Starting after the VIC Open in March, the GPC will run an 8 week Teams League at the Y in the Sunday, 5:15pm - 7:15pm timeslot, with the first session being on Sunday the 15th of March.
The focus is as much on having some good pickleball games as it is on socialising with your team members (and the opposition) - there is more opportunity for a chat in this format as each player will play 3 games and sit out the 3 other games played each gameday, and the session fee is also only $5 (there is a one-off registration fee of $20 to register a team for the league) - so even if you're playing in the 3pm session stay on for a relaxed chat & play with your teammates.Each team will consist of two women and two men; players will be ordered by their PIRAT rating when the team is assessed and each player is then given a player number from 1 to 4 accordingly. Each team will also nominate a team captain who will be responsible for organising suitable substitutes should one of the regular players be unable to attend a particular session.
To ensure that teams are balanced, the 4 players need to fit with the following restrictions (at the time the team registers) to be able to play in Division 2
Players will book into each week's session individually.
If a player is unavailable for a particular session, they need to let their team captain know asap, so the team captain can organise a replacement. The replacement player has to be of the same gender and has to have a rating that's not more than 10% different from the player they are substituting for. The 002 app now offers a facility for you to search for players based on rating ranges to help you identify potential replacements - or find that last member for your team!
If a team does not show with 4 players on particular gameday, they can still play those games where the required players are present - any games that can't be played due to players missing will be scored as a forfeit.
The league will allow for 8 teams per division to register, and will be run on the Sunday 5:15pm timeslot at the Y for 7 consecutive weeks, with semifinals and finals run in week 8.
Each week, your team will be playing against one of the other 8 teams in your Division, so that after the 7 weeks you will have played every one of the other teams. Each week, a total of 6 games will be played, and in each game the same players will be paired in both teams, resulting in a total of 6 games which will be played to 11 win by 1.
When you put your team together we recommend to clarify that your team members can commit to most of the 8 consecutive sessions; if some are not available on certain dates the team captain should start organising replacements for the respective players and dates as early as possible.
Scores will be recorded for the purpose of building a ladder for the Teams League, but scores won't count towards players PIRAT or DUPR rating. On each gameday, the maximum number of points a team can score is 66 (6 games, with a maximum of 11 points scorable in each game). Each gameday score is added to the teams total and is used to determine the ladder position of the team after each round.
In week 8 finals will be run in a longer session, where the top 4 teams first play semifinals (Team 1 plays Team 4 and Teams 2 plays Team 3), and the winners from the seminals then play for Gold/Silver, with the losing teams playing for Bronze.
Right here ! Registrations for the Team League are open now - so start building your team! We recommend that the team captain registers first - they will then be able to pick a name for their team in the 002 app, and when other team members register they simply select the team name (the name of the team captain will also be shown) to join that team.
This is a number between 1 and 35000 that you would have been given when you became a Pickleball Australia member (most likely via Pickleball Victoria, but if you started playing in another state then you would have been given that number by the corresponding state based pickleball association).