Pickleball

How to Organize a Weekly Pickleball Open Play, Without a Spreadsheet

Sumit Pokhrel, Founder of Jum · 4 min read

Pickleball is booming across Singapore and Nepal, and most groups are still running open play off a group chat and a paper sign-up sheet. Here's a simpler way to organize it.

Quick answer

Treat weekly open play like any recurring event: one place to RSVP so you know headcount before you show up, a fair way to rotate partners once you're on court, and a simple way to split the court fee at the end — instead of three separate tools, or none, doing each job.

A player reaching for a return during an outdoor pickleball session — Open play only gets more fun as the group grows — the admin doesn't have to.

Pickleball has gone from "what's that?" to courts sprouting up across Singapore and Kathmandu within a couple of years. Singapore alone now has dozens of active teams and new courts opening regularly; in Nepal, the Pickleball Association Nepal — founded in 2019 from a few friendly games in Tundikhel park — has helped build permanent courts across Kathmandu, Pokhara and beyond, and picked up official national recognition along the way.

Most of the groups riding that wave are still brand new, which means most of them are still organizing open play the way every new group organizes anything: a WhatsApp or Telegram group, and a paper sign-up sheet or a shouted headcount at the court. That works fine for the first few weeks. It starts breaking down exactly when the group is succeeding — once you've got more than 8 or 10 regulars and a waitlist that changes every week.

What actually gets harder as the group grows

Pickleball has a specific version of the usual "organizing a recurring sport" problem, because of how courts work:

Headcount decides court count. A court fits 4 players. If you don't know whether 8 or 20 people are coming this week, you can't know how many courts to book — and guessing wrong either wastes money or leaves people standing around.
The roster is never the same twice. Unlike a fixed 5-a-side football team, open play is genuinely open — regulars, occasional players and the odd first-timer all showing up in a different mix every session.
Rotation and money both depend on who's actually there, not who said they'd come. A "maybe" in the group chat doesn't help you plan courts, teams, or the split at the end.

What a growing open-play group actually needs

Underneath the pickleball specifics, it comes down to three things most dedicated pickleball scheduling apps only partly cover:

A real RSVP, so headcount is known before anyone shows up — not estimated from who "usually" comes.
A fair way to rotate partners once everyone's on court, so nobody's stuck watching from the sideline for half the session (more on this in a separate post).
A clean way to split the court fee at the end, against whoever actually showed up that week — since the group size changes constantly, this can't be a fixed number (also its own post).

Worth saying plainly: dedicated pickleball scheduler apps exist, and some of them are genuinely good at the rotation and reminder side of this. What most of them don't do is the money side — splitting the actual court booking fee across whoever showed up. If your group also plays other sports, or might grow into more than one recurring activity, a general community-organizing app ends up covering more of the actual job than a pickleball-only tool.

How Jum handles this

Every open-play session is a normal Jum event — set the date, time and venue, and members RSVP with a live headcount and an automatic waitlist once you're full. It works exactly the same way whether your community only plays pickleball or plays three different sports on three different days.

None of this needs to be complicated, even for a group that started three weeks ago. It just needs one place that actually knows who's coming, instead of three different tools — or none — trying to guess.

Quick questions

What's the easiest way to organize a weekly pickleball open play?

Use one shared place for people to RSVP so you know headcount in advance — courts only fit 4 players at a time, so a growing group needs to know how many courts to book before anyone shows up.

How many players do you need for a good pickleball open play session?

There's no fixed minimum, but most casual groups find 8-12 regulars gives enough rotation variety without long waits between games — a smaller group can still run a great session with just 2 courts.

Do I need a separate app just for pickleball?

Not if your group already plays other sports too, or might grow to — a general recurring-event app that handles RSVP, rotation and cost-splitting works for pickleball exactly the same way it works for any other court sport.

See the full RSVP-to-settlement flow → Explore every feature →