Last season's premier men's grade, which used to begin in early September to involve the tertiary students, has been scrapped.
Leading players have been distributed around the former men's 1 grade (effectively second grade) with a view to evening the strengths and providing variety.
Last season saw teams of two, with strength concentrated on two or three teams.
The feeling is that teams of four give a more realistic team ethos and clubs have co-operated in bringing it together.
Further innovation comes with a tertiary team playing for three weeks at the start of the season and two weeks in March, meeting each of the other five teams once, allowing points to be fairly gained.
All individual results will still be recorded in the national ranking system and the students will remain affiliated through clubs in their home region.
When the students leave, to avoid a bye, North Otago has shown interest in filling the gap on the same basis.
Dunedin club tennis is played on Saturdays while Oamaru uses Friday nights, and this is a way of providing more competition for their keener players.
Some ties may be played in Oamaru.
When the tertiary team is involved it will be strong, with Aaron Hicks, the recent Otago Indoor Open winner, to the fore and backed up by Hamish Low.
Eastern Harbour has retained Ryan Eggers and gained Henry Hailes from Mornington/Roslyn and Christiaan Faber from Cosy Dell.
Taieri, which won men's 1 last season, has added Carlos Reid and St Clair, which was runner-up last season, has joined up Mitchell Sizemore.
Balmacewen has gained Paddy Ou and former Canterbury player Shane Keenan while retaining George Alexander, Matt McCutcheon and Nick Cutfield, so will field two teams.
The women's situation was even more precarious.
They have been playing on Monday nights indoors with six teams of two since early September and that will continue for a few more weeks until several students leave town.
The remaining local club women will join the men's 2 grade, where the gender concessions allowed by the national ranking system will operate and again should provide more variety than possible with the low women's player base.
Although not all males may approve, there is little choice to avoid the same people playing one another every few weeks.
