The SMPA Leagues’ Lottery

The SMPA Leagues’ Lottery

For the past many years, entrance into a SMPA pickleball ladder league has been via a lottery system. This is because annually we’ve had 2-3X as many interested league players as we’ve had available league spots despite annual league programming expansions in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. SMPA’s summer 2023 session 1 pickleball league registration will once again use a leagues lottery system for registration. Here’s how that works:

Player Registration Phase:
During an approximately week long lottery registration period, SMPA members interested in joining a SMPA league may choose up to three leagues from the 8 we are offering at this time to apply to, and they rank their choices as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. If players want to play on the same league as a friend, they add the friend’s name with their and the pair enters the lottery together (one lottery entrance, not two, for the pair of players, but two spots instead of one if their entry is drawn).

Player List Generation Phase:

League leaders will, of course, be automatically added to the player lists for the leagues they’ve volunteered to run.
Because players are allowed to enter the lottery in pairs, the league leaders are too – so, if a leader requested a +1, that +1 will next be added to the player list.
The list of players registered for each leagues’ lottery will be checked against SMPAs membership list – non-members will be removed to the waitlist as the lottery is only open to SMPA members.
The remaining lottery registrants will be grouped so that those who have elected to enter as a pair are represented as a pair rather than as two individuals; all individual registrants and each pair of registrants will be assigned one unique number in the lottery.
A random number generator will be used to select which player or player pair (by number) is drawn for each available spot (or pair of spots) on a given league, with the remaining registrants filling spots on the league’s waitlist. Random.org will again be used as the source of the random number generator.
Following the initial population of the full suite of 2023 session 1 league player lists and waitlists, the players lists will be compared to see which players have gotten into 2 (or more leagues). Those players will be removed from whichever league(s) were their lower choices (and will be moved to the bottom of that/those (league(s) waitlist(s)) leaving them with just 1 league, which ever was their top choice from among those they got into. Players will then be promoted from the waitlists to fill the open spots. This process will be repeated until all player list spots are full AND no player has more than 1 league spot* to ensure as many players got the opportunity to play on a SMPA league as was possible. *If any league remains unfull with no waitlisted player not already playing on another league available to fill it, players may then join it as a 2nd league so that it may run and non-SMPA members on the waitlist may also join it after becoming SMPA members.
Lottery entrants will be contacted via email to let them know whether or not they got into a league, and – if they did, onto what league they made it in. They will then have 3 days to complete registration and payment (a link to do so will be in the email), and payment includes 2023-2024 membership renewal if lottery entrance was via a 2022-203 membership.

For example, in 2022 the Wed AM session 1 league had 58 registrants, but 6 were pairs, so there were 52 lottery entrants for 29 available spots; three spots of Whittier Park’s 32 total spots were used for the two league leaders and one of their +1s. Therefore in Random.org, the numbers 1-52 were entered, and the computer program generated numbers within that range over and over until all 52 numbers had been randomly ordered. The names that matched the numbers were added to the player list in the order they were selected by Random.org. Once the player list was full (after 29 lottery registrants had been added to it), the remaining lottery registrants were added, in the order they were selected by Random.org, to that league’s waitlist.