How to run a fixed partner league on Pickleheads

Some pickleball groups want more than a weekly round robin. They want a season – teams that compete together every week, standings that build over months, and a championship finale where it all comes down to one night.

That's what a fixed partner league is built for. Because a pickleball game is 12 minutes, not two hours, a league night isn't one matchup – it's your team playing as many others as you can fit in. Matchups balance across the full season so you face the whole field over time, not the same opponents every week.

This guide covers everything you need to run one end to end: choosing a format, managing teams, handling signups from week 1 to your last session, and finishing with a bracket-style championship. Whether you're running 8 teams or 24, you've got the full picture here.

League creation works the same way as a rotate partner league, with one key difference: when you get to the format selection step, choose Fixed to access the fixed partner formats – Shuffle and Pool Play.

From there, you'll name the league, set your schedule, configure standings options, and generate your session schedule. For a full walkthrough of the creation flow, see How to Run a Pickleball League on Pickleheads.

When you create a fixed partner league session, you'll choose a format for the night. For most fixed partner leagues, that format is Shuffle.

Shuffle builds round by round, similar to how Popcorn works for rotate partner events. Each round, one team is randomly matched against another. You keep generating rounds for the duration of the session.

Three things make Shuffle the right call for a season-long league:

Watch the Shuffle overview video →

Pool play doesn't need timed rounds, which works better for some groups – especially DUPR-heavy or competitive leagues where teams prefer playing games out to a fixed score. It also uses Court Optimizer, so new matchups assign as soon as a court finishes.

Two trade-offs to weigh: all teams need to be present before the session starts, and you'll need to set pools manually to balance matchups across weeks.

💡 Pro tip: You can still run timed rounds with pool play, just be sure to toggle on Timed Rounds during your session set up. This optimizes court assignments for every team finishing at once.

Watch the Pool Play overview video →

Common season structure: Shuffle every week during the regular season, Bracket on the final night for the championship.

The happy path for your first session:

This is the approach we recommend because it keeps every player linked to their real Pickleheads account from the start. No guest entries to clean up later, no wrong email mismatches, no scrambling to swap players before session 1.

💡 Good to know: Players can only pair with someone who has accepted their team invite. If a partner hasn't accepted yet, the system prompts them to send an invite rather than letting them manually enter a name.

Upload a CSV with email addresses and team names, and the app creates all entries at once. This works best when every email on the list matches a registered Pickleheads account. If any don't, the app creates guest entries that you may need to clean up later with Merge Teams – more on that below.

CSV is here when you need it, but the invite-link approach is usually less work in the long run.

Once week 1 is done, you're not re-entering your roster from scratch each week. That's what Add a Team is for.

Add a Team lets you pull your league's existing roster into a session in bulk. It pre-populates only the teams currently in your league standings – not every team across all your events. Select who's playing that week and add them all at once.

For a 12-team league, this takes about 30 seconds. Compare that to adding players one by one.

Fixed partner leagues introduced a handful of new team management features that didn't exist before in the app. Here's how each one works:

Team names appear on the confirmed player list, session pages, and standings. Everyone can see them – not tucked away in the background – because standings are tracked at the team level, and organizers and players need to know which team is which at a glance.

When you or a player updates their team name, it updates globally: on the current session page, on all future sessions they've already signed up for, and in the standings. One change, everywhere.

If duplicate team entries show up in your standings (typically from a CSV import with an email that didn't match a registered account), Merge Teams combines them into a single entry and keeps the season history clean. Full how-to is in the Keeping things clean section below.

Once a player has participated in the league, they only see their active team when signing up for future sessions – no option to create a new team or pull in a team from a different event. This keeps your standings duplicate-free without requiring any intervention on your end.

Players who haven't participated in the league yet – even if it's mid-season – still get the option to create a new team when they accept their first invite.

If both players on a team have accepted a previous invite and are already associated with a team, confirming attendance for one player automatically adds their partner. You don't have to chase both players separately each week.

💡 Good to know: If a team has three or four players on its roster (so they can rotate who plays on a given night), the system asks which players will participate before confirming the signup.

Over a multi-week season, a few housekeeping jobs come up. These are the tools for each one:

Duplicate team entries can appear in your standings – usually when you manually add a player and they later register with a different email, creating two entries for the same person. Merge Teams handles this.

When you spot a duplicate, select the two entries and merge them. You choose which name to keep – the app shows how many sessions are associated with each before you commit. All stats and session-level records update to reflect the merge across the full season history.

From any session, you can open Edit Lineup for any team to:

If a player can't make it, add a sub to their team for that session from Edit Lineup. Players can also add subs themselves from the session page. The sub's results count toward the original team's standing – they're playing for the team, not creating a new entry in standings.

💡 Pro tip: If you see a "no slots available" error when trying to add a sub, remove the absent player from the lineup first, then add the sub. The team has to have an open spot before a sub can slot in

Standings update at the team level. Every player who participates for a team over the course of the season – including subs – contributes to that team's record. In the standings view, a dropdown on each team entry shows which players have logged results for them.

At the league level, you can configure a participation threshold – the minimum percentage of sessions a team needs to participate in before appearing in the main standings. The setting is adjustable anywhere from 0% to 100%. Beginning with session 4, teams that haven't met the threshold are moved to a separate section at the bottom of the standings rather than the main rankings. This doesn't affect seeding.

When the regular season ends, switch the final session's format to Bracket. Your whole-season standings are already tracked, so the hard part – knowing who the top seeds are – is done for you.

Today, the last step is hands-on: drag teams into their bracket seeds to match the standings order. It's a few taps in the app before the night starts, and you only do it once. Automatic bracket seeding straight from standings is a feature we're planning to add down the road.

Once seeds are set, confirm and run the bracket like any other knockout night.

There are two ways to access Fixed Partner leagues:

Pick the path that works for you. You're good to go.