Social sessions

From the club page: "Add to feed" → Social on the web, or the create button on the club feed on your phone. You'll fill in a name, the sport, the date and start time, the venue, how many courts you've got (up to 16) and how many players you'll take (up to 64). Then one choice that matters more than the rest — see the next question. The rest is optional: a short description, a round timer, whether you're playing yourself, whether to schedule the announcement for later, and whether to also email every member. On a club session you can also restrict who can join by rating, and set a fee. A session has to start in the future. You can't create one and date it last Thursday, so Frienemi isn't somewhere to type up nights you've already played — it records the ones you run from here. Most of the rest can be edited afterwards, right up until the first round starts.

Yes, and what's still open narrows as the night gets going. Before the first round, everything is yours: the name, the time, the venue, the description, the courts, the cap, the session type, the fee, the timer. Once a round exists — even a finished one — the type is fixed, and so is whether the night keeps score. That's the pair you can't undo, which is why it's worth a second look when you create it. Between rounds you can still add courts, raise the cap, and change the round timer. While a round is actually on the courts, courts and capacity freeze completely, along with whether you're playing yourself. Those three shape the draw that's already out there, and moving one mid-round would leave people standing on a court the app no longer thinks exists. End the round and they open again. One rule that catches people out: you can raise the cap but you can't drop it below the number already in. If you need a smaller room, take people off the roster first — that's where removing someone lives — and the form tells you the number you have to get under.

Cancel session, from the session itself. You can leave a short reason — up to 280 characters — and it goes out with the notification, so "courts are flooded" reaches everyone rather than a bare cancellation they have to ask you about. Every member of the session is notified. If an admin cancels a session someone else was hosting, the host is told too. If the night had a price on it, every session fee and every guest pass on it is refunded automatically. You don't chase them one at a time. The same happens if you skip one week of a recurring session. A cancelled session has no recap and no standings — it's void, so a round that was half-played earns nobody anything. Cancelling one occurrence doesn't stop a weekly session repeating; "Stop repeating" is the separate thing for that. Cancel before you end, not after. Once you press End session there's no way back: an ended session can't be cancelled and can't be reopened, so a night ended by mistake stays in your feed as a night that happened. If that's already happened to you, email support@frienemi.com — it takes us to fix it. Worth knowing about a session you simply forget: if a session is still sitting there a day after its start time with nobody on it but you, it closes itself rather than hanging around in the club feed and on Discover looking live. If it was a one-off it's cancelled, and anything paid on it is refunded. If it's the first night of a repeating series it's just closed off, so a quiet first week doesn't kill the series.

Casual: rounds get shuffled, nobody keeps score. A social hit. Leaderboard: scores are recorded and there's a live ladder of individual players through the night, ending in a champion. Teams: the room is split into two sides and the night is one side against the other. There's a running tie score instead of a ladder, and at the end you get a most valuable player from each side. Pick carefully, because you can only set this when you create the session. Scoring in particular is off unless the type you chose turns it on, and it can't be switched on once a round exists. If you start a Leaderboard night and decide halfway through you wanted Teams, you have to cancel it and make a new one. Teams splits the sides for you, snaking the strongest and weakest alternately and then swapping people around until the two sides are close on rating. It's not a captains' pick.

Yes, on a club session. Under Who can join, turn on "Restrict by rating" and set a minimum, a maximum, or just one of the two — leave the other blank and there's no bound on that end. The numbers are on the rating scale the app uses internally, 800 to 2500, and the fields show you an example. It's a hard gate: someone outside the range is refused when they try to join, and told it's a rating gate rather than left wondering why the button did nothing. Use it sparingly. It's genuinely useful for a pennant practice or a proper beginners' night, and it is a fast way to make a Thursday social feel like a closed shop. Most clubs are better served leaving it off and letting the shuffle group the courts by rating, which it does anyway. You can turn it on or off later from the same place, right up until the first round starts. It's offered on club sessions only — a standalone social never shows it.

That's your choice, and it's a switch on the session called "Public activity". On, the session appears in Discover for anyone in the area — which is how a club picks up new faces. Off, it's club only: your members see it on the club feed, nobody else sees it at all. The club page is a separate question. Sessions you've published show on the club's own page to anyone who reads it, because someone deciding whether to come down on Thursday needs to see that Thursday actually runs. If the night is priced, a visitor from outside the club can buy their way in at the visitor price. If it's free, they can just join. So if you're turning this on for a night your committee wanted kept in-house, that's the thing to think about.

Turn it on when you create the session and set your minutes per round — anything from one to thirty. From then on everybody watches the same countdown. It sits on the session page and on the live round screen, on phones and on a laptop, so nobody has to come and ask you how long is left. When it reaches zero a buzzer goes off, and only your device makes the noise. Members watch the clock run out but their phones stay quiet, which is what you want with twenty people spread over four courts. It keeps buzzing until you tap Stop — one polite beep across a windy court is a beep nobody hears. The buzzer doesn't end the round. It tells the room to stop; you still finish the round yourself once the scores are in, and the banner changes to say it's waiting on you. On an iPhone the countdown also runs on the lock screen and in the Dynamic Island, so you can put the phone in your pocket between rounds. You can change the minutes later, but only between rounds. The round already on court had its finish time stamped the moment it started, so that one is left alone. It's optional, and plenty of clubs never use it. Turn it on if you play timed rotations; leave it off if courts just finish when they finish.

Members open the session and press Join. On a club session, being a club member is the pass — there's no approval step unless you're running a session outside a club. The number you set as max players is a hard cap, counted properly: if you're organising and not playing you don't take a seat, and walk-in guests do. There's no waiting list — when it's full, the Join button simply isn't there, so if you've squeezed on an extra court just raise the number. People can join a session that's already running. A late arrival goes into the next round's shuffle. There's no cut-off time. Somebody can drop out an hour before, or twenty minutes in — Leave session, no deadline. You can't leave your own session; if it's not going ahead, cancel it.

Yes, and you choose how loud. Publishing it posts it to the club feed and notifies your members. That happens on its own, and for most weeks it's enough. You can also tick "Also email all members" as you create it. That sends a real email to every active member with a verified email address, minus you, and minus anyone who's turned that kind of email off. Worth using for the first session of a season, when half the club still hasn't got notifications switched on. It's a choice you make while creating the session — you can't add it afterwards. And you can announce it later: pick a date and time, and the session sits unpublished until then. Handy if you're setting Thursday up on Monday morning but want it to land at six in the evening when people are actually looking at their phones. Then, closer to the night, everyone who said they're going gets a reminder about a day out and again about an hour out — a push and an in-app one. They go to the people who committed, not the whole club, and nobody gets the same reminder twice. If you move the start time, those reminders reset and fire again against the new time, so somebody who was told seven o'clock isn't left with it.

Yes — Add players, and you get three tabs. Regulars are the walk-ins from last week's session, already ticked, because most weeks it's the same faces. Club is your actual club members, unticked, for the ones who said yes in the WhatsApp group and never opened the app. New is for typing a name. Up to 40 at a time. This is the fastest way to set a night up if your club's habit is a sign-up sheet rather than an app. One catch: if the session has a fee, adding a club member from the Club tab won't wave them past it. They come back on a "hasn't paid" list rather than being added.

Add them as a walk-in guest. A name and a rough level is all it takes — no account, no email, no phone number, nothing for them to download while everyone's waiting to start. Guests are real players as far as the night is concerned. They go into the shuffle, onto the courts, into the standings and into the export. If you leave their level as unrated we'll treat them as middle-of-the-room for pairing purposes. Guests take a seat, so they count towards your max players. Being seated is free and never blocked. A walk-in plays whether or not they've paid, because you're standing on the court with them and that's not a decision to hand to a paywall. Settling up is separate, and on a priced night you've got two ways. Tap Charge on their row and the app shows a QR: they scan it, pay in their own phone's browser, and their row updates by itself while you're still standing there — no app, no account. Or take the cash and tap to record it, which books the same payment against the club without touching a card. Either way it's a money record, not a gate: nothing about it seats them or unseats them. Recording a cash door fee is the owner, a club admin, or the person hosting the night. A session admin you promoted to help run the rounds can't — running the night and handling the money are deliberately different jobs.

No — use "Went home". That takes them out of the next draw and frees their seat, but keeps every game they played. Remove is different, and stronger: it deletes them entirely, which erases their rounds from the standings and from the export. Only use Remove for someone you added by mistake. If you Remove someone who actually played, the scores of the people they played against stop making sense. Both apps warn you about this, but it's worth knowing before you're standing courtside at 8pm.

No. When you create a session, set Repeats to Weekly or Every 2 weeks. Here's how it works. When tonight's session ends, next week's is created for you automatically as a draft only you can see. It carries across everything you set up — venue, courts, max players, session type, rating limits, fee, round timer, team names — but not the people. Next week's room is a different room, so RSVPs start empty. That draft publishes itself to the club three days before it starts, or you can press Publish now whenever you like. You can also Edit it, or Skip just this week — which is the one you want for a public holiday or a court closure. Skipping is reversible, and it refunds anyone who'd already paid. "Stop repeating" keeps the session that's already scheduled and creates no more. The only cadences are weekly and fortnightly, and there's no end date — it runs until you stop it.

Three things, in order. Who sits out, if there are more players than court spaces. Whoever has sat out least goes on first, then whoever has waited longest since they last sat. So the shuffle spreads the sit-outs rather than benching the same person twice. Who's on which court. Players are sorted by rating and grouped, so courts come out reasonably even. Who partners whom. For singles we pair players next to each other on rating, and if those two have already played each other tonight we try the next person along instead. For doubles we take four players of similar rating and try the split that repeats the fewest past pairings. So it does try hard to avoid giving you the same partner and the same opponent twice. It's best effort, not a guarantee — in a room of eight over six rounds, some repeats are unavoidable. On a Teams night the courts are matched inside a rating band as a hard rule, and if the room can't fill every court inside that band we widen it rather than refuse, and flag the round as "Uneven courts" so you know.

Yes, before the round starts. Re-shuffle the whole round, or tap one player and then another to swap them — including swapping someone on with someone sitting out. Once you press Start round the line-up is fixed. There are no live substitutions mid-round, on either platform. If a court needs to stop, you can pause it, and a paused court won't accept a score until you resume it.

You can, and so can the players. Self-scoring is on by default, so whoever finishes first can tap their own court's result in and you're not walking six courts with a clipboard. Anything a player enters is provisional — if you record a score yourself it overrides theirs, and they can't overwrite yours. Scores go in per court, per round, once the round is under way. 0–0 means "not played", not a draw, so an unfinished court just contributes nothing. One difference between the platforms worth knowing: on your phone you can tap a court again and correct a score you've already recorded. On the web, once a court's score is in it's locked. So if you're likely to be fixing scores, run the night from your phone. When you end a round, you'll be shown any courts nobody scored, with the score boxes right there. It's a prompt, not a barrier — you can end the round anyway.

Three points for a win, one for a draw, none for a loss. Ties are broken by wins, then by games played, and then by something stable so that two people on an identical record don't swap places every time the screen refreshes. So a player with two wins finishes above a player with one win and three draws, even though the second has played more. On a Teams night there's no individual ladder — deliberately. A ladder would rank teammates against each other, which isn't what the night is. You get the tie score instead, with a win counting two and a draw one, so you'll see scorelines like 4½ – 3½. A doubles court counts exactly the same as a singles court. If the sides finish level on courts, total games decides it, and the recap tells you which rule decided it. The standings are worked out on our side and recalculated every time a score goes in, so everyone's screen agrees.

Yes — big screen mode. It shows the round number, each court, the player numbers on it in very large digits, and who's sitting out. It's built to be read from three metres away in daylight, and it keeps the screen from going to sleep. It's not organiser-only, on purpose. "Am I on?" is a player's question, and a scoreboard you have to hand your own phone around isn't a scoreboard. On the web it's a real page with its own address, so you can open it on a second device — a spare tablet, or the clubhouse TV — and leave it running all night while you keep working on your own screen. On your phone it's the cast icon at the top of the live round.

Press End session and you get the recap. On an individual night that's the champion, the final standings table, and the night's numbers — rounds played, players, guests. On a Teams night it's the tie score, the reason it went that way, and a most valuable player from each side with one of them crowned player of the night. End session is final. There's no reopening it and no cancelling it afterwards, so don't press it to tidy the feed up — press it because the night is over. A cancelled session has no recap, and if nobody recorded any scores the recap says so rather than inventing a winner. The recap lives on the session, so anyone who was there can open it later. There's no share button on it yet — what you can share is the session's own invite link.

Yes, from the session's ⋮ menu — Download CSV on the web, or the export option on your phone, which hands it to your usual share sheet. You get one row per player per court, with the session and round details repeated on every row. That sounds redundant but it's what lets you pivot it in Sheets and answer things nobody planned for — how often does Aiden sit out, who has never played against whom, how many guests came in July. Sit-out rows are included, because otherwise the person who rested every round would be invisible, and that's exactly the question the file exists to answer. There's also a printable session report in the same menu, if what you want is one page to pin to the noticeboard. Both are organiser-only, and both need at least one round played.

No. Ladder ratings are untouched by social play — both apps say so on the screen: friendly session, nobody's rating changed. What a decisive court does add is a win or a loss to a player's casual social record for that sport, plus head-to-head history and any achievements it earns. Walk-in guests don't have accounts, so nothing is recorded against them at all. This is on purpose. A Thursday night social where the numbers were drawn out of a hat shouldn't cost somebody the ladder position they earned in competition.