I just talked to a friend of mine who recently joined the Tennis Round. He said the site looked great, but he didn’t get any matches.

– How many people did you invite?

– Oh, just one.

– Well, that can happen even with your regular tennis buddies, no?

– Yeah, I guess so.

Really guys – people are busy. If someone’s not in town, or has a few matches already lined up, unfortunately they might not bother responding. If you’re just starting to use the site, and haven’t played anyone from Tennis Round yet, make sure to invite more people. That’s why we allow players to send up to 20 messages per day.

You can even copy and paste the same invite to multiple players. Just make sure you put some thought into it and actually suggest a time and a place for the match. If you just click the button 10 times with the default message, it’s probably not very likely that anyone will take you seriously.

This is the default text of an invite:

Take a moment and suggest the time and place for the match.

This way people can see you’re real, and you really have genuine intent to play. And not just clicking around the site to see what it does.

Usually if you invite 5-10 people, you’d get 2-3 matches. People are busy. Since most of the site is pretty much free to use, we get some less serious folks. And people who just sign up, often not even using their primary email, and then forget about it. So the more players you invite, the better the odds.

Rest assured, all players are real people. We’ve never added any dummy data to create fake users. But like any free service, we get the less committed folks, too. We’ll address that issue soon. Till then, just try to invite more players, not just one or two.

Lastly, if you don’t feel like pinging new people every day, you can let the site do this for you. We have a Flex League Program, which will look for players like you and email you. When we find someone who wants to play with you, we connect you by email through the site. That service is paid. There’s is monthly plan at $4.99 per month and an annual plan at $29 per month. You can register here.

If you’re already a member, you’d need to log in first, and then upgrade your plan from Basic to the Flex League Plan from your profile page.