is the rest of the day for the teams who don't make the main draw, and how many of them there are is your choice. CourtsOS only ever offers the shapes your groups can actually feed:

With groups of three, the top two go up and the third goes to the plate, so every team gets a knockout match. That is why three per group is usually the right pick when court time is tight. Groups of four give everyone an extra group match, which is worth having if there is time — and with the bottom-half plate nobody is knocked out then either.

Giving the plate its own court

The knockout only ever has two ties in flight at once, because both semi-finals are played at the same time — the only fair way to run them. On three courts that can leave the third standing idle all afternoon while two plate semi-finals sit waiting, their teams already known.

Plate on fixes that: name a court and the whole plate runs there, tie after tie, alongside the main draw from the first knockout slot. The main final still waits for the plate to finish, so the day still ends on your champions.

A different format for each round

A group match and a final do not have to be the same length. Format by round gives every round the draw will contain — group stage, quarter-finals, semi-finals, final — its own Default or Different switch, with the full match-format controls behind it. Fast4 or Short 4 group matches under best-of-three finals is the common one.

Only the rounds your draw actually has are offered, so an eight-team cup never shows you a quarter-final it will not play. A plate round takes its main-draw equivalent's format — a plate semi-final is a semi-final.

How many teams, and how many courts

The recommender answers this for you, but it helps to know what it is trading off. Two teams from the same group can't be on court at the same time, so with groups of three your number of groups is the ceiling on how many courts can be busy at once. Two groups spread over three courts leaves a third of your court time empty right through the group stage; four groups over three courts fills every slot.

Twelve pairs on three courts is eight rounds — a comfortable afternoon whichever match format you pick.

When each court comes free

The Fixtures tab prints a line the front desk actually wants: “Courts come free: Court 3 after round 5 · Court 2 after round 7”. It is read off the dealt schedule, so it is right whatever shape you chose and wherever you put the plate, and it goes into the downloaded summary as well. The rounds are the printed order rather than a clock — a court starts its next fixture the moment the previous result is in.

The shape it was built around: 12 pairs, 3 courts

Twenty-two matches in eight rounds, with not one idle court until the final. Notice that the plate runs alongside the main draw on the third court rather than queueing up behind it, so the plate is settled before your semi-finals finish.

The Fixtures tab is your draw

Everything is dealt before a ball is hit. The group rounds appear as cards, the knockout as a bracket, and the plate below it — in the order the day is actually played.

Fixtures · dealt at start

As results come in, the bracket fills itself in and the scores appear under each tie. A tie being played right now is badged In play — and that badge means a court says so, not that a round number has ticked over, so a fast court that has run ahead is flagged correctly and a fixture nobody has started is not.

Fixtures · mid-event

Standings, and the count-back

CourtsOS builds each group's table from the results and orders it on matches won, then set difference, then game difference. Teams still level after all three are not ordered — CourtsOS says so and asks you to decide, because guessing would quietly change who goes through.

Two things follow from that, and they are the same on your Standings tab, on the TV draw and in the printed summary:

• Teams that are genuinely level share a position — 1, 2, 3, 3, 5, 6 — rather than being separated by the order they were entered in. Once you rule a group, it is settled and the places are distinct again.
• A group with no results yet shows no ranking at all. Before the first score, position numbers are just entry order wearing a medal and the qualification bars promise places nobody has earned. The numbers, the bars and the W and game-difference columns all appear with the first result.

Standings

• “N results outstanding” — a fixture that could have been played and has no result, while later matches have been played around it. That's a score that never made it back to CourtsOS. It names the tie and takes you to the Courts tab to enter it.
• “Level on the count-back — you decide” — nothing downstream of that group publishes until you set the order, so a knockout tie can never be dealt to the wrong team.

An exhibition match, mid-tournament

Between the semi-finals and the final there is usually a gap — players recovering, a crowd with nothing to watch. 🎭 Exhibition match, on the Courts tab, fills it: pick a court, type up to four names, and Send to court.

Courts · exhibition match

That court's iPad opens the scorer with the names already in it, as soon as whatever it is doing is finished — the show outranks the court's next fixture, because you chose the court and the fixture is still waiting afterwards. It is scored like any other match and goes up on the TV board like any other match, labelled EXHIBITION so nobody reads it as a cup tie.

court.html — exhibition

On the big screen

Put /scoreboard on a TV and it carries the day, not just the courts in play.

While matches are being played it is the live board: one panel per court, sets and games, who is serving. Each court's panel carries a chip beside its name saying what the match is — “GROUP 1 · ROUND 2”, “SEMI FINAL”, “PLATE FINAL”, “EXHIBITION” — so the room can tell a group tie from a final at a glance. Live scores land with an airport-board flip and a brief pulse on the number that changed, which is what catches an eye across a hall.

scoreboard.html — live

Between matches it becomes the draw. When no court is playing — including before the first ball, from the moment you press Start — the board shows the shape of the day: the group tables with qualification bars (into the cup, into the plate), the knockout in playing order, and the plate in its own band below.

scoreboard.html — the draw

On the court

Each court iPad opens on its own next fixture with the four names already filled in — they came from the draw, so there is nothing to type and nothing to get wrong. All the court has to choose is who serves.

court.html?court=1

court.html — scoring

Every scorer screen carries your club's logo beside the court name and a small CourtsOS mark in the corner, so a photograph taken courtside is your club's, not ours. A club that has set no logo simply gets the court name.

When the day is done

The moment the last fixture lands, every screen in the club becomes the result — including the court that has just won the final and is sitting on its own done screen, which is the one screen nobody is standing at any more.

court.html — honours

The big screen does the same. /scoreboard stops being a scoreboard and becomes the result: two full-bleed scenes cross-fading, each carrying the other honours on a ribbon beneath.

scoreboard.html

scoreboard.html

Finish changes your own screens too. Courts, Fixtures and Arrivals stand down — an afternoon of live-looking fixtures on a tournament that is over is the confusing part — and you land back on Setup, ready for the next one. Nothing is deleted: the results are in History, the final table is still on Standings, and the roster stays, because “same people, next event” is one tap away.

5 Running Tiebreak 10s

Tie Break Tens on your courts — no games, no sets, just a single tiebreak to ten. About ten minutes a match.

Every other format on this page is built out of games and sets. Tiebreak 10s throws both away: one tiebreak decides the match. It is the quickest competitive format CourtsOS runs, which makes it the one to reach for on a busy club night, for a warm-up round before a main event, or for a quick knockout when you have an hour and a lot of players.

CourtsOS counts all three for you. The court taps a winner for each point and nothing else — no one has to remember whose serve it is or when to swap ends.

Setting one up

1. On Setup, pick Tiebreak 10s.
2. At Courts, tick the courts you're using. A court set to Singles is scored as singles.
3. At Match format, choose what it's played to — To 7, To 10 or To 15. Ten is the standard.
4. Set the length in rounds, and load your players — it draws the pairings from your roster like any Americano.
5. Lock & open sign-in, then start the first round from the arrivals sheet once people have tapped in.

Spinning for serve

Rather than argue about it, the court taps 🎰 Spin for serve and CourtsOS draws a server at random. The wheel spins down onto a name and the whole serving order appears underneath.

court.html?court=1

Scoring it

Each point is one tap on the side that won it. The score is shown big, the serving player is marked with a ball, and the ends swap themselves at 6, 12 and 18 points.

court.html — scoring

On the big screen

Put /scoreboard on a TV and every court in play is on it. The board knows this format has no sets, so it drops those columns and shows a single Points column.

scoreboard.html

6 The Courts tab — running the event live

Once you start, this is where the action is: the current round, court by court, with scores going in as they finish.

Courts

• Each court card shows the two pairs and their score. Tap a score to enter or amend it; when both are in, the card shows the result and locks.
• The Resting column lists who's sitting this round out.
• The bottom bar tracks players, active, resting, submitted and round. When every court is in, hit End round → to generate the next one, or Finish to close the tournament and send it to History.
• Use the round selector at the top to look back at earlier rounds — they open read-only.

Entering a score

When a match finishes, open the court's card and set the score. Tap + / − on either side — because the game is played to a fixed total, the other side fills in automatically (enter 15 and the opponents get 9 of a 24-point game). Check it reads right, then hit the big ✓ Submit score button and the card locks.

Courts · entering a score

Taking a player out mid-tournament

If someone has to leave partway through, you can take them out of the rotation — and add them back if they return — from the Arrivals tab. Tap their name, exactly as you would to sign someone in. What that means depends on whether the event has started:

• Before the tournament starts — unchanged. Tapping a name just marks whether they're here yet.
• Once it's running — tapping an arrived player means they've left. A confirmation appears — “[Player] has left the tournament?” — and from that point they stop being scheduled.

• Courts drop automatically. Everyone else carries on; a court is removed only when there aren't enough players left to fill it. With three courts (two doubles + one singles), for example: 10 players fill all three, 8 run on two, 5 run on one. Anyone not on court sits in the resting list as usual.
• They keep their points. A player who has left stays on the Standings board with everything they earned — listed below the still-playing field and tagged left — and they're saved into History too. They're always ranked below active players, even if their points would otherwise place them higher: leaving means they're out of the running.
• If they come back, tap their name again — they re-enter as a late arrival, joining from the next round.

On the Arrivals tab, someone who has left shows a ← icon and the line “Left · not scheduled from round N” — which tells them apart from a player who never arrived (○). The status message after you tap reads “[Player] has left · not scheduled from round N”.

Arrivals

Adding a player who has just turned up

Add them on the Setup tab and tap Arrivals — the sheet is drawn from the live roster every time you open it, so the new name is already there. Nobody loses their sign-in.

How it behaves by format

Rounds move on by themselves

You do not have to press anything. When every court in the round has submitted, CourtsOS counts down about ten seconds and starts the next round on its own — the countdown bar carries a Hold button if you want to stop it, and End round → still works if you would rather get there sooner.

Two things always wait for a person: the final round, because ending it finishes the tournament, downloads the summary and can email the results; and a court you have put on hold. A disputed score does not hold the round up — it is named on the countdown bar and flagged on the Fixtures list so you can find it and correct it afterwards from the round selector. Stopping the whole event over one disagreement is the worse trade.

Running out of rounds — + Add rounds

You set the number of rounds before you start, and sometimes the court time outlasts them. + Add rounds sits on the Courts bottom bar next to Finish: tap it, choose how many more, and the event simply carries on. The round counter moves, the next round is published, and both organiser devices pick it up.

You do not have to wait until you are trapped — it is there for the whole event, so if you can see at round 15 that there is time for 24, you can say so then. It takes your club accent colour on the final round, which is the one moment it needs to be findable without looking for it.

7 The Fixtures tab

The schedule at a glance — who plays whom, on which court, each round.

Fixtures

Fixtures is the printable-style running order. It's handy to show players what's coming up, and to check the rotation looks fair. Rounds appear here as they're generated; played rounds show their final scores.

Who won, at a glance

Once a result is confirmed, the winning pair is picked out in your club's accent colour — every fixture row, in every format, plus the Cup's group rows and its bracket. You can scan a whole round without reading a single score.

Three things it deliberately won't do. A disputed score names nobody, because the whole point of that row is that the number isn't agreed yet. A drawn match names nobody, because there is no winner to name — where a tiebreak settled a level score the row carries a ★ instead. And it reads the scores as numbers, so it can never highlight the wrong side.

8 Standings

The live leaderboard, updated after every submitted score.

Standings

Standings rank everyone by total points, with their win–draw–loss record alongside. In Partnership formats the table ranks pairs; in Player formats it ranks individuals. This same leaderboard also appears on the big Display board so players can follow it during play.

Anyone who leaves mid-tournament stays on the board with the points they earned, tagged left and listed below the still-playing field (they're ranked below active players regardless of their score).

Standings

9 The History tab

Every finished tournament, kept and downloadable.

History

Finished events are listed by their tournament name where you gave them one, with the format and date underneath; unnamed ones are listed by format as before.

When you tap Finish on a running event, its results are archived here automatically. Open History any time to review a past event or Download its results to share or keep. (History is one of the passcode-protected tabs.)

10 Player phone screens

Players follow the live tournament — and enter their own scores — from their phone. No app to install, no passcode.

Signing in on a phone

Players scan the QR code on the arrivals board (or the big display) to open the live tournament on their phone. They tap their own name once to sign in — from then on the phone shows a personal view headed “Viewing as [name]”. Anyone who just wants to watch can choose View as spectator for a read-only board.

Following the event

The phone shows the same live information as the big display — current matches, next matches, resting this round and the standings — but centred on that player: their match is highlighted and their name is marked wherever it appears.

Entering their own score

The player whose match it is gets an Enter score button on their court. Tapping it opens a simple keypad — set each side with + / − until the totals add up to the match target, then Submit score. It flows straight to the board and every screen.

11 The Scoreboard

The TV board for games & sets — YOUR_CLUB.courtsos.com/scoreboard.html

scoreboard.html

This is the screen for Match Play, Cup and Tiebreak 10s, where each court's score is pushed here as it's played. Put it on a TV near the desk or the bar.

• Every court you ticked appears — a court nobody has started on yet shows a waiting placeholder, so the board matches the room rather than only the courts that happen to be busy. In a Cup that placeholder names the fixture it is waiting for, and a court with nothing left on its schedule leaves the board rather than waiting for ever.
• Each court says what its match is. A chip beside the court name reads “Group 1 · Round 2”, “Semi Final”, “Plate Final” or “Exhibition”. A plain Match Play game has nothing to say there, so it shows its settings alone, exactly as before.
• Names are fitted to the board. Long names shrink together, then shorten to an initial (“K. Nakamura”), so a full name is never chopped off mid-word.
• Scores flip like an airport board — the number that changed folds to its new value with a short pulse, which is what makes a change visible from across a room.
• Short 4 and Fast4 are named in each court's sub-line, so a 5–3 or 4–3 set score doesn't look like an error.
• Tiebreak 10s drops the sets columns altogether and shows a single Points column — a format with no sets shouldn't have a column of noughts.

During a Cup, it shows the draw between matches

When a Cup is running and no court is currently playing, the board stops being a scoreboard and becomes the draw — group tables with qualification bars, the knockout in playing order, the plate below. It does that from the moment you press Start, before a ball is hit, and it comes back 90 seconds after each result. See it, and the rest of the Cup day →

Your sponsor's logo

Type a web link into the Sponsor crest field on Setup’s Name & branding step and it appears in the board's top bar, between your club's name and the LIVE indicator — as above. It's the most-watched screen at an event, so it's the one worth selling. The crest stays hidden until the image actually loads, so a dead link leaves a clean board rather than a gap.

12 The Display board

The full-screen board for a TV — YOUR_CLUB.courtsos.com/display.html

display.html

Put this on a TV or projector where everyone can see it. It shows Current matches court by court, Next matches, Resting this round, and the full Standings — refreshing itself live (note the “Live” indicator and last-updated time). At the end it switches to a Final results view.

Putting it on a TV

The ordinary board asks who is watching before it shows anything — right on a phone, which is where most of its traffic comes from, and wrong on a television bolted to a wall. Point a club TV at YOUR_CLUB.courtsos.com/tvdisplay instead: same board, no name picker, no alerts toggle, and it never remembers a name somebody once tapped on it. …/tvipad does the same for an iPad-shaped screen.

13 Court iPad screens

One screen per court — YOUR_CLUB.courtsos.com/court.html?court=1 (change the number for each).

Mount an iPad on each court and open its link (from the Club tab's Court screens list). During a round the screen shows that court's current match and what's up next, and lets the players on court enter the score directly — no need to come back to the desk.

court.html?court=1

When a court is idle between events it rotates your Promotions slides, then flips back the moment an event starts. Tap Scoreboard to jump to the live scores at any time.

Every court screen carries your club's logo beside the court name and a small CourtsOS mark in its own corner — so the screen behind a photograph is yours. Set the logo once on the Club tab and it reaches every court.

Is the screen still alive?

A court iPad is switched on and then left alone for weeks, so there is a small dot in the top corner of every always-on screen — the court screens, the display boards, the TV scoreboard and the sign-in sheet — that breathes slowly, in and out, about once every second and a half. The organiser app's ● Live pill carries the same dot for the same reason.

It means one thing: breathing is alive, stopped mid-breath is not. If you walk past a screen and the dot is still, that page has stopped — close the app and reopen it, and it will pick up where it should be. It is deliberately not a CSS animation, because those keep running on a page whose everything else has frozen, which is precisely the lie this exists to catch.

Scoring games & sets on the court

For Match Play and Cup, the iPad is a full scorer rather than a score box. Under game scoring — the usual choice for a club — the pair on court just tap Won game on their side, and CourtsOS keeps the games, the sets and the serve rotation.

Spinning for serve

Rather than tap who serves, a pair can let CourtsOS draw it. Under Or let CourtsOS pick on the new-match screen, 🎰 Spin for serve runs a wheel down onto a name — and in doubles it draws a first server for each pair, which settles the whole serving order in one go. The buttons above update to match, so you can still change it by hand afterwards.

court.html — new match

Tiebreaks are typed, not counted

When a set reaches its tiebreak, tapping the winner opens a small entry that states the rule — “First to 7, clear by 2 points”, or “First to 5 — sudden death at 4–4” for Fast4 — and asks for the score. It opens on 0–0: nothing is filled in for you, so a tiebreak nobody played can't be recorded by a stray tap. If the score you type couldn't have happened under that rule, Save is greyed out and tells you why.

court.html — tiebreak

The end-of-match card

When a match finishes, the court shows a shareable momentum card: how the match swung game by game, where it turned, the best run of the match, and each player's service record. Save / share image saves it as a picture for the club's socials or the players' phones.

court.html — between matches

14 Promotions

The adverts that rotate on your court screens — YOUR_CLUB.courtsos.com/promo-admin.html

Promotions has its own passcode (separate from the organiser passcode). Log in with your club name and promo passcode to manage the slideshow that appears on your court screens.

promo-admin.html

What you can do

• Add adverts — drag in JPG/PNG images (or tap to choose). They're optimised in your browser so they load fast on the screens.
• Slideshow & timing — turn the rotation on/off and set the seconds per advert.
• Reorder — drag the handle (or use the up/down arrows) to set the running order.
• LIVE toggle — flip any advert on or off without deleting it.
• QR link — add a link and CourtsOS shows a scannable QR on screen (great for “book a court”, coaching, or a tournament sign-up).
• Schedule — set a start and/or stop time so an advert appears (or ends) automatically — handy to pull a promo the moment its event begins.
• Preview on screen — push the current slideshow to your court screens to check it.
• Change passcode — update the promo passcode for the club at the bottom.

Getting your artwork right

Export your adverts edge to edge, with no white border. A lot of design tools add a thin white matte — a pixel or two, invisible on your laptop — and on a big court screen it shows up as a faint bright line down the edge of the slide. CourtsOS scales each slide very slightly past the edge to swallow a hairline, but it can't hide a real border without cropping into your design.

• Landscape, and generous — the screens are widescreen, so a landscape image fills them best. Around 1920 × 1080 is plenty; they're optimised in your browser on upload.
• Keep the important bits away from the very edge — logos and text a little inside the frame survive any screen's overscan.
• Dark backgrounds sit best against the court screens, which are dark themselves.

15 Player recaps

When the tournament ends, everyone who played gets their own night back — on their phone, on the court screens and on your own.

Press End Tournament and CourtsOS builds a card for every player: where they finished, what they scored, every match they played, their best win, their closest match and a line about how the night went. Nothing to set up, no accounts, no app to install — it is simply what the screens show once the event is over.

Where it turns up

• On the player’s phone. Anyone who picked their name on the display board to submit scores sees their own card the moment the event finishes. The full standings stay one tap away.
• On the court iPads. For ten minutes after you finish, every court shows the cards two at a time, moving on one place every eight seconds and looping round the field. Then the adverts come back on their own.
• On your organiser screen. For those same ten minutes the recaps are what the console rests on instead of the advert slideshow. There is a Player recaps button on the Standings tab too, so you can put them up whenever you like.

Who played who

The Who played who button turns the night into a picture: every player on a circle in finishing order, a line for each partnership and a line for each matchup. Tap a name and their evening lights up — who they partnered (in your accent colour) and who they faced (in orange), side by side, so a pair who did both show up as two lines rather than one. And you can see who they somehow never crossed all night. It is the thing people crowd round at the bar.

Turning it off

There is a Show player recaps on the courts switch on the Setup tab. Turn it off when another group is going on court straight after and the screens go back to the adverts the moment you finish. A court can also be handed back early on its own — the deck has a Back to adverts button — without affecting the others.