New Rules for Summer Season 2026

Time ChangesTop of the list of things learned from the first season was that more time is needed so there is time for warmup before matches on reserved courts and more time per game. The 2.5 hour court reservations in the spring were a significant hindrance in two respects. The most important one was not having sufficient time for players to warm up on reserved courts before matches. The second one was having to put a 13 minute cap on individual games. Of course we did not really need to learn this lesson from spring seaason experience. The 2.5 hour court reservation for the first season was more a matter of what was available when I started reserving courts than a desired amount of time.

With more time to plan ahead for the summer, I was able to reserve 4 hour blocks of time each Sunday of the Summer Season. This means there will be at least 30 minutes of warm up time on reserved courts, from Noon to 12:30, and no time limits on individual games.

I was able to reserve 4 hour blocks for our spring season's postseason games, and in most cases of which I am aware, matches were completed by 3 pm. As it happened we didn't have as many tiebreaker games in the postseason as we did in the regular season, so we'll see how it goes in the summer. If matches end by 3 pm, we may scale back to 3 hours in the fall, but now we have the luxury of having 4 hours to test that out for a full season.

It will increase the team fee a bit to cover the additional reservation time, but not enough I think to scare anyone off.

Larger Rosters

With early reports from summer team captains that it has been challenging recruiting players during the busier summer travel/vacation season, we are going to increase the roster size from 8 to 10. This may not completely eliminate the need for non-rostered emergency subs durng the regular season, but with propper planning, it should make it easier to ensure every team has four players committed for every Sunday in advance.

With this change, teams should not need to call on non-rostered emergency subs as often as happened in the spring season. Captains shoud determine in advance when signing up players which Sundays each player is available and work our lineups well in advance. Of course life happens, and when it does, emergency subs will still be allowed so long as they meet division and team eligibility requirements.

Postseason Eligibility Requirements

For the postseason, unrostered emergency subs will not be permitted with the single exception of injury during a match, and even then, the emergency sub must meet division and team eligibility requirements.

Further, players in postseason lineups must have played in at least two of the six regular season matches.

More rule changes are under consideration and will be published here and in the rules section of the site as they are decided.