The Pickleball Ladder Management (PLM) system was created by and is the property of Lanny Hernandez. It is provided for use to the SLO Pickleball Club for its Ladder management by Lanny Hernandez. The SLO Pickleball Club is currently using the PLM to manage its Mixed Doubles Challenge Ladder and plans to create Challenge Ladders for Men’s Doubles, Women’s Doubles and possibly Men’s and Women’s Singles. These additional ladder implementations will depend upon the success of the initial Mixed Doubles Challenge Ladder .
The goal of the PLM is to make management of a Ladder as effortless as possible for the administrator, to let the team members control much of the data management and to provide transparency of its operation.
The initial implementation will manage Ladder ranking using a simple challenge method, the Leap Frog method: If a team challenges another team with a higher ranking and wins the challenge, the winning team will take the losing teams rank and all the other teams’ rankings will be pushed down if required, Other ranking systems may be considered in the future.
PLM Data Structure
Data for the Ladder will be stored in three data files implemented as Google Sheets spreadsheets. The interaction between users and the data, as well as the administrators and the data, will be managed by programs coded using Google Apps Scripts, a Google implementation of Java Scripts. Currently, those programs contain over 2000 lines of code.
There are three data stores for Ladder data:
- Teams – this spreadsheet contains a row for each team participating in the Ladder. Teams are ordered as they are registered by team members. This sheet will only be accessible by Ladder administrators. This sheet contains the name of the team, the names of its members and the contact information of the team members.
- Ladder – this spreadsheet contains a row for each team in the Ladder. Teams are ordered by Rank. Rank is continually changing based upon challenges and challenge match results between teams. Views of this sheet will be viewable by the public on the website.
- Challenges – this spreadsheet contains a row for each challenge made by a team to a team with a higher rank on the Ladder sheet. The Challenges sheet may be public viewable.
- Admin – this spreadsheet contains a description of the data management process with buttons to launch the most common functions. These functions are also available from the Custom Menus menu on the Google Sheets. It also contains a record of PLM used Parameters for the operation of the PLM programs as well as links to the Admin’s email address, etc.
PLM Data Management and Operation
While Google provides editable access to their spreadsheets, Google Sheets, in PLM, only the Ladder admins will have such access to these sheets. User views of the sheets will only be provided by linking the sheets to a website page. The Ladder admins are able to edit and manage the sheets in the Google environment, but PLM is designed to make that unnecessary by providing program functions accessible from a menu system on the sheet. The PLM provides the following functions for Teams and Ladder Admins :
- Team registering. A Google form is provided to allow team members to enter the necessary data elements of member name, email address and contact phone number. In the current implementation, the Register Team form is accessible on a page on the website.
- Team inclusion in the Ladder. An Admin accessible menu item, Add a Team to the Ladder, will copy Team data from the Teams sheet to the Ladder sheet. If desired, before a team is added to the Ladder, the team members will be checked for current membership in the SLO Pickleball Club. If both teams members are not current club members, their team will not be added to the Ladder. When a team is added to the Ladder, emails will be sent to the Admin as well as each team member acknowledging the addition.
- Checking for Teams registered but not included in the Ladder. An Admin accessible menu item, Find Teams not in Ladder, will identify teams that need to be added to the Ladder sheet.
- Creating a Challenge. There are two ways that a challenge can be recorded and documented in the Challenges sheet. First and most desirable, a team member can view the Ladder sheet on the website, specify his team’s ID and the team’s ID to be challenged, then click on the Create Challenge button. This will create a row in the Challenges sheet documenting the challenge.
The Admin can also create a challenge by clicking on the spreadsheet menu item, Add a Challenge.
When a challenge is created, emails will be sent to the challenged and challenging team members notifying them of the challenge as well as the responsibility to schedule the challenge match in a timely manner and the responsibility of the winning team to notify the Admin of the results. - Update Challenge with match results. Once a challenge match has been completed, the winning team will communicate the results of the match to the Ladder Admin via email. The admin will update the appropriate Challenges sheet row by entering the winner’s information into a form provided by the menu option. This updates the appropriate challenges row with the winner’s team ID and match details.
- Update Ladder Ranking. The Admin has two menu options for doing so.
First, he can use the menu item, Process Challenges Row to Ladder, which will add the results of a specified Challenges row to the Ladder, change the Rank if required and re-sort the teams in the Ladder based upon the new Ranks.
The second option, Process All Challenges Available, processes all the Challenges that have not been previously processed and have match results; and then updates the fields, Ranks and re-sorts the Ladder listing.