Players and ladder managers can find the public page for their ladder by entering their email address on this Find-My-Ladder page.  That page may also be found in the above Ladder tab of the menu.

There are 5 pages that are used to control the administration of the ladders.

Add Another Name — Search — Standings — Email — Configuration

When reviewing the description below, it will also be helpful to review the “Screenshots and Tutorial“.

Add Another Name.

This is the starting page that is accessible from “Administration” link on the public ladder page. It requires a login with the ladder name and password. That Administration link will take you to the login page if you are not signed in or directly to the “Add Another Name” page if you are already signed in. You must have your browser configured to accept cookies. If you have cookies turned off in your browser, you can configure it to accept cookies for the domain of your ladder. The domain would be holdmycourt.com or holdmycourt.xyz depending on where your public ladder page is located.

This is the page from which you can add a new player. It has links to the standings page for each of the five ladders. The Test ladder can be used for practice and to test the functionality of the program without changing the data in the real ladders.

To inactivate a player, put a slash (/) anywhere in the box labeled ‘inactive date’. It could be part of a date if you want to indicate when the player was inactivated, as in 9/16/07. When a player has been inactivated, that player will appear in a separate list below the active list on the standings page.

The weekly scores read from left to right with Wk 1 being the oldest score and Wk 10 being the most recent week. You would not normally enter the scores here unless you were correcting scores that had been entered on the standings page.

The rank and size are kept for 5 weeks. Rank is the player’s ranking for the most recent week. Size is the size of the ladder. For example, if a player is 36th out of a total of 37 players, the rank is 36 and the size is 37. This will show up on the standings page as 36/37. R2/S2 is for the previous week, etc. Players that do not have any scores on the standings page will not be included when size is calculated. That way, you can keep track of whether a player is at or near the top or bottom of the ladder for up to 5 weeks very easily. You may want to use this information to decide when to move a player to a ladder that is a different skill level.

When adding a new player, you would not normally enter anything in the rank unless you wanted to place that player above the bottom because of a known skill level. If nothing is entered, it defaults to 99 which simply puts the player at the bottom of the ladder. To place a player at the top of a ladder, enter a rank of 1.

The Standings page has a link to an edit window for each of the players. When one of those links is clicked, it brings up this page in edit mode instead of add mode. Any of the fields can be edited as needed. To move a player to another ladder, simply click the button for the new ladder. You will probably also want to clear out all scores and rank and size information. If the player is moving down a level, for example from B to C, put “1” in the rank field.

All fields can be entered in lower case. The program is smart enough to convert to upper case where appropriate.

Search Page.

The Add Name page has a “Search” link that you can use to find a player if you are not sure which ladder that player is in. You can enter a partial name.

Standings.

The standings page is where all of the action occurs. This shows the players’ scores for the past ten weeks and the rankings for the past 5 weeks. The display might be too wide if all of the information were shown at once, so you can choose to show the scores or the rankings or the compact view which shows neither.

To record the scores for the week, simply enter the scores in the text box for each player in the Pts/Ct column of the standings page. Only the total score for all three games is entered. For example, if a player had scores of 15, 7, and 12, you would enter the total of 34. A player can have a maximum of 3 times the number of points per game because the games must be won by one point. Optionally the ladder manager could choose a win-by-2 format, but the scores would then count as 15 and 14 for the winner and loser respectively (assuming that the games are to 15 points).

The scores for the most recent week will go in to the W10 column. As additional weeks are entered, the older scores will move to the left so that by the time that you have 10 weeks, the first week will be in W1 and the 10th week in W10. If the ladder is more than 10 weeks, older scores move off the grid and you end up with a 10-week moving average.

Enter “b” for any player that had a bye. The bye column will be incremented by one for that player. If a player did not play that week, leave the box blank. Do not click the button until all scores have been entered into the rows. Do not press the ENTER key when entering scores into the boxes. The ENTER key will NOT cause any scores to be entered.

The maximum movement of a player in the rankings, up or down, from week to week is limited by the program to a maximum of 1/4 of the size of the ladder. That is to prevent the yo-yo effect of bouncing from the bottom of the ladder to the top or vice versa because of a single exceptional score. If you see that a player has the same rank as another player and the percentages are out of order, it means that one of the players has had the ranking limited by the maximum allowed. It is okay for 2 players to have the same rank. That player will have an ‘R’ in the rank column of the administration page and an ‘R’ next to the percentage on the public standings page. The ‘R’ stands for ‘R’estricted movement.

Enter a number in the box labeled Maximum Movement to override the default value of one-fourth of the size of the ladder. Enter zero to return to the default. Enter a number greater than the size of the ladder to prevent any restriction in the movement. Example: Entering 4 in the box would limit movement of a player in a week to 4 spaces or one foursome. The relative position of the player might be different than 4 if other players are also moving up or down.

The standings are published to the public web page automatically when the scores are recorded. The standings page of the website is accessible from the link in the menu table at the top of the page or from the league page of the website.

To publish the schedule, simply put the court assignments into the boxes of the Pts/Ct column of the standings page and press the “Publish Schedule” button. Optionally, the court numbers can be left blank. Place an “x” into the box for any player that is not playing that week, or “b” for players with byes. Byes should be assigned to enough players to make the total number of players a multiple of four. Byes and x’s are not saved at this time because that could change before the games are actually played. Bye players can be subs for any players that are unable to show up at the last moment. Byes are saved in the bye column when the scores are recorded. That helps the ladder manager keep track of the byes that have been assigned for previous weeks. Court assignments may be any combination of letters or digits up to six characters. It is not necessary to fill every row. If nothing is entered in a row, the court assignment will remain the same as the assigned row above it. You probably will want to enter assignments in every 4th row skipping over x’s and b’s, or just leave the assignments blank.

When the Publish Schedule button is clicked, the bottom of the page will show you what has been put on the schedule page of the website. Don’t confuse this display with the actual web page that can be seen by the players. That page is accessible from the link in the menu table at the top of the page or from the league page of the website.

Email Page.

There is a link on the main page of the ladder administration labeled “Email With Your Program…” This link will take you to a page of 4 links that can be used to send email to ladder players. When clicked, the links should bring up your default email program on your computer. More than likely, your default program is Outlook or Outlook Express. But, it should work with any of the popular email programs. This will allow you to send email from your personal email account.

It is recommended that you fill in the “To:” box with your own email address so that you will receive a copy of exactly what is seen by the other recipients. The BCC (blind carbon copy) box will be filled in with the list of email addresses for active players or inactive players as indicated.

The subject and body of the message will also be filled in as appropriate. You can add any other text to the message as you prefer.

Configure.

This page is used to enter a number of variables that are specific to your ladder. All of the variables are defined on the configure page. Take care with filling out this information because most of the items are displayed on the public pages for your ladder. That includes the title for the ladder, contact information, the labels for up to 4 individual ladders and playing day and time.