TT Leagues has been successfully used to manage results at the recent Butterfly Schools Team Finals. This paves the way for a wider roll-out of the software for schools’ competitions.

Since its launch in 2019, TT Leagues has been successfully applied to a wide range of competitions in Local Leagues, British Clubs Leagues and the County Championships. But one area remained untapped – namely schools’ competitions.

But that has now changed, following the successful application of TT Leagues at the Butterfly Schools Team Finals at WV Active Aldersley on Sunday 27 April. The TT Leagues software was applied to all eight competitions in the four age groups for both boys and girls. The results of all the matches are shown on the website that was set up specifically for this competition.

To access the results, click on “Fixtures and Results” on the main menu and then navigate to the competition(s) you are interested in to view the divisional tables, results, player averages and more.

Chris Cockburn, Schools Competitions Organiser at Table Tennis England, said: “It proved very useful to be able to manage the results for the Team Finals via TT Leagues. And it was particularly useful where positions in the final table had to be determined by countback.

“By using TT Leagues in a ‘live’ environment we have identified some improvements that we should make for next season. We want players, coaches and parents to be able to access results via their smart phones in near real-time at the venue. This is what happens at BCL sessions and is very popular. We should do the same at the schools’ finals.”

Andrew Wilesmith, Director of Table Tennis Development at Table Tennis England, said: “This was a very successful pilot implementation of TT Leagues. I am very keen to roll-out the software more widely next season – not only for the schools’ team competitions, but also for the individual events as well.”

As with other developments with TT Leagues, significant consideration had to be given to how to configure the software for this new application. In particular, it was necessary to be able to add to teams and to the online scoresheets players who did not have the normal TTE membership requirements of TT Leagues (ie Compete/Compete Plus membership). But the flexibility to include, on a site-by-site basis, other membership types has now been incorporated into TT Leagues which enables it to be used for schools’ competitions.

The developments that have been made to enable schools’ competitions to be run within TT Leagues are now available to all Leagues on a site-by-site basis.

If you want to run schools’ competitions on your TT Leagues sites, please contact the TTE Help Desk. They will activate the necessary functionality for your site and provide any guidance so your site can be configured so that you can set up a schools’ competition.