There is a specific genre of r/Pickleball post that I cannot stop reading. It goes like this: an organizer of a recurring game finally cracks, posts a 400-word account of exactly how their group runs, and asks if anyone else has solved this. The replies are uniformly: “yes, we use a spreadsheet, here is the spreadsheet.”
I have read approximately one hundred of these threads. Here’s the field report.
The spreadsheets
You don’t understand. The spreadsheets are insane.
The one I think about most: a 14-column Google Sheet for an 8-person group. Columns include first name, last name, skill rating, self-reported skill rating, paddle preference (?), preferred court side, “drama avoidance score” (1-5), home zip code, distance from home court in miles, last attended date, consecutive games attended, and three columns I genuinely could not parse.
The same poster — let me be clear, this is one human — had a separate sheet for tracking court bookings, color-coded by which member made the reservation. Reds were “owes the group money for the booking.” There were a lot of reds.
Honorable mentions:
- A group that runs a conditional-formatted heatmap of attendance, where regulars get green, occasional players get yellow, and “ghosts” (people who haven’t shown in 6+ weeks) get red. The owner refuses to delete the ghosts because “they might come back.”
- A group whose spreadsheet has a “vibe score” updated weekly by a rotating two-person committee. I read this twice to make sure I understood it. I do not think I understood it.
- A group with separate tabs for “regulars,” “subs,” and “applicants.” Applicants. Like a co-op board.
The house rules
People take this very seriously.
The strictest rule I encountered: “If you miss two Saturdays in a row, you’re out of the group. We will not be taking questions.” The group had been running for four years. The original poster had personally enforced this rule on his own brother.
Other selections, lightly anonymized:
- “No scrolling on the bench.” A real rule from a real group. Phones in pockets when you’re not on the court. The poster explained that they’d watched too many people miss their rotation because they were watching reels.
- “No talking about pickleball strategy during breaks.” This was a dink-only group’s reaction to one guy who could not stop coaching everyone else. They’d tried asking him to stop, asking him politely, asking him sternly. Finally they wrote the rule.
- “You bring snacks the week after you miss.” A positive sanction. I like this one. Nobody resents bringing snacks.
- “If you arrive after the warmup, you sit the first game.” Tough but fair.
- “The host plays in every fourth game.” From a group of nine where one person always organizes. They built him a guaranteed-rotation rule so he wouldn’t get rotated out of his own game. This is sweet, actually.
The drama
There is so much drama. None of it is about pickleball.
The genre of post is: “We had a thing happen in our group chat and now half the group isn’t talking. What would you do?” The thing is always one of:
- Somebody said something snippy about somebody else’s level
- Somebody invited a new player without asking and the new player was Significantly Above the group’s level (occasionally: Significantly Below)
- Somebody started a parallel group with a subset of the original group and the original organizer found out via Instagram
- Money. Always money. The court fees, the paddle order someone organized, the t-shirt fund that disappeared
- Romantic. Yes. People meet at pickleball. People stop dating at pickleball. The chat is sometimes where it ends.
The advice in the replies is always good and the original poster never takes it.
The wholesome
For balance: a non-trivial number of these threads are people just bragging, lovingly, about their groups.
The best one I read: a group that’s been playing the same Sunday morning game in the same park since 2019. They’ve had three weddings and two funerals between members. They keep a paper notebook in a tupperware container at the court — every Sunday, whoever’s there signs in. Six years of signatures. The notebook is on its fourth volume.
There’s also a guy in Phoenix who runs a Wednesday morning game for retirees, picks them up from their apartments in a 7-passenger van he bought specifically for this purpose, and refuses to take gas money. The replies were 80% “this is the most beautiful thing I have ever read” and 20% “are you currently dating anyone.”
What I learned
Every functional pickleball group is, in its own way, a beautiful disaster.
The systems they run on are improvised — built by hand, enforced by one person, held together by either rules or relationships, sometimes both. The Reddit posts asking “how does your group work” are not asking for tools. They’re asking for permission to admit that what they’re doing is harder than it should be.
We built Dinkin for the spreadsheet half of it. Not the rules, not the relationships, not the snacks — but the bookkeeping. The cap, the RSVPs, the deadline, the who’s-actually-coming-on-Saturday. Take that off the organizer’s plate and they get to go back to running the group, not the chat.
The group itself, you keep. It’s the best part anyway.