• It is the home team’s responsibility to provide balls for each match. The league approved balls are listed in the detailed rules.
• If you play a rescheduled match at some other facility then the home team is required to bring appropriate balls (e.g. orange indoor Onix for school gyms).
  

• A minimum of 4 players are required for each match.
• Teams can send 5 or 6 players if desired. Only 4 players are playing at any given time but substitutions are allowed in order to allow the 5 or 6 players to share the 4 playing spots. See the detailed rules for information about substitutions during the match.
• It’s up to each team to decide whether they prefer to send only 4 players to each match (and leave the other 1 to 2 at home) or send 5 (or 6) players and share the playing time.

• Matches consist of 4 players from one team playing against 4 players on another team on 2 courts.
• Each match consists of 4 rounds of doubles play where you will switch partners and opponents in each round.
• All rounds are 2 games to 11 win by 2 capped at 13.
• This results in all players playing 8 doubles games. In mixed divisions, 3 rounds are mixed doubles and 1 round is gender doubles.

• The scoresheet contains boxes to fill in player names to generate the on-court matchups.

• The away captain sends the away lineup to the home captain (ideally up to 24 hours in advance of the match to allow the home captain to create the scoresheet).

• The home captain then creates the scoresheet by adding the away and home player names into the correct boxes. The scoresheet comes in an Excel fillable format to allow the home captain to fill it in and print it from a computer rather than having to fill it in by hand (pdf is available as well).

• If desired, substitutions can be made after the completion of any game. The only restriction is the player substituting out after the first game in any round must sit out the second game of the round (anything goes if substitutions are made after the second game of the round).

• All games from all rounds are scored the same. The team that wins the game is awarded 2 match points. If the other team scored at least 6 points in the game then that team is awarded 1 match point (5 or less points in the game gets 0 match points).

• Games that don’t complete due to reaching the time limit are also scored the same way. There is no winner so neither team receives 2 match points. Teams(s) that have scored at least 6 points in the game are awarded 1 match point.

• The match winner is the team with the highest total of match points (sum of all match points from all games).

• In all matches except playoff elimination matches, it is possible for teams to have a tie. Playoff elimination matches have tie-breaker rules.

Click here to open the example scoresheet (mixed doubles in this case)

Things of note on the scoresheet:

• The player names can be filled in on a computer using the fillable Excel scoresheet file from the website. The results (games scores and match points) would normally be filled in by hand (not by computer as in this example).
• The away captain sends their roster (AF1, AF2, AM1 and AM2 names) to the home captain. The home captain then creates the scoresheet by filling in the away roster and adding the home names (HF1, HF2, HM1 and HM2). The scoresheet then automatically creates the round opponents on each court. The same thing happens in gender doubles (the scoresheet creates the opponents for each round).
• The away team has 5 players and the home team has 4 players attending this example match. Notice that Maggie didn’t actually play in the match (if she did then the substitutions would be hand written when they occurred).
• In match 1 of the first round, Homer and Marge defeated Anakin and Padme by a score of 11-8 in game 1 and they lost the second game by a score of 4-11. Then to the right of that the match points (0, 1 or 2) are assigned and totalled for the round (including the other games happening on the other court).
• This continues for all games of all rounds. Notice in round 4 match 7 that the second game wasn’t completed due to time running out. There is no winner of that game so neither team gets 2 points. Team(s) that have scored 6 or more in the game are still entitled to 1 match point.
• After all rounds have been played (or time runs out), then all match points are added together to determine the winner.

 Please email the MPL if you have any questions about the scoresheet or the above explanations.

• Teams should arrive early enough to be ready at the scheduled match time.
• The home captain is responsible for bringing a scoresheet to the match. Both captains should fill it out together during the match. The winning captain is responsible for emailing a photo of the scoresheet to the MPL after match completion (email to [email protected]).
• A 10 minute warmup is allowed at the scheduled match time.
• Captains should start the first round promptly after the warmup and should minimize the amount of delay between games and rounds. The 2 hour time limit is likely tight to get all 4 rounds played.