A doubles entry is one entry with two players on it. Almost every general registration tool is built on the opposite idea: one person, one form, one payment, one fee. That single mismatch is where most of the tournament desk's weekend goes.
One entry, two people, one payment
Think through what your desk actually needs to happen when a pair enters.
- One of the pair pays for both, or each pays a half, and the entry is not confirmed until both parts are in.
- A player enters without a partner and asks to be paired, which needs a holding state the draw can see.
- A partner withdraws in the week of the event and is substituted without the remaining player losing the place or paying again.
- Both players carry their own record: rating, club, waiver, and date of birth where there are age brackets.
- The same player enters singles, mixed doubles and doubles at one event, appearing in three draws under one set of contact details.
Tools that count registrants handle none of this cleanly. The usual workaround is two separate registrations joined by a note in a spreadsheet, and that holds until one of them withdraws.
Fees charged per head, entries made by the pair
Where the fee is per player per event, a pair that entered once is charged twice and a player in three draws is charged three times. Each skill band is often treated as a separate draw and priced accordingly. Run a league, a ladder that re-forms every round and a weekend split into bands, and the same members generate a charge each time. A club that puts on more play for the same people pays more every time it does so.
We quote no fee levels here. The ones that matter are printed on your own statements, and a year of them belongs in the software bill calculator beside the booking and membership lines.
Brackets are the other half of the problem
A skill bracket is not a category on a form. It is a rule about who may enter which draw, and it is what makes the event worth entering.
- A rating band with a floor and a ceiling, where the rating comes from the body that issues it rather than from what the player typed.
- Combined rating limits for a pair, where each player sits inside the band but the pair does not.
- Age brackets that interact with skill bands, and players eligible for two at once.
- A minimum number of entries before a bracket runs at all, with a rule for merging or refunding when it does not fill.
- Results that feed back into a club ladder after the event, rather than ending in a printed sheet.
The rating itself stays with the governing body. It means something only because every other player is measured on the same scale, and that is not a thing to rebuild. What can be yours is the entry: the pair, the band, the eligibility check, the draw, and the scheduling onto your own courts.
What it costs when the tool cannot do it
That cost is not on the invoice. It is a volunteer rebuilding the draw in a spreadsheet on the Friday night, entries retyped out of a payment report, a bracket that quietly ran with a player who should not have been in it, and an argument on the Sunday the desk cannot settle because nothing was recorded.
Write your own rules down first: what a pair entry is, what a withdrawal does to it, how a bracket is defined, when one is merged, and what a refund looks like. Then test any tool against that page.
Our page on what pickleball and racquet clubs rent and what can be rebuilt describes how entries, brackets and scheduling sit with the booking grid, and the guide to renting versus owning software covers when a club should stay exactly where it is.