Running squash competitions may sounds easy, but if you have never done it, then it can be difficult to know where and how to start. How many players should/will participate? How do you organise the various matches? How do you keep track of the results? What about making it fair for all? Should you “seed” the players? Answers to all of these questions can be found here, together with some free tools to assist you.
For the most part, the information given below applies to squash competitions where either teams or individual players participate. Therefore throughout the rest of the post, I will simply refer to “players”, although the same procedures can be used for teams, unless specifically noted.
A Typical “Knock-Out” Squash Competition Draw/Results sheet
How do I run squash competitions?
First of all, you have to decide what sort of squash competitions you want to have, as there are several different types, including the following common ones:
- A “League” competition (or “Round Robin”)
- A “Ladder” competition
- A “Knock-out” competition
To a large extent, the choice depends on how many players are competing and how long you want the event to last. In this post, I will look at the first option – League Competitions. Ladders and Knock-out Competitions will be covered in a subsequent post.
League Competitions
League competitions (or “Round Robin” competitions) are usually run when there are many players of several different standards, and you want to run the competition over quite a long period – typically several weeks or months. The players are divided into different “Divisions” according to standard or ability. Each player has a match (or multiple matches) against every other player in the same Division.
At the end of the period, all of the players in each division are placed in order according to the results of their matches so that each division will have a winner, a second place etc., etc. Typically the winning player of each division will be promoted to the next higher division for the next cycle/season (sometimes more than one player is promoted) and the losing player of each division is relegated to the next lower division (again, sometimes more than 1 player is relegated).
How many times each player plays every other player and also how frequently the matches are played – determine how long the whole cycle or season lasts. For squash Leagues involving individual players, the divisions usually comprise of 5 or 6 players and each player plays every other player only once. Assuming each player has only one game each week on average, this means the league cycle would typically last 4 or 5 weeks. The website www.SquashLeagues.org, provides a very easy way to manage this type of league, and run squash competitions like this.
However, for Squash Leagues between teams, there can be up to 10 teams in each Division (or more), and the League lasts for a whole season – typically 6 months or more, requiring each team to play one match per week, and to play each other team more than once during the season.
Watch out for another post dealing with the other types of squash competitions – how to run Squash Ladders and also Knock-out competitions, together with some useful tools to assist the running of these types of squash competitions.