Running a pickleball league on Pickleheads is as close to set-it-and-forget-it as organized play gets. Create your league once, and the platform builds your full session schedule, handles player invites before every night, and updates standings in real time as scores come in.
Your job on league night is just to run the session — the Pickleheads app takes care of the rest. This guide walks you through the full setup, from the creation form to your first live league night.
Step 1: Open the League Creation Form
Go to your profile and tap My Leagues, then tap Create League. This opens the league creation form. Everything you fill in here becomes the default configuration for every session the league generates — you can edit individual sessions later, but this is your starting point.
Step 2: Set Your League Schedule
Enter the day(s) and time(s) your league meets each week. You can add multiple days if you're running more than one night per week.
Once you create the league, it will auto-generate 90 days of sessions based on this schedule. More sessions get added automatically as the league progresses, so you won't need to create them manually.
Step 3: Choose Your League Type
Select League or Ladder.
Not sure? Here’s the difference:
- A traditional league has a defined season length (6, 8, or 12 weeks are common) with an expectation that players attend regularly.
- A ladder has no set end date, runs continuously, and is built for mixed attendance.
💡 Good to know: If you're running a ladder, check out the separate ladder guide. The steps here cover traditional league setup.
Step 4: Set Your Standings Criteria
Choose your primary, secondary, and tertiary sort criteria. These determine how the standings are ordered and who wins the league at the end of the season.
Win percentage works well as the primary sort. It rewards consistency and gives players who miss a week a fair shot at the standings. Point differential is a solid tiebreaker — it rewards dominant wins without making the standings feel arbitrary.
Step 5: Choose Your Default Round Robin Format
Every league session will default to this format. You can change individual sessions later, but this sets the template for all of them.
Here are my top three recommendations:
- Popcorn — partners and opponents rotate every round; good for social leagues
- Up and Down the River — players move up or down a court based on round results; better for competitive groups
- Gauntlet — a seeded format that optimizes for competitive matchups; a good middle ground between the two above
⚠️ Important: Only rotate-partner formats are supported in leagues right now. Fixed-partner formats (where you play as a team all night) are coming soon.
Step 6: Configure Your Session Defaults
Fill in the settings that will apply to every session by default:
- Skill level and whether it's a DUPR-enabled league
- Expected player count and number of courts available
- Description and images
- Co-hosts
- Whether you're collecting payment
- Advanced settings (player invites, contact info visibility)
These become the default for every auto-generated session. You can override any of them at the individual session level.
Step 7: Set Up Player Invites
This section has the most impact on your week-to-week experience as an organizer. How you set it up depends on one question: are players signing up on Pickleheads, or somewhere else?
Path A — Registrations happen off Pickleheads (most facilities and larger operators)
Skip the Automated Invites section entirely. Here's the flow instead:
- Well before the first league night, send your players an email asking them to download the Pickleheads app and create an account.
- On the session page for each league night, you'll find a QR code (Invite > Print a QR Code). Post it at the venue before play starts.
- As players arrive, they scan the QR code. Anyone without an account will be prompted to create one before they can join. Plan for people to arrive 20–30 minutes early on night one so this goes smoothly.
- Scanning the QR code adds players to the session and doubles as check-in. You'll know exactly who's there.
💡 Good to know: Creating a group for your league is optional under this path, but worth doing. It gives you a record of who's created an account and a communication channel going forward.
Path B — Players are signing up on Pickleheads (smaller groups, community-run leagues)
Use the Automated Invites section. Here's how to set it up:
- Create a list of your league players. A list is private to you – players don't need to opt in, and you can add people by email or phone even if they don't have a Pickleheads account yet. As they create accounts, their contact info gets replaced by their actual profile automatically.
- Optionally, create a group for your league. Groups require players to opt in, so not everyone will join right away. That's what the list is for. Over time, as list members receive invites and create accounts, they'll join the group. Eventually you'll have everyone in one place.
- Attach both the group and the list in the Automated Invites section. Set how far in advance invites go out (the default is five days before each session; you can set it anywhere from six hours to seven days out).
From that point forward, players get invited automatically before every session.
Step 8: Choose Who Covers the Platform Cost
Pick one option before creating the league. It affects how sessions work for players and may be confusing to change later.
- Players chip in. Every session becomes a Pickleheads Plus-powered session. Players need an active Pickleheads Plus subscription ($12/year) to join. You get unlimited access to the league platform at no cost.
You cover it. Requires a Pickleheads Ultra subscription ($74.99/month). Sessions are open to any player, no Plus subscription required. Best if you want zero friction for your players at the door.
Step 9: Create Your League
Tap Create League. You'll land on your league page, where the full session schedule has already been built based on your inputs.
Take a few minutes to scroll through the schedule before you start inviting people.
Step 10: Review and Customize the Schedule
On your league page, each session is listed with options to edit. For any session you can:
- Tap the pencil icon to edit settings for that night specifically
- Tap the arrow to open the full session page
- Skip or cancel a week
- Change the round robin format for that session
- Toggle DUPR on or off (useful if your first week is a seeding round you don't want sent to DUPR)
You can also add sessions outside your regular schedule – a makeup night, a finals event, whatever you need. And if your league is already running under the old Pickleheads round robin method, you can link existing sessions to pull those results and players in.
💡 Good to know: The league generates 90 days of sessions on creation. You don't have to do anything after that. More sessions get added automatically as you go.
Step 11: Run Your First League Night
Run each session through the Pickleheads mobile app, the same way you'd run any round robin.
You'll notice a League Event button where the regular green round robin setup button normally appears. That button connects directly to the standings and schedule for quick reference during the night.
Enter scores as rounds finish, then end the event when play wraps up. The standings update in real time with every score.
⚠️ Important: Players who joined via email or phone (rather than a Pickleheads account) will appear in the standings as that contact info. Encourage them to create an account using the same email or phone number they were added with. Their account will replace the placeholder automatically once they do.
Step 12: Seed Each Week Using the Standings
After week one, you have real data to work with. When you set up the player list for subsequent sessions, tap Sort by Standings (if you're using a seeded format like Up and Down the River or Gauntlet). This seeds court assignments based on actual results rather than pre-season ratings, which makes for fairer matchups as the season goes on.
💡 Pro tip: From week two on, this takes about 30 seconds. Tap Sort by Standings, confirm the list, and go. The week basically runs itself from there.
If a score gets entered wrong, open the completed session, find the game, and fix it. The standings update automatically.
Wrapping up
Once the league is live, your job each week comes down to this: sort by standings, run the session in the app, enter scores, end the event. The platform handles everything else.
You're good to go. If you haven't set up your player list or group yet, that's the next thing worth five minutes of your time.
See you on the courts!
