Court Report

Ten days of pro pickleball start Friday at Brookhaven Country Club in Farmers Branch, Texas, just outside Dallas. The MLP Nations Cup runs October 30 through November 1, and the Opendoor Pickleball World Championships follow November 2-8. It’s the fourth straight year Worlds has been at Brookhaven, according to The Kitchen.

Worlds is a PPA Major, and each of its five pro titles is worth 3,000 ranking points, more than any other event this season. The PPA lists the total payout at $1,648,641, including appearance fees. Pro qualifying is Monday and the round of 64 is Tuesday. From there, each bracket plays one round a day through Championship Sunday. The three doubles finals are best of five, and there are no bronze-medal matches. PickleballTV streams every court all week.

Anna Leigh Waters is the top seed in all three of her events. According to the PPA’s preview, she hasn’t lost a singles or women’s doubles match in 2026, and she hasn’t lost in singles in 888 days. Her women’s doubles partner is Anna Bright. In mixed, Waters and Ben Johns are the defending champions, but No. 3 seeds Jorja and JW Johnson beat them recently.

The men’s draws look less settled. Johns and Gabe Tardio are the top seeds in men’s doubles, but Johns hasn’t won any of the last four men’s doubles events he’s entered. That includes the Hong Kong final last week, which he and Tardio lost to Federico Staksrud and Hayden Patriquin, now the No. 2 seeds and defending champions. Johns also entered singles as the No. 19 seed and opens against Brandon French, a local favorite. Chris Haworth is the top seed in men’s singles, and No. 3 Hunter Johnson has won three of his last four singles events.

The PPA says more than 3,200 players are entered across pro and amateur divisions. The Challenger Showdown runs November 5-7, with eight 2027 PPA Tour contracts at stake, and Mark Wahlberg headlines a celebrity event on the night of November 5, live on Tennis Channel. Daily grounds passes start at $25.

Why it matters: Pro titles will be decided in two places on the same weekend. USA Pickleball’s National Championships run October 31 through November 8 in San Diego, with pro medal matches November 7-8, the same days as the Worlds semifinals and finals. The PPA says every No. 1 seed is entered in Dallas.

DUPR announced on October 22 that JOOLA is its new title sponsor, and the rating platform is now called “DUPR powered by JOOLA.” Neither company disclosed the length or value of the deal. The two were already partners: JOOLA sponsors DUPR’s College Pickleball Tour, and on September 1 its HC-40 became the official ball of DUPR-run competition, including Minor League Pickleball.

For regular players, the news is the gift card. DUPR+, the paid tier, costs $19.99 a year. Annual members in seven countries (the U.S., Canada, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Japan and India) get a $30 JOOLA gift card good for any JOOLA product. Members in the U.S. and Canada also get their choice of $20 in Club Cash at participating clubs or a free lesson with a participating coach. DUPR’s original announcement of DUPR+ listed it at $29.99 a year.

“The gift card alone exceeds the cost of membership,” DUPR CEO Tito Machado said in the announcement. JOOLA President and CEO Richard Lee said the companies “are built around the same goal: helping players get better.”

The deal landed in the middle of a free preview of a revamped DUPR+, open to every player worldwide from October 13 through today, according to The Dink. The paid tier now includes rating trends, clutch and upset-win stats, your win percentage against each rating range, U.S. metro-area rankings, a monthly AI recap called DUPR Replay, an AI-Enhanced DUPR Rating built on PB Vision video analysis, and a verified-player checkmark.

Read the fine print before you pay. DUPR’s FAQ says the gift card and club benefits aren’t issued to monthly subscribers, and existing annual members get them at their next renewal, not now. Canceling early doesn’t get you a refund.

Why it matters: The basic DUPR rating is still free. But DUPR+ is required to play in DUPR Verified Events, including Minor League Pickleball, and DUPR says results from those events carry 50% more weight toward your rating. So the matches that count most now require a paid membership. DUPR began adding AI video analysis to ratings in August, and its FAQ doesn’t say whether that still applies to players who don’t pay for the AI-Enhanced rating. The rating that USA Pickleball, the PPA Tour and MLP all use now also carries a paddle company’s name.

PPA Tour Asia finished its 2026 season Sunday at the Hang Seng Bank Hong Kong Slam at Kai Tak Arena. It was the last of the tour’s 10 Asian stops this year and its first event at the 1,500-point level. The Dink reported a pro prize pool of up to $1.1 million, a record for Asia, and 1,047 players registered across all divisions.

The biggest result came in men’s doubles. Second seeds Federico Staksrud and Hayden Patriquin beat top seeds Ben Johns and Gabe Tardio 11-6, 11-8. The same teams met in the final of the MB Hanoi Cup, which opened the Asian season, and Johns and Tardio won that one. Patriquin has now won men’s doubles three weeks in a row: in Chicago with Staksrud, in Brisbane with Tardio, and in Hong Kong against him.

Johns got some of it back in mixed. He and Anna Leigh Waters beat Anna Bright and Patriquin in two games, three weeks after Bright and Patriquin beat them 11-9, 11-7 in the Las Vegas Open final. Waters also won women’s doubles with Bright, beating Tyra Black and Jorja Johnson, who had won the title in Brisbane the week before. Waters skipped singles.

Both singles champions repeated from Brisbane. Hunter Johnson beat Staksrud in the semifinals and Tama Shimabukuro 11-4, 6-11, 11-7 in the final. Johnson has won PPA singles titles in Las Vegas, Brisbane and Hong Kong in the past four weeks. The exception was Chicago, where qualifier Emilien Burnel beat him in the first round. Noe Khlif knocked out top seed Chris Haworth in the quarterfinals before losing to Shimabukuro.

No. 8 seed Andie Dikosavljevic of Australia beat Judit Castillo 11-1, 11-5 for the women’s singles title. It was the same final as Brisbane, which Dikosavljevic won 11-6, 11-6. She beat Sahra Dennehy in the semifinals, and Castillo had upset top seed Kaitlyn Christian in the quarters.

Why it matters: The MLP Nations Cup starts Friday at Brookhaven Country Club in Farmers Branch, Texas, and the Opendoor Pickleball World Championships follow there November 2-8. Johns and Tardio were the top seeds in Hong Kong, but they have lost the final in both events they’ve played together this month. Patriquin has won his last three men’s doubles events with two different partners, and Johnson has won three of his last four singles events.

Palm Springs cut the ribbon Wednesday afternoon on its rebuilt pickleball complex at Demuth Park. The site now has 22 courts, up from 12, along with shade structures, seating, drinking fountains and lights. KESQ puts the cost at $5.1 million, paid with Measure J infrastructure money and developer-paid park fees. Demuth is the city’s only outdoor public pickleball venue, according to The Palm Springs Post.

“Initially, we had 12 pickleball courts and we needed more,” Parks and Recreation Director Nick Gonzalez told KESQ.

The project took a while. At the September 2025 groundbreaking, Councilmember Jeffrey Bernstein said it started eight years earlier. The original design called for 24 courts. In May 2025, all seven construction bids came in over budget, ranging from $6.1 million to more than $7 million. The city rejected them and had its design firm, Kimley-Horn, cut the plan. Two courts came out, lighting went from 24 courts to 19, and shade structures dropped from 22 to 11. In July 2025, the council unanimously awarded a $5.1 million contract to Deark E&C Inc. With construction management and other costs, the Post reported the total at about $5.4 million, under the $6 million budget.

Crews tore out the old 12 courts after the groundbreaking, and the city ran 12 temporary courts at College of the Desert in the meantime. The build was planned for eight months. In June, Gonzalez told the parks commission that an electrical switchgear needed for the lights “has been severely delayed,” which pushed the opening back.

The courts are open daily until 10 p.m. Every court can be reserved from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. After 3, one court per skill level stays reservable and the rest go to open play. Courts are labeled by level, from beginner to advanced. Under rules the Parks and Recreation Commission approved in July, tournaments, leagues and private lessons need a permit, only city-authorized instructors can teach, and chairs, dogs, alcohol and amplified sound are banned.

Why it matters: On Tuesday we covered Columbus, Georgia, where court bids came in high and the council added $1.7 million. Palm Springs had the same problem in 2025 and cut the plan instead. It gave up two courts, lights on three others and half its shade, and it finished under budget. In the desert, losing half the shade is a real cost, but players still got 10 more courts.

The PPA Challenger Series, the PPA’s developmental tour, will hold 18 tournaments in 2027, its third season. The schedule, announced October 14, opens January 8-10 at HUB Jacksonville in Florida and ends October 22-24 at Life Time Harbour Island in Tampa. Two dates, August 20-22 and October 8-10, have no venue yet.

Seven of the stops are new: Jacksonville, Life Time Ocotillo in the Phoenix area, Peachtree Corners in suburban Atlanta, Life Time North Shore outside Chicago, Roseville, California, Chanhassen, Minnesota, and Richmond, Virginia. Returning stops are Houston, Auburn-Opelika, Black Desert Resort in Utah, Wilson, North Carolina, Fort Collins, Macon, Seattle, Punta Gorda and Harbour Island. Five events will award 250 ranking points, up from four this year. The rest award 125.

Life Time hosted two Challenger events in 2026 and will host eight in 2027, according to pickleball.com. Seven Life Time clubs are on the schedule so far. Every event uses the LT Pro 48, Life Time’s ball and the PPA Tour’s official ball.

Each stop runs amateur brackets from 3.0 to 5.0 alongside a pro division with a $10,000 prize pool, according to the PPA’s Challenger page. Pro division champions earn a wild card into the main draw of a PPA Tour Open. The 2026 events averaged about 400 players each, from all 50 states plus Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

“PPA Challenger tournaments are where the next generation proves itself, and where local players see what’s possible,” said Tanner Groff, the series’ vice president.

The 2026 season still has one event left. The Challenger Showdown runs November 5-7 at Brookhaven Country Club in Farmers Branch, Texas, during the Opendoor Pickleball World Championships. The highest-ranked Challenger players without a PPA contract are invited, and eight of them will leave with 2027 PPA Tour contracts. Connor Mogle won men’s singles at the first Showdown last November and earned a contract.

Why it matters: For players trying to turn pro, this is the PPA’s clearest path onto the tour: earn points, qualify for the Showdown, and win one of eight contracts. For everyone else, there may now be a stop within driving distance with a 3.5 bracket, and the pro division plays in the same building. With Life Time hosting eight events, more of the PPA’s player pipeline will run through the company’s clubs.

Columbus, Georgia still doesn’t have its first public pickleball facility, and the cost has gone up again. On October 13, City Council voted 7-2 to put another $1.7 million from general fund reserves into the project on Third Avenue in Uptown. Inspections and Code Director Ryan Pruett told council the total cost to taxpayers under the current plan is $8.4 million, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer reported.

The project began with the Columbus Pickleball Association, a nonprofit. Deputy City Manager Pam Hodge said its original request to the city was $1.6 million, and private donors were supposed to cover the rest. CPA president Lance Tankersley said the group raised about $1.35 million and spent about $945,000 of it buying a blighted lot at 1641 Third Ave. to donate to the city.

Tankersley said the city’s money was “based on an early estimate made before the site was designed and engineered.” Engineers found the soil needed post-tensioned concrete courts, and the stormwater system had to be fully designed. Construction costs rose, and subcontractor bids came in high. Pruett said getting back to the approved budget would have meant cutting “some type of big feature” from the project.

The court count has already been cut. The association’s concept had 28 courts, four of them under the Second Avenue bridge. A layout drawn up with a contractor this year has 21, and the bridge courts would cost another $700,000. Councilors Glenn Davis and Joanne Cogle said they support building all 25.

Not everyone on council liked the numbers. “It seems a little outrageous to me that we went from a commitment that was around $1.6 million,” said Councilor Cathy Cook, one of the two no votes. Davis doubted the association could raise much more money and said the city should treat the courts like any other city facility. “It would be like golf,” he said. “The golfers can’t go out and raise money to maintain the golf facilities.”

The project will be built in phases, and the city hasn’t announced an opening date. “Right now, what they can see is a cleared site,” Tankersley said.

Why it matters: The $1.6 million figure came before anyone engineered the site. When costs went up, the city covered most of the increase. If your club is pitching a court project to its city, get the site engineered before naming a number.

The PPA held two tournaments last week. The WALKER Australia Pickleball Cup in Brisbane paid 1,500 ranking points to each champion, and the Mojo Energy Pouches Virginia Beach Open paid 1,000. Forbes reported that many top U.S.-based pros picked Brisbane. Ben Johns, Anna Leigh Waters and Anna Bright weren’t in Virginia Beach either, so several titles there went to players who usually don’t win them.

Virginia Beach

Jaume Martinez Vich had played in 10 PPA finals and lost every one. On Sunday, October 18, he and Elliott Schupp, who had never played together before that week, beat Noe Khlif and Riley Newman 11-4, 4-11, 11-4 for men’s doubles gold. Both players won their first PPA title. Martinez Vich also reached the singles final after beating top seed Roscoe Bellamy in the quarterfinals, but John Lucian Goins beat him 11-5, 11-3. Goins didn’t drop a game all week and won his first title since 2025.

Kate Fahey won two titles at the same event for the first time. She beat No. 21 seed Helena Jansen Fink 11-1, 11-9 in women’s singles. In mixed, she and Eric Oncins trailed Catherine Parenteau and Newman 2-8 in the third game and won it 11-9 with a 9-1 run. The final score was 11-13, 11-4, 11-9, and it was Fahey’s first PPA doubles title.

Parenteau won women’s doubles with Sofia Sewing, beating Alix Truong and Layne Sleeth 11-8, 11-6. It was Sewing’s first PPA title and Parenteau’s 55th. The Kitchen says she has won at least one PPA gold every year since 2021, a streak that only Waters and Johns share.

Brisbane

Gabe Tardio and Tyra Black won mixed doubles together, beating Parris Todd and Christian Alshon 7-11, 11-6, 11-7. Then each won a second gold. Tardio and Hayden Patriquin beat JW Johnson and Tama Shimabukuro 3-11, 11-6, 11-7 in men’s doubles. Black and Jorja Johnson beat Todd and Australia’s Danni-Elle Townsend 11-5, 11-6 in women’s doubles. Top seed Hunter Johnson beat Alshon 11-8, 5-11, 11-8 in men’s singles. Australian Andie Dikosavljevic won women’s singles over Judit Castillo, 11-6, 11-6.

Why it matters: When the PPA runs two events in the same week, the ranking points decide where the stars go. This time they went to Brisbane, and Virginia Beach ended up with three first-time PPA champions: Martinez Vich, Schupp and Sewing.

Anna Leigh Waters left Las Vegas one title short of 200. She got it in the first match of Championship Sunday at the Veolia Chicago Cup, then kept going.

Waters and Ben Johns beat JW and Jorja Johnson 11-4, 11-4 in the mixed doubles final on October 11 at Life Time North Shore in Northbrook, Illinois. That was their 66th mixed title together, according to The Kitchen. In women’s doubles, Waters and Anna Bright dropped the first game 2-11 to Catherine Parenteau and Tyra Black, then won 11-3, 11-4. Waters closed the day by beating Kate Fahey 11-1, 11-7 in singles.

That puts her at 202 career PPA titles and a record 45 Triple Crowns. She’s 19. Johns is next on the list with 188. “Obviously the first gold’s the toughest to get,” Waters said, per The Kitchen, “but I’m just going to keep working my butt off.”

The men’s side was less predictable. Gabe Tardio was playing overseas, so Johns teamed with Jack Sock for the first time as the No. 2 seed. No. 27 seeds Anouar Braham and Bruno Faletto beat them in the round of 32, 8-11, 11-5, 11-3. Federico Staksrud and Hayden Patriquin won the title, beating No. 14 seeds Nico Acevedo and Jaume Martinez Vich 11-1, 11-6 for their fifth title as a team.

In men’s singles, No. 4 seed Roscoe Bellamy beat top seed Chris Haworth 11-4, 11-5 for his second career PPA title and his first of 2026. “The guy’s an absolute beast,” Bellamy said of Haworth. Qualifier Emilien Burnel, seeded 55th, knocked out No. 3 seed and Las Vegas champion Hunter Johnson 13-11, 5-11, 11-9 in the first round and reached the semifinals, where Haworth beat him 11-1, 11-0.

Why it matters: Nobody else has 200 PPA titles, and Waters got there before turning 20. Johns has now gone three events without a men’s doubles gold. In the two he played without Tardio, Mesa with Staksrud and Chicago with Sock, he lost his first match both times.

The tour moves on to the Mojo Energy Pouches Virginia Beach Open, running October 12-18.

A week ago, talk of a Picklr bankruptcy was unconfirmed chatter online. On Friday, October 9, it became a court filing.

Picklr Inc., the parent company of the biggest indoor pickleball franchise, filed for Chapter 11 reorganization in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Texas. The next day it announced a $4.5 million financing commitment from Dynamus Alliance, an investor group led by franchisee and existing investor Tom Neale. A judge still has to approve the money, and Sports Business Journal put the group’s commitment at $4.8 million. Dynamus is expected to sponsor the reorganization plan and become the lead investor.

Founder and CEO Jorge Barragan blamed lease guarantees. Corporate backed the leases for about 40 early franchise locations, and those obligations landed on the holding company. “We signed, unfortunately, too many corporate guarantees that landed on the holding company,” he told SBJ. “And that’s on us. I own it.” Chapter 11 lets the company renegotiate those leases with landlords.

The money problems weren’t new. SBJ’s review of the franchise disclosure document found a $4.4 million net loss on $10.3 million in revenue in 2025, plus about $19 million in total liabilities at the end of March.

Only the parent company is in this case. Franchisees, who own and run their own clubs, aren’t part of it. The Picklr has more than 70 U.S. locations in 29 states, plus clubs in Canada, Australia and Japan, and it has told members that courts, hours and memberships are continuing as usual. Barragan said no club will close as a direct result of the filing, but he expects the network to shrink over the next 18 to 24 months.

One franchisee is already in bankruptcy court. 3 Strand Holdings and 12 related entities, tied to Picklr clubs in Burlington, Danvers, Exton, Newark and Westbrook, filed for Chapter 11 in Florida on September 24. The franchisee wants to go through with an asset purchase agreement with Picklr Clubs Inc., and the Picklr entities want to terminate it. A hearing is set for October 20.

Why it matters: If you play at a Picklr club, what happens to it depends on your local owner’s lease and finances, and IAPPF is telling members to ask their club directly. The lease guarantees helped The Picklr open clubs fast, and they’re the reason the parent company is now in bankruptcy court.

If you’ve ever wondered whether your 3.7 is actually good, there’s now a real answer. DUPR gave The Dink a breakdown of doubles ratings it hadn’t published before, covering every DUPR user worldwide who recorded a result in the 12 months up to September 22. The Dink published them on October 7.

Here’s how the active player base splits:

Doubles rating	Share of players
2.0–2.49	11%
2.5–2.99	20%
3.0–3.49	29%
3.5–3.99	24%
4.0–4.49	11%
4.5–4.99	4%
5.0 and up	1%

Put another way, a 3.0 puts you ahead of about 31 percent of rated players. A 3.5 gets you past 60 percent, a 4.0 past 84 percent and a 4.5 past 95 percent. The biggest single band is 3.0 to 3.49, 53 percent of everyone rated sits somewhere in the 3s, and the median player lands in the low 3s.

The top of the chart is the part people will argue about. “5.0” gets tossed around at open play like it’s a common level, but only about 1 percent of active rated doubles players have reached it, and just 5 percent are 4.5 or higher.

The Dink is careful about what this data doesn’t show. It covers doubles only. It counts only people who logged at least one rated result in the past year, which tilts the pool toward league and tournament players and leaves out everyone who plays at the park and never records a match. DUPR didn’t release a total player count, and the percentages are rounded to whole numbers, so the cutoffs are approximate. A rating built on four matches is also much shakier than one built on 400.

What it means for you: DUPR decides which bracket you can enter at a lot of tournaments, which leagues will take you, and increasingly which prize-money divisions you can play in. This distribution goes a long way toward explaining why 3.0 and 3.5 brackets fill first at local events while 4.5-and-up draws stay small. It’s also a decent reality check. If you’re a 3.6 and feel like everyone at your club is better than you, among people who track their results, you’re already ahead of roughly six in ten.

Pickle Money Ball, the amateur series that pays cash in every skill division, has picked a home for its first national championship: Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, July 26-31, 2027. The purse will be more than $1 million, according to details released to The Kitchen on October 7.

The week is split by event. Mixed doubles runs Monday and Tuesday, men’s and women’s doubles Wednesday and Thursday, and singles Friday and Saturday. Each event starts with pool play, and every team advances to a single-elimination bracket, so nobody flies to Vegas and goes home after round robin.

Divisions run from 3.5-and-under to 5.0+ and are set by DUPR, which became the series’ official rating system in January. Players earn points at Pickle Money Ball Regionals and Super Series events, and by nominating results from other tournaments, leagues and open play through the PMB app. The top 40 players on the points leaderboard get free entry, and everyone else can register directly. COO Clay Deen has said the top four finishers in each Regional division also qualify automatically. It hasn’t said how the $1 million will be divided among divisions or what entry will cost.

The series held its first event in Mesa, Arizona, in March. Since then it says it has paid out about $1 million to roughly 700 amateurs, an average of $1,408 each, and more than 25 players have cleared $5,000. It’s planning more than 20 events in 2027. The next big one is the $600,000 Florida Regional Championship at The Fort in Fort Lauderdale, October 22-25.

For most rec players, an amateur tournament has meant paying an entry fee and driving home with a medal. A seven-figure national purse that 3.5s and 4.0s can play for is a different deal, and it raises the stakes on your rating. DUPR data published this week shows about 60 percent of active rated doubles players sit below 3.5. In other words, the 3.5-and-under division covers more eligible players than every other division combined, and that’s where the fight for the money will be most crowded.

Ben Johns played in all three finals on Sunday at the Rate Las Vegas Open and lost every one of them. The PPA Tour event, worth 1,000 ranking points, finished October 4 at the Darling Tennis Center.

Singles was the surprise. Johns was the No. 19 seed and, according to The Kitchen, hadn’t won a PPA singles title in more than a year. He beat Dylan Frazier, Christian Alshon and John Lucian Goins to reach his second singles final of 2026, which put him one match from his first Triple Crown since 2024. Hunter Johnson then beat him 11-1, 11-3. The PPA Tour says Johnson had been 0-6 against Johns before Sunday.

In men’s doubles, Christian Alshon and Andrei Daescu beat Johns and Gabe Tardio in two games. Last year’s Las Vegas final between the same teams ran five games and 2 hours and 28 minutes before Johns and Tardio won it 12-10 in the fifth. This one was Johns and Tardio’s first loss since November 2025, and it ended a streak of 17 straight finals won that dated back to Atlanta in May 2025. Alshon and Daescu have now won back-to-back events after taking the Arizona Open two weeks ago.

Mixed doubles went the same way. Anna Bright and Hayden Patriquin beat Johns and Anna Leigh Waters 11-9, 11-7 for their third title together. Johns and Waters had won mixed in Las Vegas four years running. Waters did win women’s doubles with Bright, 11-8, 10-12, 11-5 over Tyra Black and Catherine Parenteau. That was the pair’s 25th title together, and it moved Waters to 199 career PPA titles. Bright was the only player to win two golds.

In women’s singles, Kaitlyn Christian beat 18-year-old Kiora Kunimoto 11-8, 2-11, 11-4. Kunimoto, the No. 5 seed, knocked out top seed Kate Fahey in the quarterfinals on her way to her first PPA final.

Why it matters: Johns and Tardio hadn’t lost all year, and Johns and Waters rarely lose mixed. Add Johns and Federico Staksrud’s first-round exit in Mesa two weeks ago, and the sport’s best teams look more beatable than they did a year ago.

Waters gets three more chances at No. 200 this week at the Veolia Chicago Cup, a 1,500-point indoor event at Life Time North Shore in Northbrook, Illinois, running through October 11. Round of 64 coverage starts today on Pickleballtv.

The Picklr has spent the past two years opening clubs in new states and new countries. Now it’s cutting back.

Athletech News reported on September 25 that the franchise has cut corporate staff and closed some clubs. The International Association of Pickleball Professional Facilities (IAPPF) found that at least one employee wrote on LinkedIn that their job ended “due to a corporate restructure.” CEO Jorge Barragan also posted on LinkedIn that “this year got hard” and that the company had started saying “the real number out loud.” The post came with news that COO Abby Olson is now acting president.

Two departures are on the record. In Round Rock, Texas, the eight-court club north of Austin closed in early September after about 20 months, according to Community Impact. The owners didn’t renew the lease and moved members to The Picklr’s Austin West and Oak Hill locations.

In Goleta, California, owner Ted Guggenheim took his club out of the system, and it reopened September 14 as The Grove Pickleball, swapping memberships for passes with a $25 drop-in rate. Guggenheim said he had been “losing money under the franchise model,” according to local reporting cited by IAPPF.

Some warning signs were already public. The Picklr’s 2025 Franchise Disclosure Document said the franchisor’s financial condition “calls into question” its ability to provide services to franchisees. It also flagged a “significant number of franchises that had been sold but not yet opened.” The document counted 56 franchised outlets at the end of 2025. Only 12 had been open a full year, and their median gross sales were about $938,000. Opening a club costs an estimated $1.25 million to $2.08 million.

Online posts have claimed the company is headed for bankruptcy. IAPPF said it could not verify any bankruptcy petition, and none has been confirmed. The number of jobs cut and a full list of affected clubs haven’t been made public.

Why it matters: Each Picklr club is run by a local franchisee, so trouble at corporate doesn’t automatically close the one you play at. IAPPF made that point to its members, and Goleta’s courts are still open under a new name. The wider indoor business looks shakier. Last month we reported that nine clubs listed for sale had cut asking prices by an average of 39%. Now the largest franchise is shrinking. For members, the local owner’s health matters more than the logo on the door.

The 2026-27 College Pickleball Tour, run by DUPR and the UPA, opens this weekend with three regional events:

• Boiler Bash Regional 300, West Lafayette, Indiana (October 3–4)
• Utah Super Regional 300, Herriman, Utah (October 3)
• Texas Collegiate Pickleball Challenge, Waco, Texas (October 4)

The fall schedule continues with the North Carolina Super Regional 300 on October 17–18 and the Ohio Super Regional 300 on October 24–25. The College World Championship 400 follows October 30 through November 1, and the fall closes with the Arizona Super Regional 300 on November 21–22.

The early storyline is roster movement. Defending champion Utah Tech signed Hunter Merritt, a 5.2-rated senior who transferred from LSU. Coach Chloe Butterfield landed him with university scholarship money, which is still uncommon in college pickleball. According to The Dink, Merritt is expected to play on Utah Tech’s second team alongside Liam Duffin and Clayton Boydston. A program with a title to defend now has a 5.2 player on its second team.

In Florida, the Gators lost 5.4-rated Christian Frankie to graduation and replaced him with 5.0-rated Zack Florendo from in-state rival Florida State. Transfers between rival schools were rare in college pickleball until recently. Now they’re shaping how the top programs line up.

The opener in West Lafayette also includes the fourth meeting between Indiana and Purdue for the Old Oaken Paddle, played in DUPR’s dual-match format. Indiana has won all three so far. The two schools start with a mixed doubles exhibition that pairs a player from each team. Former IU coach Timber Tucker said the event “really exemplifies what is great about pickleball.” One player is on both sides of the rivalry: Tori Burke, a Purdue graduate who now studies at IU, plans to join the Hoosiers’ competitive roster.

Why it matters: College pickleball now has scholarships, transfers and a trophy rivalry, the things fans know from other college sports. The talent is getting deeper too, with 5.0-plus players moving between programs. These are the players who will join the pro and senior-pro pipelines in a few years. If you’re a strong junior player or the parent of one, college pickleball is now a real thing to plan for.

When JOOLA announced the Power FX in early September, it gave out a name, a launch date and almost nothing else. The paddle went on sale yesterday at JOOLA.com and retailers nationwide, so here are the details.

There’s one model. The Power FX is a 16mm Perseus, JOOLA’s elongated shape, in a green-and-teal colorway called Daydream. It’s priced at $179.95. Premium foam paddles mostly sell for $195 to $250, so JOOLA came in under the category it’s entering, and that’s not what most people expected from the brand.

Inside is an EPP foam core in a carbon fiber frame, with what JOOLA calls an Adaptive Propulsion Core. That’s a version of the patented technology the company has spent 2026 enforcing in court. It reaches further into the throat than earlier versions and has two small air gaps near the top of the head. Pickleball.com’s first look puts the average weight at 8 ounces, swing weight at 114 to 118 on two stock units, and the handle at an extended 5.5 inches. JOOLA also changed the face: a new weave and resin finish that testers measured at roughly 30 to 40 percent rougher than JOOLA’s usual surfaces.

Early reviews say the feel is unusual. Pickleball Studio called it the stiffest foam paddle they’ve hit, with a quick response off the face. John Kew described it as “stiff and hollow,” which isn’t a combination you usually see in foam. That fits what JOOLA was going for. Austin Kim, the company’s director of product, said the design adds flex and sound to make up for the muted feel that foam often has, and called it “the first one where both power and the feel showed up in the same paddle.”

Why it matters: The Power FX is already approved by both USA Pickleball and UPA-A, so tournament players and tour pros can use it now. The approval also came before USA Pickleball’s new 2,100 RPM spin limit for newly certified paddles took effect today, which means the grittier face never had to pass that test. For rec players, it’s a foam option from a major brand that costs less than most of the competition. Supply is limited at launch, and pickleball.com reports that a Kosmos-shaped version may follow in 2027. If you’re used to soft, plush foam paddles, demo this one before you buy.

Major League Pickleball has filled in the blanks on its first Nations Cup. On September 24 the league announced groups, rosters and captains for the eight-team event, which runs October 30 through November 1 at Brookhaven Country Club in Farmers Branch, Texas, just outside Dallas.

Group A is Team USA, Canada, Asia Domestic and Europe–West. Group B is Australia, Latin America, Asia International and Europe–East. Each team carries six players. Friday and Saturday are round robins within each group to set seeding, and Sunday is a single-elimination bracket.

Team USA (captain Johnny Goldberg): Ben Johns, Anna Bright, Tyra Black, Kate Fahey, CJ Klinger and Will Howells. Anna Leigh Waters, fresh off her first MLP title with the New Jersey 5s, is not on the roster.

A few other rosters worth a look:

• Europe–East (captain Caleb Garrard) has Romania’s Andrei Daescu, who just won the PPA Arizona Open men’s doubles title with Christian Alshon, along with Slovenia’s Tina Pisnik, Lithuania’s Lina Padegimaite and Sweden’s Arwid Dahlin.
• Latin America (captain Juan Manuel Benitez) is built around a Brazilian core of Rafa Lenhard, Eric Oncins and Mari Humberg, plus Chile’s Nico Acevedo (Daescu’s opponent in that Arizona final), Mexico’s Charlie Trevino and Puerto Rico’s Alexa Schull.
• Australia (captain Sange Carter) brings Sarah Burr, Chris Crouch, Sahra Dennehy, Mitch Hargreaves, Danni-Elle Townsend and George Wall.
• Canada (captain Steve Deakin) includes Blaine Hovenier, Layne Sleeth and Victoria DiMuzio.

Asia gets two teams. Asia Domestic (captains Geoffrey Nguyen and Jeff Tsao) draws on players based in the region, including China’s Len Yang and India’s Milan Rane. Asia International (captain Madeleine Lim) includes Hong Kong’s Jack Wong, Japan’s Rika Fujiwara and the Philippines’ Macy Ybanez.

Why it matters: Pro pickleball has leaned heavily on American players and American markets. The Nations Cup is MLP’s first attempt to sell regional pride as its own product, and it also serves as the official kickoff to the 10-day 2026 Pickleball World Championships. If a team format built on flags works in Dallas, it gives the league something to do in the offseason and a reason to take the product overseas.

It’s also a busy week on the calendar. USA Pickleball Nationals start October 31 in San Diego, so the two events overlap for their first two days.

Prize money and broadcast details haven’t been announced. Tickets are on sale through Tixr.

Samin Odhwani is on his way out as Major League Pickleball commissioner — but not out of pickleball. The league confirmed last week that Odhwani will join Apollo Sports Capital and SC Holdings in a role overseeing their investment in Pickleball Inc., the parent company of both MLP and the PPA Tour, with a seat on the Pickleball Inc. board.

He’ll stay on as commissioner until a replacement is agreed on, so this is a transition rather than a departure date.

Odhwani took the job in spring 2025, and the two-season run behind him is the strongest business stretch the league has had. Ticket revenue rose 94 percent year over year. Attendance was up 52 percent. Sponsorship revenue more than doubled. The Finals in Central Park averaged 773,000 viewers on CBS, a 55 percent jump and the second-largest pro pickleball TV audience ever recorded.

The structural changes were just as significant. He scrapped the Premier/Challenger split in favor of a single 20-team league, expanded rosters to six players, rebuilt the regular season around team-market events instead of neutral-site stops, and folded in international teams and Champions Series Pickleball.

Apollo Sports Capital CEO Al Tylis pointed to that track record in explaining the hire, calling Odhwani a natural fit to oversee the firm’s investment. Apollo led the $225 million investment into Pickleball Inc. earlier this year; a big part of the new role reportedly centers on chasing a long-term media rights agreement.

Why it matters: The commissioner is leaving the operating job to go supervise it from the capital side — which tells you where the leverage in pro pickleball currently sits. Whoever takes over inherits a league with genuine momentum and a hard problem: converting a 20-team, team-market model into a media rights deal big enough to justify franchise valuations. For recreational players, the practical stake is whether MLP keeps landing in network windows on Sunday afternoons, or drifts back into app-only obscurity.

The Veolia Arizona Open wrapped up Sunday at Arizona Athletic Grounds in Mesa, and the men’s doubles final was the kind of match that makes the case for the sport better than any highlight reel.

Nico Acevedo and Yuta Funemizu had already announced themselves in round one, blowing out top seeds Ben Johns and Federico Staksrud 11-4, 11-5 in 34 minutes. They rode that form all the way to the final against Christian Alshon and Andrei Daescu — and then held six championship points across the 91-minute match without converting any of them. Alshon and Daescu took it 11-7, 7-11, 15-13.

Anna Leigh Waters left with two more golds. She beat Kate Fahey 11-9, 11-4 in women’s singles, extending an unbeaten run in the discipline that now stretches past two years, then partnered Ben Johns to an 11-3, 11-6 mixed doubles win over Rachel Rohrabacher and Christian Alshon. Rohrabacher got her own title back with Parris Todd in women’s doubles, taking down Meghan Dizon and Tyra Black 11-4, 12-10, 11-6.

Chris Haworth won men’s singles for the second year running in Mesa, coming back from a first-game deficit to beat Staksrud 10-12, 11-9, 11-6. He also got hit by a bird mid-final, which is not a stat the PPA tracks but probably should be.

Why it matters: The Arizona Open was worth 1,000 ranking points, which is real weight this late in the calendar as players position themselves for year-end seeding. More interesting is the pattern at the top of the men’s game — Johns and Staksrud, the sport’s two most decorated doubles players, went out in the first round to a pairing that didn’t exist a year ago. Waters remains Waters. Everything below her is increasingly up for grabs.

The Tour heads to Nevada next for the Rate Las Vegas Open, September 28 through October 4 at the Darling Tennis Center.

If you play in Cleveland and it feels like every open-play session has three new faces, the data agrees with you. DUPR, the rating system used by most leagues and tournaments, looked at where its new-user signups grew fastest over the past 12 months and published a top ten this week. Cleveland leads the country at 71 percent year-over-year growth, with Huntsville, Alabama, a hair behind at 70.6 percent and Seattle at 70.

The full list, with growth rates as reported by The Kitchen:

1. Cleveland, Ohio: 71%
2. Huntsville, Alabama: 70.6%
3. Seattle, Washington: 70%
4. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 64%
5. Fremont, California: 62%
6. Ashburn, Virginia: 61%
7. Lexington, Kentucky: 60.1%
8. Fort Lauderdale, Florida: 60%
9. Las Vegas, Nevada: 57%
10. Cumming, Georgia: 56%

Two things jump out. First, the geography. Florida, Arizona and Texas have long been the sport’s population centers, but only one Florida city made the list and Arizona and Texas are absent. Second, the size. Ashburn, Fremont and Cumming are suburbs, not metros, and Huntsville and Lexington are mid-size cities. When the base is small, a few new clubs or a busy league season can move the percentage a long way.

That points to the caveat. A DUPR user is someone who registered for a rating, which usually means leagues, ladders, tournaments or a club that runs play through the app. This measures organized play, not everyone who picks up a paddle at a public park, so cities with new dedicated facilities and active league programming show up here first. Huntsville, for instance, got a Picklr franchise last year. DUPR did not publish underlying counts, so there is no way to tell how many players a 70 percent jump represents in each market.

For context, the Sports & Fitness Industry Association’s most recent participation report put U.S. pickleball at 24.3 million players in 2025, with growth of nearly 172 percent over three years. Every city on DUPR’s list grew well above the national rate.

What it means for you: if you live in one of these ten places, expect fuller open-play rotations, more competition for court time and, eventually, more courts, because facility developers read these lists too. If your city did not make it, the sport still has plenty of room to run in your market.

JOOLA has spent 2026 turning a patent lawsuit into a licensing program, and this week it announced the tally. Of the 11 paddle brands it sued in April over its Propulsion Core technology, seven have settled or consented to judgment. An eighth, Diadem Sports, never responded, and JOOLA has asked the court for a default judgment against it. That leaves three still contesting the case: Franklin Sports, RPM Pickleball and Friday Labs.

“Eight resolutions is a clear signal that our IP is real, it’s protected, and we intend to keep it that way,” JOOLA CEO Richard Lee said in the announcement.

The seven that settled are Paddletek, ProXR, Proton, Volair, Facolos, Engage and All Racquet Sports, the licensee behind Adidas-branded paddles. Engage’s came as a consent judgment rather than a negotiated deal. When we last covered this fight in July, Volair had just become the fourth to settle, agreeing to pay royalties on its Shift line and stop production this fall. The three since then have not disclosed terms, but the earlier deals set the template: royalties to JOOLA, patent numbers printed on affected paddles, and a phase-out of the models in question. Proton’s paddles even got a “Powered by JOOLA” label on their way out the door.

Propulsion Core is the thermoformed core construction in JOOLA’s Pro line since 2024, including the 3S, 3S Dual, Pro IV and Pro V. JOOLA sued in federal court and before the U.S. International Trade Commission, which can block imports of infringing products. The ITC proceeding is still open with no final determination.

The holdouts are worth watching. Franklin is the highest-profile of the three, since it sponsors Anna Leigh Waters and a roster of other pros, and it has said nothing publicly. Friday Labs has also been quiet. RPM Pickleball is actively fighting the case. A default judgment against Diadem would resolve that claim without any ruling on whether the patent is valid, which is the question the remaining defendants may want answered.

Why it matters: most of the industry has now conceded that the core design behind the last two years of paddle innovation belongs to one company. The next generation of paddles will either license it, design around it, or come from a brand willing to pay lawyers. For players, the effects are narrower. Paddles already in your bag are not affected, but several models from the settled brands are being discontinued, so if you play with one and like it, buy a spare now. Longer term, expect royalty costs to show up in prices.

Major League Pickleball closed the books on its 2026 season Monday with a stat sheet built to impress the people who wrote a $225 million check in May. The headline figures: ticket revenue up 87 percent over 2025, attendance up 69 percent, and a Finals weekend in Central Park that drew more than 10,000 fans across five ticketed sessions and more than doubled the league’s previous single-event gate, set at the Newport Beach playoffs.

The season ran nine regular-season events from May through August, plus the Grand Rapids mid-season tournament and three playoff weeks in Dallas, Newport Beach and New York. Across 51 event days, the league averaged about 1,500 fans per day. Five events cleared that mark, up from two a year ago, and Orlando produced the first two arena sellouts in MLP history. Four of the nine regular-season stops out-grossed the best-selling event of 2025.

The TV number we already knew is still the big one: 773,000 on CBS for the Finals, the second-largest audience ever for pro pickleball. The wrap adds that the FS1 broadcast of the Orlando regular-season finale on August 1 pulled 146,000 viewers, a record for pickleball on that channel, and Tennis Channel’s Finals coverage added another 89,000. On PickleballTV, minutes watched rose 32 percent to more than 415 million. Instagram followers hit 150,000, with impressions up 61 percent and interactions up 106 percent.

Why it matters: when Apollo Sports Capital and Tom Dundon invested in Pickleball Inc. at a $750 million valuation, the bet was that live events and broadcast rights would grow into that number. Revenue growing faster than attendance suggests the league is finding pricing power, not just filling seats with cheap tickets. The caveats are the usual ones for a self-reported wrap. There are no dollar totals, no profitability figures, and percentage gains off a small 2025 base look better than the absolute numbers would.

The offseason is short. The inaugural MLP Nations Cup runs October 30 through November 1 at Brookhaven Country Club outside Dallas, with eight regional teams (USA, Canada, Australia, South America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and two from Asia) playing round robins Friday and Saturday and a single-elimination bracket Sunday. It doubles as the kickoff to the 2026 Pickleball World Championships. Rosters have not been announced.

Pickleball is still short on courts. It turns out it is not short on courts for sale. The International Association of Pickleball and Padel Facilities (IAPPF) pulled every pickleball facility listing on BizBuySell in late June, checked them again in early September, and found nine that had cut their asking price in between. The average reduction was 39 percent. Two were more than 50 percent. None went up. IAPPF CEO David Johnson published the findings at The Dink on Thursday.

The examples are specific. An indoor club in Florida went from $1.5 million to $600,000. An eight-court club with a bar on Staten Island dropped from $699,000 to $399,000. A small operation in Harris County, Texas, went from $150,000 to $95,000. The Pickleball Academy, a five-location chain across Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, was relisted at $2.15 million after originally asking $4.5 million.

The most telling detail is a set of four indoor facilities in Florida, Maryland, Michigan and South Carolina that all hit the market at exactly $1.5 million. Once the owners posted financials, the four repriced to $600,000, $860,000, $915,000 and $1 million. Same opening number, four very different businesses.

Johnson’s explanation is blunt: “Your facility is not worth what you spent building it.” Buyers pay a multiple of earnings, and a club that is not producing steady profit does not get valued on its construction budget or its court count. Location and lease terms matter more than square footage. “The clubs that come through this reset will be the ones run like real businesses,” he writes. “Those are the clubs that stay open.”

Some caveats. These are asking prices, not sale prices, and the piece has no data on what actually closed. Nine facilities is a small sample, and the author runs an organization that sells facility consulting, so the message is also a pitch. And nothing here says demand is soft. Industry estimates still put the U.S. roughly 25,000 courts short, a figure we covered last month.

What it means for the average player: the club you play at may change hands, and the owners who overpaid to build are the ones most likely to raise dues, cut hours, or sell. The clubs built on memberships, leagues and programming rather than open-play optimism are the ones that stick around. For anyone who has daydreamed about owning a facility, the entry price just got a lot more realistic.

The fourth Pickleball World Cup wrapped Sunday in Da Nang, Vietnam, and the scoreboard looked familiar: the United States beat the host nation 4-0 in the Open team final at Tien Son Sports Palace to defend the title it won in Fort Lauderdale last year. Hong Kong took bronze.

The scale was not familiar at all. Organizers put the field at more than 5,000 athletes from 65 countries and territories, spread across 97 courts at seven venues, and Guinness World Records certified it as the most nationalities ever in a single pickleball tournament. For comparison, the first edition in Peru three years ago drew 14 countries. The Open draw alone ran 64 teams through 16 round-robin groups before the knockout rounds.

Team ties are best-of-seven: women’s doubles, men’s doubles, two rounds of mixed, then women’s and men’s singles, with a tiebreaker if needed. The U.S. never let it get that far in the final. Jack Munro, Kat Stewart, Bobbi Oshiro and Richard Livornese Jr. anchored the squad, and the same names carried the individual pro draws. Munro won men’s doubles with Livornese and mixed with Australia’s Nicola Schoeman. Stewart took women’s singles over the Netherlands’ Roos van Reek. Vietnam got its moment when Ly Hoang Nam, a former tennis pro, won men’s singles in front of a home crowd.

The U.S. also won the Masters, Juniors and Kids team divisions, the last two against Vietnam and India respectively. Brazil took the Seniors title over Spain.

Why it matters: this was the last World Cup played without the sport’s top tier. Pickleball Inc., the parent of the PPA Tour and MLP, cleared its contracted players to represent their countries starting in 2027, so the Ben Johns and Anna Leigh Waters question stops being hypothetical next year. The Cabieses siblings who founded the event have said from the start that the goal is the Olympics, and an Olympic bid needs a real world championship with the real best players. Da Nang proved the event can handle the crowd. Next year decides whether it can handle the stars.

Vietnam, meanwhile, has quietly become one of the sport’s deepest markets outside North America. The host country topped the overall medal table by a wide margin, and a home player winning the pro singles bracket says the depth is real, not just enthusiasm.

USA Pickleball has filled out its 2027 Golden Ticket calendar, announcing nine partner-run national qualifiers to go with the five tournaments the governing body operates itself. That makes 14 events where a division win earns priority registration for the 2027 Oceanview USA Pickleball National Championships.

The oddity in the schedule is the start date. The first 2027 qualifier, the LevelUp Pickleball Golden Ticket in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, runs November 11 through 15. The 2026 Nationals in San Diego end on November 8. If you are playing both, you have three days to get from the Barnes Tennis Center to western Pennsylvania.

The nine new stops, in order:

• Canonsburg, PA, November 11-15, 2026 (LevelUp Pickleball)
• St. Louis, MO, February 15-21 (Pickleball Amigos)
• Jacksonville, FL, March 1-7 (The HUB)
• Seattle, WA, April 26-May 2 (Pickleball Is Great)
• Houston, TX, May 6-9 (NP Houston)
• Glen Allen, VA, May (Virginia Spring Classic)
• Silicon Valley, CA, July 5-11 (The HUB)
• Bend, OR, July 14-18 (Pacific Northwest Classic)
• Dallas, TX, July 19-25 (Pickleball Is Great)

The five USA Pickleball-owned events, announced late last month, are Glendale, Arizona (January 12-17), Las Vegas (February 23-28), Opelika, Alabama (March 17-21), San Diego (March 31-April 4) and Colorado Springs (May 19-23). Registration for Glendale and Las Vegas opens October 1, with the rest to follow.

“Golden Ticket tournaments are where the journey to Nationals begins,” CEO Mike Nealy said, adding that the expansion lets “more athletes experience meaningful competition closer to home.”

For recreational players thinking about a first sanctioned tournament, the math is worth knowing. Nationals eligibility requires 4,500 Tiered Point System points, and a Golden Ticket event awards that full amount for showing up. Win your bracket and you skip the waitlist entirely. The 2027 map is also noticeably better for the middle of the country and the Pacific Northwest than past years, which have leaned heavily on Arizona, Florida and Southern California.

What has not been announced is where 2027 Nationals will be played. Oceanview stays on as title sponsor, but USA Pickleball has said nothing yet about a venue or dates. The 2026 edition returns to San Diego from October 31 to November 8.

JOOLA announced last week that the Power FX, its first full-foam paddle, will launch September 30. The company says it’s “built to give players effortless power on every shot,” and that is close to the entire spec sheet so far. No shapes, thicknesses, face material or price have been released.

“POWER FX represents something new for JOOLA — something our community has been asking for,” said Gordon Kaye, JOOLA’s chief experience officer. “We’re excited to share more and get this in the hands of players very soon.”

The community has indeed been asking. Foam-core paddles have been the category everyone else has chased since the middle of last year. Honolulu shipped its Gen 4 line in April, Paddletek put out the Honeyfoam TKO-X in May, and Selkirk bought foam pioneer Bread & Butter in June. JOOLA’s Pro V series arrived in February with no foam option, and reviewers noticed. JOOLA’s answer at the time was that it would build a foam paddle when it could add something of its own rather than copy what was already on shelves.

JOOLA’s thermoformed Propulsion Core, the heart of its Gen 3 paddles, has been the subject of patent claims against eleven brands this year. Four of them have settled and agreed to pay royalties. Launching a foam paddle now signals that JOOLA sees the category as here to stay rather than a trend it can litigate around.

Three questions will decide whether the Power FX matters beyond the announcement. First, certification: pros and, as of August 30, juniors and senior pros can only compete with UPA-A approved paddles, so approval timing will show whether JOOLA expects its tour players to use it. Second, whether Ben Johns, the brand’s marquee pro and fresh off men’s doubles gold in Cary, puts it in play. Third, price, since foam’s premium tier runs $195 to $250 and JOOLA tends to land at the top of it.

Why it matters: when one of the sport’s largest brands enters a category, it stops being a niche. Expect more foam options, more competition on price and a lot of reviews in October. If you play sanctioned tournaments, wait for the approval lists before ordering. If you don’t, early Gen 4 foam paddles earned a reputation for trampoline feel and uneven durability, so see whether JOOLA’s version fixes either before buying.

The Veolia Pickleball National Championships wrapped Sunday at Cary Tennis Park, and the first 2,000-point Slam of the new PPA season ended mostly the way the seedings said it would. Mostly.

The exception came Saturday in mixed doubles. JW and Jorja Johnson beat top seeds Ben Johns and Anna Leigh Waters 4-11, 11-9, 11-6 in the semifinals, ending a run that had stood at 192 days without a loss going into the week. The Johnsons didn’t get the gold, though. Hayden Patriquin and Anna Bright handled them 11-9, 11-3, 11-7 in the final for the pair’s second title together.

The other streaks held. Bright and Waters won women’s doubles over Jorja Johnson and Tyra Black 11-5, 11-6, 11-3, and did it after outscoring their first three opponents 66-7. They have now gone more than a full calendar year unbeaten, dating to September 13, 2025. Johns and Gabe Tardio came in 45-0 with nine golds from the spring and left 46-0, beating Christian Alshon and Andrei Daescu 11-8, 11-8, 5-11, 11-5. Their run is past 300 days.

Waters took women’s singles 11-1, 11-9 over Kate Fahey to push her singles streak beyond 830 days.

Men’s singles produced the best bracket of the week. Hunter Johnson beat No. 12 Noe Khlif, then No. 1 Chris Haworth 11-9, 11-1 in the semis, then No. 2 Federico Staksrud 7-11, 11-3, 11-0 in the final. It’s Johnson’s ninth career singles title, third on the all-time list.

Sofia Sewing, the longtime APP standout making her PPA debut, came through qualifying seeded 46th and reached the singles quarterfinals.

The event was also the first to count toward the new World Pickleball Rankings and the first Slam run under the format changes we covered last week: Owl AI line calls on eight courts, side switches at six points, no bronze matches.

Why it matters: the Johns-Waters mixed pairing was the one marquee streak nobody had cracked this year, and the Johnsons did it two months into their Paddletek deal. Bright, meanwhile, leaves Cary with two golds and a case that she’s the most valuable partner in the women’s game right now. And for anyone who plays tournaments, this was the first Slam with cameras calling lines on eight courts. What the PPA learned this week will shape how fast that setup spreads.

The numbers are in from Central Park, and they’re the best Major League Pickleball has ever posted. Sunday’s championship-clinching match between the New Jersey 5s and St. Louis Shock averaged 773,000 viewers in its noon-to-1 p.m. ET window on CBS, the league announced Wednesday. That’s a 55 percent jump over the 2025 Finals, which had set the previous MLP record at 499,000, and it makes the broadcast the second-most-watched pro pickleball event in history.

The only bigger audience belongs to the PPA. The Carvana PPA Masters doubles finals on CBS in January averaged 791,000 and peaked above one million. MLP came within 18,000 viewers of that on the last Sunday of August.

The in-person numbers held up too. More than 10,000 fans came through CityPickle at Wollman Rink across three days and five sessions, in the league’s third straight year of staging the Finals in Central Park. The 5s swept the Shock 2-0, with both matches decided by DreamBreaker, and regular season MVP Anna Leigh Waters picked up her first MLP title.

The comparison is close to apples-to-apples: the 2025 Finals were also in Central Park, also on CBS, also in a Sunday window, and the audience grew by more than half. The 2024 Mesa Cup on FOX, once the sport’s high-water mark at 501,000, now sits fourth. By the league’s own accounting, three of the sport’s four largest TV audiences have arrived in the past 13 months.

A few caveats. These are league-reported averages for a single one-hour window; peak viewership wasn’t released, and Saturday’s opener, which wasn’t part of the CBS window, isn’t included. But the direction is hard to argue with.

Why it matters: television audiences are what sponsors, team owners and network partners actually buy. A 55 percent year-over-year jump for the league’s marquee broadcast, in a network window rather than a streaming app, is the strongest business argument pro pickleball has made since the 2024 merger. It also arrives as the sport tries to convince broadcasters that pickleball can carry a regular slot rather than a one-off special. On Sunday’s evidence, the case is getting easier to make.

The PPA Tour’s first Major of the season reaches the Round of 16 today at Cary Tennis Park, and the early story is less about who’s winning than about how the matches are being run.

Three changes debut this week. Owl AI’s automated line calling is live on eight courts, the tour’s widest deployment since it partnered with the company earlier this year. Teams now switch sides whenever one reaches six points, in every game rather than only deciding games. And bronze medal matches are gone at any event worth 1,000 ranking points or more; both losing semifinalists get the same points and fourth-place pay, and neither has to stay an extra day to play for third.

Add the World Pickleball Rankings, which start counting here, and it’s a lot of new rulebook for one week.

The draws are new too. The offseason reshuffle produced Hayden Patriquin and Federico Staksrud as the No. 3 men’s seed, JW Johnson with teenager Tama Shimabukuro at No. 4, CJ Klinger with Will Howells at No. 5, and Christian Alshon back with Andrei Daescu. Dekel Bar and Dylan Frazier are seeded seventh. Sofia Sewing, one of the APP Tour’s most decorated players, makes her PPA debut in all three disciplines: women’s doubles with Catherine Parenteau (No. 5), mixed with Casey Diamond, and singles, where she’s seeded 46th and drew Kiora Kunimoto in Thursday’s featured match. Nico Acevedo also debuts in men’s doubles alongside Tyson McGuffin.

The targets haven’t moved. As of Wednesday, Anna Leigh Waters hadn’t lost a PPA match in 825 days. Ben Johns and Gabe Tardio were 297 days without a loss, Waters and Anna Bright 354, and Waters and Johns 192.

Off court, Cary is playing through a North Carolina heat wave with rain possible for the weekend. Ticket sales were strong enough that PPA marketing executive Jeff Watson told ABC11, “We want to be here long term.”

Quarterfinals are Friday, semifinals Saturday and finals Sunday, September 6, on PickleballTV and Tennis Channel.

Why it matters: automated line calls and the bronze cut both trim the friction pros complain about most: disputed calls and dead days. If the eight-court Owl AI setup holds up in a Slam, expect it at every Major by the Finals. And the side-switch tweak shares sun and wind evenly across a match, the kind of change that reaches amateur tournaments within a season or two.

Third time was the charm. The New Jersey 5s, runners-up in both 2024 and 2025, swept the St. Louis Shock 2-0 at Wollman Rink in Central Park this weekend to win the 2026 Major League Pickleball Championship — and neither match came easily.

Saturday’s opener was the tense one. St. Louis took women’s doubles behind Anna Bright and Kate Fahey (11-2 over Anna Leigh Waters and Jorja Johnson) and men’s doubles through Hayden Patriquin and Gabe Tardio, putting New Jersey down 2-0. The 5s answered by winning both mixed matches — Noe Khlif and Waters 11-4, then Federico Staksrud and Johnson 11-8 — to force a DreamBreaker, which they survived 22-20. Sunday followed the same script with a friendlier ending: another 2-2 split, but this time New Jersey ran away with the tiebreaker 21-9 to close it out, with the championship window airing live on CBS.

Waters was named regular season MVP and now owns the one title that had somehow escaped her. She has won essentially everything else the sport offers; the MLP trophy completes the set. Staksrud, acquired in New Jersey’s blockbuster midseason trade, took Finals MVP honors after anchoring both men’s and mixed play all weekend.

The roster construction deserves credit too. New Jersey spent $800,000 in the draft on Jorja Johnson, paired her with Waters into the league’s best women’s doubles team, and then went all-in at the deadline for Staksrud. The 5s entered the playoffs as the top seed, swept Brooklyn 3-0 in both semifinal matches, and never trailed in a series.

Why it matters: MLP bet its season finale on a Central Park stage and a network TV window, and got a two-time-runner-up redemption story with the sport’s biggest star winning her first league title. And there’s no offseason lull to speak of — the PPA’s 2026-27 season opened the very next day in Cary, North Carolina.

The Picklr’s international map now has a pin in the Southern Hemisphere. Picklr Cronulla, an 11-court indoor club in Caringbah in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire, opened to players on August 17 and celebrates its official launch with a free community open day this Saturday, August 29.

It’s the flagship for Picklr ANZ, the master franchisee that signed with the U.S. chain in July 2025 to build 50 clubs across the region — 44 in Australia and six in New Zealand — over the next five to seven years. The ANZ group is TPM Partners, led by CEO Robert Pistilli with co-founders Anthony Liveris and Brett Clark, and it will follow the same local-owner franchise model The Picklr has used to reach more than 500 clubs open or in development across North America and Japan.

The next site is already named: Brookvale, serving Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Pistilli told SmartCompany the two-year plan covers the inner west and eastern suburbs of Sydney, then Brisbane. “The positive reception in the community has been overwhelming,” he said.

The equipment side is settled, too. In July, Picklr ANZ named JOOLA its major equipment partner in a multi-year deal: featured paddle in every ANZ pro shop, exclusive equipment for the club’s “P-Series” coaching pathway, and a “Racquet Pass” demo program so members can try paddles before buying.

Australia is a reasonable bet. AusPlay’s April 2025 survey put active pickleball participation above 155,000, and the country’s indoor market has so far been mostly converted warehouses and shared badminton halls rather than purpose-built clubs.

For The Picklr, Cronulla makes three countries outside the U.S. in about a year: Japan, Canada (Saskatoon and Regina, announced this spring) and now Australia. The chain closed a $59 million Series B, counts Drew Brees among its backers, and is clearly treating the franchise playbook as exportable. Whether a Utah-born membership model survives the translation — Australians are used to cheap council courts and club sport — is the open question.

Why it matters: the global indoor-club race is on, and U.S. franchises are moving first. If you’re an Australian player, you’re about to find out what a membership-based pickleball club costs.

The PPA Tour’s 2026-27 season opens Monday, and it opens big. The inaugural Veolia Pickleball National Championships runs August 31 through September 6 at Cary Tennis Park in Cary, North Carolina, with a $1,648,641 payout spread across five pro divisions and 2,000 ranking points to each winner — Slam-tier money and Slam-tier points, the most the tour hands out at any single stop.

It’s also the first event scored under the World Pickleball Rankings, the composite system the PPA announced August 5. Instead of separate ladders for each discipline, every player now gets one number built from their 14 best results over the trailing 52 weeks, weighted 50 percent gender doubles, 35 percent mixed and 15 percent singles. Every PPA event worldwide — Challengers, the Asia and Europe stops, Majors — feeds the same leaderboard, and it will determine seeding, byes and qualification for the season-ending Finals. Cary is where that clock starts.

The field is what you’d expect for a Major: Anna Leigh Waters (No. 1 in singles, doubles and mixed), Ben Johns, Gabe Tardio and singles No. 1 Chris Haworth are all entered. North Carolina gets two of its own near the top of the draw in Kate Fahey (No. 2) and Brooke Buckner (No. 4).

Pro schedule: Qualifying Monday, Round of 64 Tuesday, Round of 32 Wednesday, Round of 16 Thursday, quarterfinals Friday, semifinals Saturday and gold and bronze matches Sunday, September 6. PickleballTV carries every court; Tennis Channel picks up featured rounds and Championship Sunday. Grounds passes start at $25.

Amateur brackets — skill and age divisions, Junior PPA, Senior Open and a 16-team MoneyBall draw — run alongside the pros all week. The Town of Cary, which landed the event with help from a state grant, expects more than 2,000 players.

One thing worth clearing up: this is a PPA Tour event, not USA Pickleball’s. The governing body’s own Nationals — the Oceanview USA Pickleball National Championships, the amateur event with the Golden Ticket path — still runs October 31 through November 8 in San Diego. Two “Nationals” in one fall is a preview of a turf question the sport hasn’t settled.

Why it matters: the PPA spent the summer building infrastructure — a Europe tour, an Asia tour, a global ranking — and Cary is the first weekend all of it is switched on at once. The standings that come out of North Carolina will shape draws for the next 12 months.

For the first time since it became the sport’s default rating, DUPR is looking at more than the final score. Beginning this month, AI-powered video analysis is officially part of the DUPR rating, layered on top of the competitive match results the algorithm has always used.

The mechanics are simple on the player side. Record a match on a phone, or play on a court equipped with a participating smart-camera system, and the footage flows to DUPR through one of its integrated video partners — PB Vision, PlaySight, SwingVision, Save My Play, Volley and Track Tennis. The partner’s AI tracks player movement and ball trajectories, generates shot-by-shot data (serve placement, third-shot execution, kitchen-line approaches, backhands under pressure) and produces skill breakdowns, highlights and coaching recommendations. Because those systems now connect directly to DUPR, there are no separate profiles or manual uploads, which was the main thing keeping earlier attempts at video ratings from getting used.

DUPR says the change reaches its 2 million-plus rated players and more than 15,000 clubs, leagues, tournaments and technology partners.

What DUPR has not said is how much the video actually moves the number. The announcement gives no weighting, no minimum footage threshold and no detail on whether the video component can be declined. So the honest read is: your rating is now informed by performance data, but the rec player who never records a match will be rated the same way as before.

Why it matters: the most common complaint about DUPR has always been that it measures results, not play. A strong player with weak partners bleeds rating; a middling player riding a great partner gains it. Shot-level data is DUPR’s answer to that — in principle it can separate what you did from what your partner did, and credit skills that don’t always show up in the score. It also gives DUPR a harder-to-game signal against sandbagging, since a 3.5 who is hitting 4.5 shots on video will eventually get found out.

The trade-off is transparency. Rating systems earn trust by being predictable, and a black-box video input makes it harder to understand why your number moved. Expect pressure on DUPR to publish how the two inputs are blended, particularly from tournament directors who seed brackets off it.

Practical advice, for now: keep playing rated matches. If you want the AI to see your game, start recording.

Major League Pickleball’s season ends where it gets the most eyeballs: CityPickle at Wollman Rink in Central Park, August 28-30. The league released its broadcast plan Monday, and the headline is a live, exclusive window on CBS from noon to 1 p.m. ET on Sunday, August 30 — a network broadcast slot for the championship rather than a cable or streaming-only finish.

The semifinal pairings are set. Top seed New Jersey used its pick to take No. 5 Brooklyn, which means No. 2 St. Louis draws No. 6 Dallas. Both are best-of-three series, with each match running women’s doubles, men’s doubles, two mixed doubles and a DreamBreaker if it’s 2-2.

New Jersey’s choice is a reasonable one on paper and a bold one in practice. The 5s swept Brooklyn 11-1, 11-8, 11-4 in the MLP New York final back in June, but that was at Randall’s Island; this time Brooklyn is playing a de facto home game in Manhattan, and it just eliminated defending champion Columbus with Jackie Kawamoto and Riley Newman closing the deciding mixed. New Jersey, meanwhile, is in its third straight finals weekend and has been the league’s best team since its midseason Staksrud trade.

St. Louis gets the team nobody wanted. Dallas has been the story of the summer: back-to-back event titles in San Diego and Chicago, an 11-match winning streak into the playoffs, and a quarterfinal in which JW Johnson and Augie Ge beat Ben Johns and Max Freeman 11-2 on the way to eliminating No. 3 LA. The Shock won the Mid-Season Tournament and swept Texas without dropping a game last round, so this is the two hottest teams in the bracket meeting a round early.

How to watch (all times ET):

• Friday, Aug. 28: MSG, 12-6 p.m.; PickleballTV all day
• Saturday, Aug. 29: MSG, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; PickleballTV
• Sunday, Aug. 30: CBS, 12-1 p.m. (exclusive); Tennis Channel, 2-4 p.m.; PickleballTV

Courtside and VIP passes are on sale through Tixr. There’s no parking at the venue; take the subway.

Why it matters: MLP has spent two seasons trying to prove a team format can hold a general sports audience. A network window on a late-August Sunday, with a Central Park backdrop and a possible New Jersey-Brooklyn regional final, is about as good a test case as the league could have drawn up.

Starting Saturday, August 22, anyone playing on Mashpee’s town courts has to use a noise-reducing ball. Town Manager Rodney Collins announced the mandate on July 20 after nearly a decade of complaints from a neighbor whose house sits about 250 feet from the courts, and the reaction from the local playing community has been loud enough to prove the point.

More than 600 people have signed a petition asking Collins to rescind the rule. A local instructional program canceled its summer classes. Players told the Select Board they’ll simply drive to neighboring towns instead.

The complaints trace back to Earnie Barrows, who built his home at the end of a dead-end road in 1998 — two decades before the courts opened in August 2018. Barrows described “11.5 hours of this, constant,” and said he wakes up in the middle of the night hearing pickleball. Sixteen neighbors signed his 2018 noise petition. The town commissioned sound studies in 2020 and 2023; neither found that play routinely exceeded state noise standards, though one recommended taller fencing and quiet equipment, and the 2023 study noted substantial competing noise from nearby Otis Air Force Base. Sound-dampening fencing went up in 2020 and didn’t settle it.

The recreation department approved ten quiet ball models, ranging from roughly $3 to $30 per ball. Only two of the ten are approved by USA Pickleball for tournament play. Players have objected that the balls fly and bounce differently enough to change the game.

Why this matters beyond Cape Cod: quiet-ball mandates are becoming the compromise of choice for towns caught between players and neighbors, and Mashpee is a preview of how that compromise lands. Collins reportedly told players at a July meeting that if litigation succeeded, there wouldn’t be any pickleball courts at all — which is the real leverage in most of these fights.

Ten days from now, the paddle rules for junior and senior pro divisions catch up with the rest of the professional circuit. Effective August 30, competitors in PPA Juniors and Senior Pro brackets must use paddles that carry UPA-A certification — the stamp, the model number printed on the paddle, and a listing on the official UPA-A Approved Paddle list. The United Pickleball Association’s athlete arm framed the change as a response to player feedback and a matter of “a level playing field in the spirit of fair competition.”

Until now, UPA-A certification has applied to pro divisions, the Challenger Series, pro qualifiers, and international events under the PPA and MLP umbrella. Junior and senior pro fields sat outside that requirement, which meant a 16-year-old and a 52-year-old could legally compete with paddles that a pro in the next draw couldn’t touch. The certification program tests paddles on deflection force and maximum spin RPM — both fresh out of the box and after simulated extended use, which is the part designed to catch paddles that break in hot.

The wrinkle worth knowing: UPA-A and USA Pickleball run separate lists. A paddle can be on both, one, or neither. USA Pickleball’s list still governs sanctioned amateur events like Nationals and Golden Ticket tournaments; UPA-A governs the PPA/MLP side. Certification isn’t cheap on the manufacturer end either — $10,000 annually per brand plus $3,000 per paddle model on the standard timeline — which is part of why the two lists haven’t converged.

For rec players, nothing changes. But if you have a junior competing on the PPA circuit or you’re playing senior pro, check the bag before August 30. Cross-reference the exact model and size against the UPA-A list, because a paddle passing USAP testing does not mean it passes here.

Two months ago the story was that America’s court buildout was finally catching up — 18,000-plus play locations logged, thousands added in a year. A new Forbes piece argues the finish line keeps moving.

The number getting passed around: about 25,000 additional courts needed in the U.S., and that assumes participation stops growing today. The estimate comes from Tim Keightley, CEO of Center Court Pickleball, and reflects an operator’s view rather than a government census, so treat it as directional. But the direction is not subtle. Industry figures cited in the piece put participation up roughly 170% over three years and 22% in the last year measured, with something like 80 million players globally.

The more interesting shift is who those players are. The median age of a U.S. pickleball player has reportedly dropped from around 40 to about 35, and Gen Z — roughly ages 13 to 25 — is now the sport’s largest single demographic. That is a long way from the retiree-clinic stereotype the sport spent a decade shaking off, and it changes what a facility has to be. Younger players want late-night open play, leagues, and a social layer, not a 9 a.m. round robin.

It is also reshaping how operators run the math. Center Court caps memberships at 80 per court — deliberately leaving money on the table so existing members can actually get on. That is the quiet tension in the boom: a facility that oversells access stops being worth the membership.

For the average dinker, the practical read is that new courts near you probably won’t fix peak-hour waits on their own. The supply is growing fast. Demand is still growing faster.

The Major League Pickleball quarterfinals wrapped Sunday in Newport Beach, and the bracket that survived it does not look much like the one that went in. Four teams are left: No. 1 New Jersey, No. 2 St. Louis, No. 5 Brooklyn and No. 6 Dallas.

Brooklyn’s win was the headline. Facing defending champion Columbus, the No. 5 seed took the series 2-1, closing it out when Jackie Kawamoto and Riley Newman jumped to a 9-0 lead in the deciding mixed doubles and held on 11-8. Newman pointed at the roster’s brutal middle stretch afterward — “there were injuries, there were sicknesses” — and noted this was the first weekend Brooklyn had played at full strength since mid-June. Timing matters in a three-week playoff.

Dallas kept doing what Dallas has done all summer. The No. 6 Flash dropped Match 1 to No. 3 LA, then flattened them, with JW Johnson and Augie Ge beating Ben Johns and Max Freeman 11-2 and Danni-Elle Townsend and Ge closing the series 11-7. The midseason retooling — trading for Townsend, adding Alix Truong — has held up under playoff pressure.

The two top seeds handled business. St. Louis swept Texas 2-0 without dropping a game, and its four players finished ranked first through fourth statistically for the weekend. New Jersey beat Palm Beach 2-0 to reach the final weekend for a third straight year, though it needed a DreamBreaker to escape Match 1.

Semifinals and the final run August 28-30 at City Pickle’s Wollman Rink setup in Central Park. One wrinkle worth watching: as top seed, New Jersey gets to pick its semifinal opponent from Brooklyn or Dallas, with St. Louis inheriting whoever is left. Both options are teams playing better than their seeds. There is no soft landing here.

The Association of Pickleball Players returned to Chicago this past weekend for its eighth year in the city where the tour was founded, and the bracket promptly fell apart in the best way.

The carnage was worst in the doubles draws. In both women’s and mixed pro doubles, all four of the top-four seeded teams were out before the semifinals. Vivian Glozman and Roos van Reek won women’s doubles as the No. 11 seed — Glozman’s first podium in a while, and the kind of run that used to be a once-a-season anomaly on this tour. Kat Stewart and Ronan Camron took mixed by knocking off top seeds Megan Fudge and Aidan Schenk.

Men’s doubles nearly delivered its own shock. Patrick Kawka and Quang Duong made the final from the No. 10 seed, beating a string of higher-ranked teams to get there, before Jack Munro and Richard Livornese Jr. closed it out for their third consecutive Chicago title — the one piece of chalk on the weekend.

Singles split the difference. Ammar Wazir defended his 2025 men’s crown over Jayden Broderick, winning at home in front of a crowd that clearly enjoyed it. On the women’s side, Seone Mendez knocked out higher seeds on her way to a win over Domenika Turkovic and the second gold of her career.

The event, held August 10-11 and benefiting Shriners Children’s, sits in the APP’s original home — founder Ken Herrmann’s city.

Why it matters: the APP’s pro field has been getting deeper for two seasons, and weekends like this are the evidence. When a No. 11 seed can win a pro draw, the gap between the top tier and everyone else is closing. That trend is worth watching as the tour heads into a 2027 season with doubled prize money.

The PPA Asia tour wrapped its seventh event of 2026 at the MB Ho Chi Minh City Open, a 500-level stop carrying World Pickleball Rankings points — and Vietnamese players walked away with the headline result.

Hien Truong and Quan Do took men’s doubles over Collin Johns and Hoang Nam Ly, their first Asian tour title since June. Johns, who has been running coaching and education clinics across the Pacific Rim this season, picked up his fourth medal since May. Truong also took bronze in singles, where Adam Harvey beat Luc Pham in the final after Pham upset Jack Wong in the semis.

The weekend belonged to Andie Dikosavljevic, though. She won her first PPA Asia medal in women’s singles, coming through a three-game final against first-time medalist Trang Huynh, then teamed with Yufei Long to win women’s doubles. That’s the double — and it extends a run that includes nine women’s pro singles titles on the PPA Australia tour dating back to March 2025.

In mixed, Lingwei Kong and Hong Kit Wong beat top seeds Nok Yiu Tang and Eunggwon Kim, handing that pair a third straight final loss in the discipline.

Why it matters: the PPA’s Asian circuit was widely read as an export project — American structure, American players, new markets. Two seasons in, that’s not quite what’s happening. Local and regional players are winning real titles against touring pros, and the Vietnamese scene in particular keeps producing results. For a sport trying to build a genuine international competitive base rather than an exhibition tour, that’s the more meaningful development than any single trophy.

The Asian tour continues through the fall with stops in Shenzhen and elsewhere in the region.

The 2026 English Open begins today at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, and the headline is the room itself. Organizers have opened Halls 6, 7 and 20 into one continuous space holding 60 ProFlex-coated courts — billed as the largest indoor pickleball tournament in the world, and a straightforward answer to a venue problem.

The event had spent three years at Telford International Centre, where the 2025 edition drew roughly 2,350 players from more than 40 countries and effectively ran out of floor. Pickleball England is targeting more than 3,000 players and over 6,000 individual event registrations this year, spread across about 120 brackets by age and skill level (3.0 through Open, with 70+ divisions seeded by age alone). Play runs six days, through August 16.

The layout details are the kind of thing that only matter if you’ve ever played a cramped indoor tournament: three-meter walkways between court blocks, a central vendor village doubling as the operations hub, and a schedule built to keep matches running on every court all day rather than clustering them into peak blocks. Franklin X40s are the tournament ball throughout. There’s also a seminar track with speakers from both the US and UK, and the Unity Cup team event that mixes age groups.

Why it matters beyond the UK: indoor tournaments at this scale are rare anywhere, and the economics are usually the obstacle — you need a convention-center footprint and enough registrations to justify it. Hitting 3,000 players in a country where pickleball was a curiosity five years ago suggests the European amateur base is now deep enough to support American-style mega-events. Expect other national federations to look hard at the NEC model.

Spectator tickets run £10-£25.

The opening round of the Major League Pickleball playoffs wrapped Sunday at Pickler Universe in Carrollton, Texas, and the bracket came out exactly as seeded. All four best-of-three series ended in 2-0 sweeps, with No. 5 Brooklyn, No. 6 Dallas, No. 7 Palm Beach and No. 8 Texas all advancing.

The scorelines flatter the winners. Brooklyn nearly went down in its opener against No. 10 SoCal, surviving a DreamBreaker 24-22 after the Hard Eights’ young lineup saved several match points. Jackie Kawamoto went 8-2 in DreamBreaker play across the weekend to keep Brooklyn upright; Match 2 was the easy one, a 3-1 win.

Texas had the hardest road of anyone. Both of its matches against No. 9 Atlanta went to a DreamBreaker, and the Ranchers only broke the second one open late, ripping off 10 straight points to turn a 10-8 nailbiter into an 18-8 finish.

Dallas was the exception to the drama. The Flash won Match 1 3-1 after a shaky start, then handed in the only genuinely lopsided result of the weekend behind a shutout showing from JW Johnson. That extends the streak we flagged going in — the Flash have now won San Diego, gone unbeaten in Chicago and swept their playoff opener, and they’re doing it as a No. 6 seed. Alshon led all players in the round at 77.2% of points won.

Palm Beach handled No. 12 Chicago behind the Pisnik/Sewing women’s doubles pairing, though the Slice pushed them in mixed.

The four winners now head to Newport Beach on August 14-16, where top seeds New Jersey, St. Louis, LA and Columbus enter after a first-round bye. Semifinals and the final run August 28-30 at City Pickle’s Wollman Rink setup in Central Park.

For anyone in the top four: the seeding says you drew a lower seed. The last three months say Dallas is the team nobody wanted.

The 2026 Major League Pickleball postseason begins Friday at Pickler Universe in Carrollton, Texas, and the format’s newest wrinkle is already shaping the bracket. Seeds 5 through 8 were allowed to select their Round 1 opponents from the pool of teams seeded 9 through 12, with the highest remaining seed choosing first.

Brooklyn, at No. 5, went first and took No. 10 SoCal — reportedly because Hard Eights standout Armaan Bhatia is sidelined with a knee injury. Dallas picked next at No. 6 and passed on No. 12 Chicago to face No. 11 Las Vegas. Palm Beach (No. 7) took Chicago, leaving No. 8 Texas to draw No. 9 Atlanta, the highest-seeded team in the lower half.

The full Round 1 slate:

• No. 5 Brooklyn vs. No. 10 SoCal
• No. 6 Dallas vs. No. 11 Las Vegas
• No. 7 Palm Beach vs. No. 12 Chicago
• No. 8 Texas vs. No. 9 Atlanta

Each matchup is a best-of-three series, with a third match played only if the teams split the first two. Higher seeds hold the home designation for matches one and two; a coin flip decides it if a decider is needed.

The top four seeds — New Jersey, St. Louis, LA, and Columbus — sit out this round entirely and enter at the quarterfinals in Newport Beach on August 14-16.

The seeding tells a slightly misleading story in Dallas’s case. The Flash won San Diego from the eighth seed and then went undefeated again in Chicago, riding an 11-match winning streak into the postseason. A slow start left them at No. 6 anyway, which means one of the league’s hottest teams is playing an extra series that the teams above them get to skip. It also means somebody in Newport Beach may be facing them a round earlier than they’d like.

USA Pickleball has named Oceanview Life and Annuity the title sponsor of its flagship amateur event, now formally the 2026 Oceanview USA Pickleball National Championships. The tournament runs October 31 through November 8 at the Barnes Tennis Center in San Diego.

Oceanview is a retirement products company — fixed and fixed-indexed annuities — which tells you something about who the governing body thinks is watching. USA Pickleball CEO Mike Nealy called the deal “an exciting new chapter for our National Championships,” and Oceanview President and CEO Bill Egan pointed to the sport’s community appeal in the announcement.

The more immediately useful news for players is the registration calendar. Priority registration opens this month for athletes who have already earned a spot through the Path to Nationals. That group includes anyone who won a Golden Ticket at a 2026 qualifying tournament, 2025 Nationals gold medalists, athletes 70 and older who competed in a 70+ division, and players whose 2025 events were washed out by rain.

Everyone else registers into a waitlist and gets sorted by the Tiered Point System, USA Pickleball’s ranking framework for sanctioned play. TPS points come from participation and placement across sanctioned tournaments, and eligibility for Nationals requires a minimum of 4,500 points. Golden Ticket events and the U.S. Open both hand out that full 4,500 automatically, which is a large part of why those tournaments fill so fast.

For the recreational player eyeing a Nationals bid, the practical read is this: if you haven’t been banking TPS points at sanctioned events this year, the waitlist is where you’ll be, and the main draw fills from the top down. Sanctioned play in the fall still counts — but the window to build a competitive point total is narrowing.

The APP Tour announced Monday that it will double professional prize money for 2027, taking its pro purse from $1.5 million this season to $3 million — a 100% year-over-year increase spread across all pro brackets. The tour is also expanding its U.S. calendar from 10 events to 12.

Exactly how the money gets distributed across the 2027 calendar hasn’t been detailed yet; the tour says the full schedule, including dates and locations for the two new stops, is due in Q3 2026.

The broadcast side is changing too. Rather than televising selected days, the APP says all four days of every 2027 tournament will be streamed. That’s a meaningful shift for the pros who play early-round matches that historically happened off camera, and for anyone who wants to watch the draw develop instead of dropping in at the semifinals.

“Doubling our professional prize money, expanding the APP Tour domestically and globally… are clear demonstrations of our confidence in the future of professional pickleball,” said APP founder Ken Herrmann, who added that “a healthy professional sport requires meaningful competitive opportunities and a structure that rewards performance.”

The announcement follows a recruiting push that has brought nearly 70 male and female pros onto APP contracts since the start of 2026. Beyond the domestic tour, the APP points to more than 50 annual events worldwide through its APP Asia Tour and the Global Pickleball Alliance as additional earning opportunities.

Why it matters: Pro pickleball’s economics have been the sport’s most-discussed open question, with the PPA and MLP under the UPA umbrella and the APP running as the primary independent alternative. A doubled purse doesn’t close that gap on its own, but it does give unsigned and dual-path players a second real place to earn — and competition for player commitments tends to be good for players.

For recreational players, the APP’s amateur brackets are the practical hook: these are the same events where club-level players enter alongside the pros, and two more stops means two more shots at a tournament weekend within driving distance.

Major League Pickleball’s regular season ended the way the standings suggested it would: with the New Jersey 5s and St. Louis Shock playing for everything.

The two clubs came into the Orlando finale — hosted by the Squeeze at the State Farm Field House inside Walt Disney World’s ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex, July 30 through August 2 — tied atop the standings. Both ran the table in group play, which set up a straight 1-vs-1 meeting on Sunday. New Jersey took it 3-1 for its fourth consecutive event title and the No. 1 overall seed.

The swing game was mixed doubles, where Noe Khlif and Anna Leigh Waters edged Hayden Patriquin and Anna Bright 15-13 in a match that changed hands several times. Federico Staksrud and Jorja Johnson then closed the door 11-2. Staksrud, acquired in the July trade window and playing his first MLP weekend in a 5s uniform, went 5-1 in mixed with Johnson and 3-2 in men’s with Will Howells — an immediate return on a deadline deal.

Elsewhere on the weekend, the Chicago Slice survived the California Black Bears in a 25-23 Dreambreaker, with 13-year-old Elsie Hendershot scoring the clinching points.

What’s next: Twelve teams qualified. Seeds 1 through 4 get a first-round bye and enter at the quarterfinals; seeds 5 through 12 play best-of-three series in round one, with the 5-through-8 seeds picking their own opponents from the 9-through-12 group. Round one runs August 7–9 at Pickler Universe in Carrollton, Texas. Round two moves to Newport Beach August 14–16, and Championship Weekend lands in New York City August 28–30.

Why it matters: MLP’s condensed May-to-August calendar was built to make the back half feel like a real postseason rather than a long grind, and the format delivers on that — a top seed earns a genuine shortcut, and mid-seeds get to shop for a favorable matchup. For the 5s, the bye means three weeks of rest before their first playoff ball. For everyone in the 5–12 range, the season effectively restarts Friday.

The PPA Tour’s global expansion reached a new continent last weekend. The PPA Italy P125 Portorož, held July 23–26 at Portorož Sports Park on Slovenia’s Adriatic coast, marked the tour’s first professional stop in Europe — even if the geography takes a moment to explain. The event launches the PPA’s new Italian series, and Portorož sits just across the water from Venice, close enough to serve as the series’ opening act.

The turnout suggests real demand. Around 230 competitors from as many as 40 countries entered, chasing a share of a $10,000 prize fund and 125 ranking points. In the pro draws, Louis Laville and Tom Protzek took the men’s doubles title, Claudia Caymel Romero and Katie Morris won the women’s doubles, and Morris doubled up by claiming mixed alongside Ben Cawston.

Portorož was one of three international pro events on the same weekend. In Singapore, the PPA Asia 500 Leapmotor Singapore Open saw Collin Johns and Len Yang win men’s doubles, while 16-year-old Jaeda Minniefield — until recently a challenger-level player — captured the mixed title with Luc Pham. In Malaysia, the Leapmotor APP Penang Open belonged to Quang Duong, who won both men’s singles and doubles, and to Dutch star Roos van Reek, who swept women’s singles, women’s doubles, and mixed for her second triple crown in two months.

The bigger picture: pro pickleball is no longer a North American product with occasional overseas exhibitions. With the PPA running full Asian and now European calendars, and the APP’s international series in its sixth event of the year, ranking points and prize money are being contested on three continents in a single weekend. For a sport whose top 20 tour athletes already represent 18 different countries, the infrastructure is starting to catch up to the player base — and the pipeline of international talent, from van Reek to Duong, keeps making the case for more.

Pickleball has officially arrived in Hollywood. “The Dink,” the first major studio film built entirely around the sport, premiered globally on Apple TV on July 24 after a red-carpet debut in Los Angeles.

The comedy stars Jake Johnson (“New Girl”) as Dusty Boyd, a washed-up tennis prodigy coaching kids at his father’s suburban country club. Ed Harris plays the father, Chuck, who is waging a personal war against pickleball’s takeover of his tennis courts — a plotline that will feel familiar to anyone who has followed the real-world turf battles at racquet clubs across the country. When an old injury ends Dusty’s tennis career for good, he turns to pickleball for rehab and, with the help of a charming partner played by Mary Steenburgen, discovers he actually likes it.

Josh Greenbaum (“Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar”) directed from a script by Sean Clements, with Ben Stiller producing through Red Hour Films. Tennis legends John McEnroe and Andy Roddick both appear as themselves, and Roddick has been making the press rounds talking up his real-life pickleball habit.

Why does a movie matter for the sport? Reach. Pickleball’s growth has been driven largely by people who already play dragging friends onto the court. A mainstream comedy on one of the biggest streaming platforms puts the sport — its culture, its rivalries with tennis, its slightly obsessive community — in front of millions of people who have never picked up a paddle. The tennis-versus-pickleball feud at the heart of the film is played for laughs, but it also gives the sport the kind of cultural shorthand that only comes when Hollywood decides you’re worth satirizing.

Early reviews have been mixed-to-positive, with critics praising the cast chemistry even when the sports-comedy beats feel familiar. For pickleball, though, the review that matters is simpler: the sport now has a movie, and that’s a milestone no participation statistic can match.

Turns out San Diego wasn’t a fluke.

The Dallas Flash followed up their first title of the season by winning Major League Pickleball’s Chicago debut, going undefeated across four days at Life Time North Shore and The Picklr Mount Prospect before dismantling the Brooklyn Pickleball Team 21-10 in Sunday’s DreamBreaker. Back-to-back event wins, 25 more standings points, and a winning streak that now sits at 11 straight matches — a run that includes Brooklyn, the LA Mad Drops and the Columbus Sliders.

Brooke Buckner was again the engine. She went 5-1 on the weekend and won 65% of the points she played, the best mark of any regular in the field. Behind her, Dallas simply refused to lose a DreamBreaker, which is the single most useful trait a team can have in August.

Elsewhere in the bracket, the California Black Bears took third and made the weekend’s biggest leap in the standings, climbing all the way into playoff contention after looking dead in the water a month ago. Miami finished fifth, Texas seventh — despite Nico Acevedo going 8-1 and Eric Oncins 7-1, which is the kind of individual weekend that usually comes with a trophy attached. The Utah Black Diamonds finished last and were mathematically eliminated.

Chicago also hosted the debut of the MLP Champions Series, the league’s new 40+, 50+ and 60+ divisions, which ran 74 TeamBattles alongside the pro event.

Why it matters: The regular season ends this week in Orlando, and then the postseason opens August 6-9 in Dallas, with the top 12 teams advancing and the top four seeds earning byes. Higher seeds get to pick their first-round opponents — which means the Flash, riding the hottest streak in the league, are about to become the team nobody chooses.

For years, the best players in the world couldn’t play for their countries. That just changed.

Pickleball Inc. — the parent organization behind the PPA Tour and Major League Pickleball — announced a strategic partnership with the Pickleball World Cup that clears PPA and MLP athletes to represent their home nations beginning with the 2027 edition. Under the deal, Pickleball Inc. also becomes the World Cup’s exclusive media rights and commercial sponsorship partner, handling broadcast distribution, international marketing and business development.

The World Cup was founded by Peruvian siblings Hercilio and Miranda Cabieses, who have been open about where this is all pointed. “We started this journey with the goal to see pickleball in the Olympics,” Hercilio Cabieses said. Getting the sport’s actual top players onto national teams is a prerequisite for that conversation being taken seriously.

The timing makes sense on the numbers. The current top 20 PPA Tour athletes represent 18 different countries — which is a remarkable stat for a sport that gets described as an American invention at backyard-game scale. Pickleball Inc. has also been building out international operations across Asia, Australia, Canada, Italy and Spain, including this year’s PPA Tour Asia stops in Beijing, Tokyo and Singapore.

PPA CEO Connor Pardoe framed the World Cup as embodying “national pride, elite competition,” the two things pro pickleball has mostly lacked a stage for outside of team-league formats.

Why it matters: Every sport that reaches the Olympics does it the same way — a legitimate international federation structure, a flagship national-team event, and the world’s best players actually showing up to it. Pickleball has had the participation numbers for a while. This is the first move that seriously addresses the third piece. For the rest of us, it means a real chance to watch Ben Johns and Anna Leigh Waters play with a flag on their chest instead of a team logo.

Nobody had the Dallas Flash circled coming into San Diego. They came in eighth. They left with a trophy.

Dallas ran the table at Barnes Tennis Center this weekend, sweeping Group A and then handling the Columbus Sliders 3-1 in Sunday’s final to capture their first Major League Pickleball event title of the season. The 5-0 run vaulted them from eighth to sixth in the league standings — a meaningful jump with the playoffs looming in August.

The final followed a familiar upset script. Columbus came out hot, with Tyra Black leading all players at the event on an 11-1 record and a 77% points-won rate. But once the women’s line was settled, Dallas took over. The men’s tandem of Auggie Ge and JW Johnson cruised through the weekend and made a statement in the decisive matches, and Brooke Buckner anchored the mixed lineup with a 4-1 record that ranked third-best of any player in the field.

The bigger story might be who wasn’t lifting a trophy. The LA Mad Drops, one of the most talent-heavy rosters in the league, stumbled to a fifth-place finish in what one observer called “a brutally disappointing weekend” — with renewed questions about Ben Johns’ up-and-down form. The California Black Bears, fresh off a flurry of trade-window additions, also strengthened their postseason positioning.

Why it matters: San Diego was the last regular-season evidence before rosters locked, and it scrambled the playoff picture. Dallas proved a lower seed can peak at the right time, while LA’s slide is a reminder that on paper doesn’t win on court. With the postseason set for Dallas and Newport Beach next month, seeding is tightening — and the Flash just made their case that they’re a team nobody wants to draw early.

Major League Pickleball’s second trade window closed at noon ET on Monday, July 20 — and New Jersey used the final seconds to make the loudest move of the offseason.

The New Jersey 5s acquired Federico Staksrud and Milan Rane from the Orlando Squeeze, sending Martin Emmrich, Lina Padegimaite, and cash the other way. On its own, adding Staksrud — one of the sport’s elite multi-discipline players — would be a coup. What stunned analysts is that New Jersey pulled it off without surrendering either of its starting men, Noe Khlif or Will Howells. Most around the league assumed a deal for a talent like Fed would cost the 5s one of those two. Instead, they kept their strong lineup intact and stacked a star on top.

The reaction was immediate. Pro Zane Navratil quipped that “the rest of the league is playing for third place.” MLP’s Erik Tice called the deal a clear win for New Jersey and expressed surprise that Orlando didn’t extract Khlif in return. The consensus now frames the title race as a two-team conversation between the 5s and the St. Louis Shock, with most calling it a toss-up.

For Orlando, the trade is a reset: Emmrich and Padegimaite bring veteran experience and the cash gives the Squeeze flexibility, but they’ve dealt away a headline name in a season where their playoff math was already tight.

Why it matters: MLP’s roster movement has become a storyline all its own, and this deal is the exclamation point on a chaotic Trade Window #2 that saw stars like Dylan Frazier shuffled repeatedly. With the deadline now shut, the lineups are locked heading into August’s playoffs in Dallas and Newport Beach — and New Jersey has drawn a target on its back. The question is no longer whether the 5s are contenders, but whether anyone outside St. Louis can hang with them.

Major League Pickleball’s regular season resumes today in San Diego, where eleven teams begin four days of competition at Barnes Tennis Center in Point Loma. The event, running July 16-19, is the seventh regular-season stop of 2026 and the first league action since the St. Louis Shock took home the Mid-Season Tournament title in Grand Rapids.

The field splits into two groups. Group A features the Atlanta Bouncers, Bay Area Breakers, Dallas Flash, LA Mad Drops, and Utah Black Diamonds. Group B brings the California Black Bears, Columbus Sliders, Florida Smash, Orlando Squeeze, Phoenix Flames, and SoCal Hard Eights — with the Hard Eights getting the closest thing to a home crowd the league offers.

There’s an added wrinkle this week: MLP’s second trade window doesn’t close until July 20, so some rosters taking the court in San Diego were assembled days ago. The California Black Bears arrive with three fresh acquisitions, and how quickly those pieces gel could decide whether the moves look shrewd or desperate by Sunday.

Championship Court matches stream live on PickleballTV, with Grandstand coverage on the PickleballTV app and a Sunday broadcast window on MSG Network from 11 AM to 3 PM ET. As usual, Minor League Pickleball and Jr. MLP run alongside the pros, with MiLP’s four-player coed team format open to all ages and skill levels.

Why it matters: With the playoffs set for August in Dallas and Newport Beach, the standings math is getting unforgiving. The Shock banked ten bonus points for their Grand Rapids win, which puts extra pressure on everyone chasing them — every group-stage match in San Diego now carries real seeding weight. And for the bubble teams, this is the last on-court evidence front offices will see before deciding whether to make one more move ahead of the deadline.

Major League Pickleball’s trade deadline is starting to feel like a suggestion. Originally set for June 30, then pushed to July 12, the close of Trade Window #2 has now been extended a second time — to Sunday, July 20 at noon ET. And teams are using every extra day.

The California Black Bears have been the most aggressive buyers of the stretch. On July 13 they added Zoey Weil and Jalina Ingram in separate deals, then followed up on July 14 by landing Dylan Frazier from the Miami Pickleball Club. That makes Frazier one of the season’s most-traveled stars: the veteran men’s doubles standout went from Texas to Miami in the June 2 blockbuster that sent Nico Acevedo to the Ranchers, and now finds himself on his third roster of 2026.

Miami kept dealing the next day, sending Yuta Funemizu to the Utah Black Diamonds on July 15 with Tyler Loong heading back the other way. Add it up and the Pickleball Club has quietly become the league’s clearinghouse, moving Acevedo, Frazier, and Funemizu out the door in a span of six weeks.

The timing makes things interesting. The extended window means rosters remained in flux right up to the start of MLP San Diego, where the retooled Black Bears take the court July 16-19 in Group B. Front offices will get four days of live evidence before deciding whether to squeeze in one final move before Sunday’s cutoff.

Why it matters: MLP’s willingness to keep sliding the deadline shows how central roster drama has become to the league’s midseason product — the trade window is now a storyline of its own, not just housekeeping. With playoffs arriving in August in Dallas and Newport Beach, the next few days are the last chance for contenders to fix a weakness and for rebuilding teams to cash in veterans. Expect at least one more surprise before noon on Sunday.

Dothan, Alabama is making a serious wager on pickleball. On Saturday, July 11, city leaders cut the ribbon on a $6.4 million public complex at the Rip Hewes Athletic Complex, and the scale is hard to ignore: 25 covered courts with overhead fans, ADA accessibility, and an LED indirect-lighting system that officials describe as a first-of-its-kind setup for championship play. There’s a dedicated championship court, and the covered design means year-round play in the Alabama heat.

Opening day drew more than 250 players, many of whom traveled over 150 miles to be there. The city paired free play and clinics with vendors, food trucks, and a one-day tournament run alongside Southern Pickleball — a preview of the programming the facility hopes to sustain.

The project was roughly two and a half years in the making. Billy Powell, Dothan’s Director of Leisure Services, led planning that included touring regional facilities and consulting with operators before breaking ground. Hannah Shiver, Executive Director of Visit Dothan, has been vocal about the economic angle: the city wants the complex to be Alabama’s premier public pickleball destination, hosting leagues, clinics, and tournaments that pull in out-of-town players who then spend money at local hotels and restaurants.

Why it matters: Dothan is a textbook example of a growing playbook — mid-size cities treating pickleball courts as economic-development infrastructure, not just parks-and-rec amenities. A 25-court covered venue is genuinely tournament-scale, and the “sports tourism” pitch (fill the courts, fill the hotels) is increasingly how these six- and seven-figure public investments get justified. For recreational players, it’s a reminder that the best new courts aren’t only sprouting in the big metros. Sometimes a regional city decides to go all-in — and everyone within a two-hour drive benefits.

Major League Pickleball is heading somewhere it’s never been. For the first time, the league lands in Chicago, running July 23-26 at the brand-new Life Time North Shore Sport and Racquet in Northbrook, Illinois. Four days, the world’s top team rosters, and a fresh venue on the schedule as the 2026 season pushes toward its playoff stretch.

The storyline writes itself for the home crowd. The Chicago Slice get the benefit of home-court energy at exactly the right moment — they’re fighting to keep their playoff aspirations within reach, and every standings point in the back half of the season carries extra weight. Expect a partisan gallery and a team with real motivation to feed off it.

The event arrives right after MLP’s mid-season tournament in Grand Rapids, where the St. Louis Shock surged into a share of first place. With the regular season tightening and the playoffs in Dallas (Aug. 6-9) looming, Chicago is a meaningful stop, not a victory lap.

There’s an amateur angle, too. Chicago will feature Minor League Pickleball (MiLP) alongside the pros, giving recreational players the chance to compete in the same team format on the same stage as the sport’s stars. Registration runs $140 per player and closes July 17 at 11:55 PM CST, so anyone eyeing a spot needs to move quickly.

Why it matters: Expanding into a top-three U.S. media market is a statement of intent for a league still mapping out where its live product can draw. New market, purpose-built racquet venue, and a home team with something to play for — that’s the kind of stop MLP wants to build a footprint around. And by stacking MiLP amateur play onto the same weekend, the league keeps blurring the line between watching the pros and being part of the show.

The Johnson family’s paddle search is over, and it ended somewhere few predicted. Paddletek Group announced on July 7 that it has acquired PIKKL, the Minnesota paddle brand founded in 2023 by Dan Martinson and Mike Strommen, and signed JW Johnson, Jorja Johnson, and their mother Julie Johnson — plus Tyra Black, PIKKL’s longest-tenured pro.

The signings resolve a storyline that has run all season. JW and Jorja hit free agency when their longtime Franklin deal expired early this year, and they spent months openly testing gear from JOOLA, Selkirk, Paddletek, and PIKKL in tournament play. “This was never about logos or contracts,” JW said in the announcement. “I’ve tested every paddle, and this opportunity gives us access to incredible technology while becoming part of a brand focused on winning.”

Black is the continuity piece. She has played PIKKL for years with her signature Hurricane Pro and joins the group fresh off a midseason trade to the Columbus Sliders, keeping her paddle while her paddle company changes hands above her.

“We were looking for teammates who share our passion for the sport,” said Ron Saslow, founder of Paddletek parent Thirty-5 Capital. “The Johnsons were on a monthslong journey looking for the paddle and the brand that would help them win.”

The deal is Paddletek Group’s second acquisition in eight months, following its December purchase of ProXR and recovery-gear maker Yobow. PIKKL will keep operating as its own brand under the group’s umbrella. Add a pro roster that already includes Christian Alshon, Riley Newman, Connor Garnett, and Zane Navratil, and Paddletek has quietly assembled one of the deepest stables in the sport.

The bigger pattern is hard to miss. Selkirk bought Bread & Butter in June, JOOLA is collecting patent settlements from half the industry, and now Paddletek is rolling up brands and marquee players at once. The paddle market spent five years fragmenting into dozens of upstarts. 2026 is the year it started consolidating back.

USA Pickleball is finally testing the thing everyone actually argues about: spin. On July 8 the governing body announced a new certification test that measures paddle spin output directly, with a hard ceiling of 2,100 RPM for any paddle certified after October 1, 2026.

The test runs on PaddleVision, a dual-camera system built by Image Systems, a Swedish motion-analysis firm. High-speed imaging tracks the ball off the paddle face and calculates its rotation. That’s a meaningful shift from the current approach, which checks surface roughness and coefficient of friction — proxies for spin rather than spin itself. Manufacturers have spent the past two years engineering around those proxies with textures and materials that stay within grit limits while producing more rotation than the rules ever anticipated.

“This is an important step in ensuring our equipment standards continue to support fair competition while allowing for responsible innovation,” said Riley Burgess, USA Pickleball’s vice president of equipment compliance.

The rollout has a few moving parts. Manufacturers receive the full standard operating procedure on July 15. Until October 1, paddles can still earn approval under the existing surface tests. After that, every new certification must pass the spin measurement. Paddles already on the approved list stay legal under the standards in effect when they were approved — so nothing in your bag becomes contraband this fall.

For recreational players, the near-term effect is on what comes next, not what you own. Brands racing to out-spin each other now have a fixed target, and paddles in development that blow past 2,100 RPM will need rework before they ever reach a shelf. Combined with the on-site field testing USA Pickleball rolled out at Golden Ticket events this spring, the message is consistent: the era of regulating paddles by how they feel under a fingertip is ending, and the era of measuring what they actually do is here.

JOOLA’s sweeping patent campaign against the paddle industry just claimed another resolution. On July 3, the company announced a settlement with Volair over the Shift paddle line, which JOOLA alleged infringed its patented Propulsion Core technology — the thermoformed core design at the heart of its Gen 3 paddles.

The terms give Shift owners and would-be buyers a clear runway. Volair can keep selling Shift paddles through the fall, after which production stops for good. Every unit sold in the meantime must be marked with JOOLA’s ‘826 patent number, and Volair will pay royalties on those sales. In exchange, Volair gets removed from JOOLA’s International Trade Commission filing.

“Volair has acknowledged JOOLA’s intellectual property and its role as a leader in technical innovation,” JOOLA CEO Richard Lee said in a statement, adding that the company will “continue to pursue fair outcomes with the remaining defendants.”

That last part matters, because this fight is far from over. Volair is the fourth brand to settle out of JOOLA’s original action against eleven companies, following Paddletek, ProXR, and Proton — all of whom agreed to similar patent-marking and royalty arrangements. Seven defendants remain in active ITC proceedings: Diadem, RPM, Adidas Pickleball, Engage, Facolos, Franklin, and Friday.

For recreational players, the practical takeaways are twofold. If you’ve had your eye on a Shift, this fall is your last window to grab one new — though existing paddles aren’t affected by the settlement. Bigger picture, JOOLA’s growing stack of settlements strengthens its legal position and suggests the era of freely borrowed core technology is ending. Expect that to shape how the next generation of paddles gets designed, licensed, and priced — and don’t be surprised if “royalty math” quietly shows up in the cost of your next paddle.

Major League Pickleball’s first-ever New York stop ended with a coronation — just not for the home team. The New Jersey 5s swept the Brooklyn Pickleball Team 11-1, 11-8, 11-4 in the Super Sunday final at Sportime Randall’s Island, claiming their third consecutive event title after wins in Columbus and Austin.

The result reshuffles the top of the table. After a slow start to the season in Dallas, the 5s have been the hottest team in the league, and the New York title lifted them to 87 standings points — four clear of the St. Louis Shock, who had held the top spot behind back-to-back Super Sunday wins. New Jersey now leads in both total points and points per event, which matters with playoff seeding on the line.

The weekend wasn’t spotless for the 5s. The Texas Ranchers, retooled at the trade deadline, handed them a 21-19 Dreambreaker loss that snapped a 15-match undefeated streak — a reminder that MLP’s singles-relay tiebreaker can undo even the deepest roster on any given day. New Jersey shook it off and didn’t drop another match.

Brooklyn’s run to the final in front of a home crowd was a genuine bright spot, and it came with a scare. A gust of wind toppled a baseline LED videoboard during Thursday’s match against Bay Area, striking Rachel Rohrabacher’s left leg. She recovered enough to help carry Brooklyn to Sunday, but the incident — along with weather delays that pushed matches indoors — gave MLP some operational questions to answer about outdoor setups.

There’s no time to dwell on any of it. All 20 teams head to Grand Rapids July 8–12 for the Mid-Season Tournament, where international guest squads join the field and the 5s get a chance to prove their surge travels.

Major League Pickleball’s summer centerpiece is nearly here, and this year it comes with an international twist. The 2026 MLP Mid-Season Tournament runs July 8–12 at Belknap Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and for the first time the field won’t be limited to the league’s own franchises.

All 20 MLP teams will be joined by four guest squads — Team Australia, Team Canada, Team Europe, and a College All-Stars roster — pushing the bracket to 24 teams total. It’s a deliberate showcase of the sport’s global and emerging talent, dropped into one of pickleball’s most beloved settings: the event shares the grounds with the historic Beer City Open, blending a pro spectacle with grassroots amateur competition all weekend.

The format is double-elimination, with teams seeded by Points Per Match and Match Win percentage as the tiebreaker. On the line are prize money, bonus standings points, and — crucially — playoff positioning as the race toward the August postseason heats up. Select matches will air on FS1, FS2, and FOX, with full coverage on PickleballTV.

The timing is loaded. MLP pushed its second trade deadline back to July 12, meaning rosters could still shift mid-tournament as clubs jockey for position.

Why it matters: The Mid-Season Tournament has become MLP’s biggest regular-season stage, and adding national and collegiate teams signals the league’s ambition to look like a truly global circuit. For fans, it’s a rare chance to see international standouts test themselves against the league’s best before the playoffs begin in Dallas, Newport Beach, and New York City.

Professional pickleball planted a flag in Japan’s capital this week. The Sansan Tokyo Open — a PPA Asia 500 event running July 1–4 — is the PPA Tour Asia’s first-ever tournament in Tokyo, held at Arena Tachikawa Tachihi, a modern sporting venue in the western part of the city with expansive courts and upper-deck seating.

The stop carries a US$50,000 prize purse and awards 500 ranking points, marking it as a significant rung on the region’s fast-growing pro ladder. It’s one piece of an ambitious 2026 PPA Tour Asia calendar that spans China, Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Hong Kong — a footprint that barely existed a couple of years ago.

“The 2026 calendar reflects the incredible growth of professional pickleball across Asia,” said Kimberly Koh, Managing Director of UPA Asia. “We’re expanding into new cities and bringing the PPA experience to more players — both pros and amateurs — across the region.”

The momentum won’t stop in Tokyo. Later this month, Singapore hosts the first-ever PPA Asia 125 Challenger Series as part of PickleSlam 2026, billed as one of the country’s largest pickleball showcases.

Why it matters: For years the pro game has been overwhelmingly American, with the PPA and MLP anchored in the United States. A dedicated Asian circuit — with real prize money, ranking points, and marquee venues — gives players across the region a professional pathway of their own and hints at where the sport’s next wave of growth is coming from. Tokyo is a milestone stop, and almost certainly not the last.

Major League Pickleball is giving its regular season a marquee finish. The league’s final regular-season stop, hosted by the Orlando Squeeze, will run July 30 through August 2 at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex inside Walt Disney World Resort — the first time MLP has wrapped its regular season at the Disney venue.

Matches will be played indoors at the State Farm Field House, and the stakes will be steep: it’s the last chance for teams to lock in playoff seeding before the postseason begins. Coming right on the heels of a late-June trade frenzy that reshuffled rosters across the league — including the first four-team deal in MLP history — the Orlando event will be the first real test of whether those moves actually click when seeding is on the line.

From there, the 2026 playoffs play out across several cities in August, culminating in the league’s championship later that month. Teams that stumble at Disney could find themselves on the wrong side of the bracket; a hot weekend could vault a club into a much friendlier postseason path.

Why it matters: For the Orlando Squeeze, hosting at Disney is a huge spotlight for a young franchise in its home market. For the league, planting its regular-season finale at one of the most recognizable sports complexes in the country fits MLP’s broader push for mainstream legitimacy and reliable, fan-friendly venues. And for the rest of us, it sets up a clean storyline heading into the dog days of summer: a showcase weekend under the Disney banner, then a month of playoff pickleball to decide who lifts the 2026 trophy.

Major League Pickleball’s roster market went into overdrive in the final week of June, capped by a deal the league had never seen before: a trade involving four teams at once.

Announced June 24, the swap brought together the Chicago Slice, St. Louis Shock, Texas Ranchers, and Atlanta Bouncers, with multiple players and cash changing hands in a single transaction. When the dust settled, Chicago landed Elsie Hendershot, St. Louis added Angie Walker plus cash, Texas brought in veteran doubles specialist Kaitlyn Christian plus cash, and Atlanta picked up Mari Humberg. League officials billed it as the first four-team deal in MLP history — a sign of how complicated midseason wheeling and dealing has become.

It wasn’t the only big move. A day earlier, a three-team deal sent Blaine Hovenier to the Bay Area Breakers, Clayton Powell to the Las Vegas Night Owls, and Luc Pham to the Miami Pickleball Club. Smaller swaps over the prior week reshaped rosters in Dallas, Phoenix, and Columbus as contenders scrambled to shore up depth for the stretch run.

The frenzy prompted the league to move the finish line. Trade Window #2 had been scheduled to close June 30; MLP pushed it back to July 12 at 8 p.m. ET, giving front offices nearly two extra weeks to finalize moves.

Why it matters: with the regular season winding down and the August playoffs in view, every roster tweak is really about postseason seeding. The St. Louis Shock — who entered the week atop the standings — kept tinkering even from the top, while teams that have underperformed relative to their talent (Columbus chief among them) are still hunting for the right chemistry. For fans, the extended deadline means the drama isn’t over yet. Expect another wave of moves before the window finally shuts on July 12.

Major League Pickleball brings its 2026 traveling circus to the five boroughs today, opening a four-day stop at Sportime Randall’s Island that runs through June 28. It’s the league’s first event in New York City, and the backdrop — courts laid out in the shadow of the Manhattan skyline — gives MLP one of its splashiest settings of the season.

The competitive story heading in is the St. Louis Shock. St. Louis rolled through the previous stop in St. Petersburg, going a perfect 5-0 in group play before sweeping the LA Mad Drops 3-0 in the final to claim a second straight Super Sunday belt. That run tightened their hold on the top of the standings, and another deep weekend in New York would put real distance between the Shock and the chase pack with playoff seeding on the line.

For context on why every match matters: each of MLP’s 20 teams plays five regular-season events in 2026, banking standings points toward an August playoff field. With the calendar past its midpoint, a strong New York result can be the difference between a comfortable seed and sweating out the final stops. Trade Window #2, which has already reshaped several rosters, stays open through July 12 — so a rough weekend here could trigger more roster moves before the regular season closes.

Host interest centers on the Brooklyn Pickleball Team, who arrive needing points to climb into postseason position in front of a home crowd. MLP’s team format — men’s doubles, women’s doubles, mixed, and a tiebreaking Dreambreaker singles relay — rewards depth over star power, which keeps even lopsided-looking matchups live into the final games.

Matches stream throughout the weekend. For recreational fans, it’s a rare chance to see the pro game up close in a major metro market that’s been starved for top-tier live pickleball.

For years the knock on pickleball was simple: too many players, not enough courts. That gap is finally starting to narrow. The crowd-sourced court database run by Pickleheads — one of the most widely used tools for finding a place to play — now lists more than 18,000 U.S. locations after adding upward of 2,300 in the past year alone.

The buildout is being driven by a mix of public and private money. Cities are converting underused tennis courts and resurfacing park space, while private operators race to open purpose-built complexes with anywhere from 8 to 20 courts — facilities large enough to host tournaments and, just as importantly, the structured league nights that keep casual players coming back. Seattle is a standout case, with roughly nine new facilities and close to 150 courts slated to come online across 2025 and 2026.

The demand behind all that concrete and acrylic is real. Industry participation tracking from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association pegged U.S. pickleball at well over 20 million players, with year-over-year growth still running north of 20% — numbers that have kept the sport at or near the top of the “fastest-growing” rankings for several years running.

Why it matters for the average dinker: court access is the single biggest bottleneck between a curious newcomer and a committed regular. More locations mean shorter waits during peak hours, fewer turf wars with tennis players, and a better shot at finding open play within driving distance. It also signals that municipalities and developers increasingly view pickleball as durable infrastructure rather than a passing fad — which is exactly the kind of long-term bet that keeps nets up and lights on. If you’ve been waiting out a packed local schedule, it may be worth re-checking the map. Odds are something new opened near you.

Major League Pickleball brings its team format to the biggest stage of all this week, setting up shop at Sportime Randall’s Island — home of the John McEnroe Tennis Academy — for MLP New York, June 25-28. With Manhattan’s skyline as a backdrop and the host Brooklyn Pickleball Team fighting to lock up a playoff spot, it’s one of the marquee stops on the 2026 calendar.

Eleven teams are in the field: Brooklyn, the New Jersey 5’s, Dallas Flash, Chicago Slice, Palm Beach Royals, Carolina Hogs, Bay Area Breakers, Florida Smash, Las Vegas Night Owls, SoCal Hard Eights, and the Texas Ranchers. They’ll be split into one group of five and one group of six, playing round-robin from Thursday through Saturday before the top four in each group advance to Sunday’s bracket.

The scoring is worth understanding if you’re following along: each match is worth three points, with a regulation win earning all three, a DreamBreaker (the single-game tiebreaker) win worth two, a DreamBreaker loss worth one, and a regulation loss worth nothing. Those margins matter — at this point in the season, group standings can come down to a single tiebreaker.

There’s a local angle, too. Brooklyn returns as host on Randall’s Island, the same venue where it played last year, and a deep run on home turf would go a long way toward securing an August playoff berth. New Jersey, riding a 12-match winning streak, arrives as one of the hottest teams in the league.

For fans who can’t make it to New York, MLP’s team format remains one of the most watchable products in the sport — fast, loud, and built for an arena crowd. And in true MLP fashion, the pros aren’t the only ones playing: Minor League Pickleball runs alongside the main event, putting amateur teams on the same grounds as the stars.

The St. Louis Shock are peaking at exactly the right time. At Major League Pickleball’s first event in St. Petersburg, Florida (June 17-21), the Shock rolled through a brutal group — beating Columbus, Palm Beach, Orlando, and Texas to finish 5-0 — then swept the Los Angeles Mad Drops 3-0 in Sunday’s final to claim the event and 25 standings points.

If that final feels familiar, it should. It was the third meeting of the season between these two clubs and the second straight Super Sunday St. Louis has taken from LA, following their win at MLP St. Louis earlier in June. The back-to-back sweeps push the Shock into sole possession of first place in the 2026 standings. “I’m just so proud of our players, and happy to be peaking now,” said GM Ross Chaifetz after the win.

The bigger story of the weekend may have been who didn’t show up. The Columbus Sliders came in as the talk of the league after a blockbuster trade for Tyra Black gave them four top-10 doubles players on paper. Instead, Columbus stumbled to a fifth-place finish, dropping group-play matches to Palm Beach and St. Louis. The team framed the lineup experiments as playoff prep rather than a finished product — but it was a reminder that talent on paper and chemistry on court are two different things.

A few other threads worth tracking: Palm Beach’s women’s duo of Pisnik and Sewing went a perfect 6-0 on the weekend, including wins over top-ranked opponents, and New Jersey extended a 12-match winning streak even as its men’s doubles cooled off.

For the recreational fan, the St. Pete stop is another sign of MLP’s geographic spread — the league keeps planting flags in new markets — and of how a hot streak late in the regular season can reshape playoff seeding. Next up: MLP New York at Sportime Randall’s Island, June 25-28.

Major League Pickleball rolled into St. Pete Athletic this week for a five-day run that began June 17 and stretches through Super Sunday on June 21. Play opened at 11 a.m. ET with broadcast coverage on PickleballTV, and the first day delivered exactly the kind of drama that has made MLP’s team format a draw.

The headline match of the opener saw the Chicago Slice outlast host team Florida Smash, with the result ultimately decided by a dreambreaker — the singles tiebreaker MLP uses when a team match splits 2-2. Florida Smash showed plenty of fight along the way, clawing back from a 10-4 hole in women’s doubles to steal a game, but Chicago held its nerve when it mattered most in front of a partisan home crowd.

The St. Petersburg format keeps the action dense: teams face every opponent in their group across the first four days, with pool play running Wednesday through Saturday before the standings reset for Sunday’s finals. That structure means no team can coast — every match shifts the group math heading into the weekend.

The stop is the latest leg of a busy June for MLP, which has already run events in St. Louis (June 4-7) and Austin (June 11-14), with New York on deck for June 25-28 at Sportime Randall’s Island. The compressed calendar is part of MLP’s 2026 plan, in which all teams play five of nine regular-season events.

For recreational fans, the dreambreaker is the format quirk worth watching. It rewards teams that carry genuine singles depth, not just two strong doubles pairings — a reminder that even at the pro level, the player who can grind out a solo point still decides championships.

Standings and full match results are posted on the official MLP site as group play continues through Saturday.

The rules that govern recreational and tournament play don’t change on a whim — they move through a deliberate annual cycle, and that cycle just hit a key milestone. USA Pickleball’s submission window for proposed rule changes closed June 1, the public comment period wrapped June 15, and the organization’s Rules Committee has now begun working through the proposals that could define the 2027 rulebook.

Here’s how the process works. Members at the Challenger and Champion levels can submit proposed changes, edits, or entirely new rules. Once submitted, every proposal lands in the New Rulebook Database, where it’s open for public comment — and notably, anyone can weigh in there, not just paying members. That feedback becomes part of the formal record the committee considers.

From here, the Rules Committee evaluates each proposal alongside the public comments and votes, with every submission landing in one of three outcomes. Anything that survives committee review heads to the USA Pickleball Board of Directors for final approval. Approved changes get folded into the 2027 rulebook, which is slated for publication by December 20, 2026, ahead of an official effective date of January 1, 2027.

Why should the average dinker care about committee meetings happening months before anything takes effect? Because this is the stage where the rules are actually decided. By the time a change shows up in a December rulebook, the debate is over. Recent years have seen the process tinker with everything from serve mechanics to spin serves to gear standards — small tweaks that ripple straight down to your local open play.

If you’ve ever grumbled about a rule across the net, this is the system designed to do something about it. The window to submit and comment for 2027 has passed, but the cycle reopens every April — worth a calendar note for anyone with strong opinions about the kitchen line.

Major League Pickleball’s traveling roadshow lands in Florida this week, with its St. Petersburg stop running June 17-21 at St. Pete Athletic. The venue, hosted by the Florida Smash, opened in late 2025 and has quickly earned a reputation as one of the best indoor pickleball facilities in the country — climate-controlled comfort that’s no small thing for a five-day event in mid-June Florida.

The format follows MLP’s now-familiar group structure. Teams are split into two groups and play every opponent in their group across the first four days, with those results setting the seeding. Sunday is the payoff: same-seeded teams from each group square off head-to-head — Group A’s top seed against Group B’s top seed, and so on down the line — with event standings points on the table based on the day’s results.

The DoorDash-presented league has packed its 2026 calendar into a tight summer window, and St. Petersburg sits squarely in the thick of it. Each stop carries standings implications, so there’s little room for teams to coast through pool play before the schedule’s later events.

For fans, the indoor setting is a genuine perk. No wind, no glare, no rain delays — just clean conditions that tend to produce longer rallies and sharper hands battles at the kitchen line. Day tickets run roughly $25 to $150, with four-day passes available for anyone wanting the full weekend.

For recreational players, MLP remains the most watchable on-ramp to the pro game: rally scoring, mixed-gender lineups, and a team-first, Ryder Cup-style energy that translates whether you’re courtside in St. Pete or streaming from home. If you’ve been curious about how the team format actually works, a five-day event at a marquee indoor venue is a good place to start.

The PPA Tour’s global push reaches a notable milestone this week as PPA Tour Asia stages its first-ever event in Beijing. The Beijing Open runs June 17-21 at the National Tennis Center, the same Olympic grounds that have hosted some of the biggest names in world tennis. Trading clay and hard courts for kitchen lines, the venue gives pickleball one of its most prestigious international stages to date.

Like other PPA stops, the Beijing Open pairs a pro draw with amateur age and rating divisions, letting recreational players compete on the same premier courts as the touring pros. That dual structure has become a signature of the tour’s expansion strategy: build a marquee pro event, then open the gates to local players who want a taste of the experience.

The debut is part of a broader 2026 that the PPA has billed as its biggest global season yet. PPA Tour Asia has been steadily adding stops across the continent, and planting a flag in Beijing — at an Olympic-caliber facility, no less — signals real ambition for pickleball in the world’s largest sports market. China has the courts, the manufacturing base, and a fast-growing recreational scene; a flagship pro event in the capital is a logical next step.

Why it matters for the sport: pickleball’s domestic boom is well documented, but its long-term ceiling depends on whether it can take root internationally. Events like the Beijing Open are how that happens — not just exporting American pros, but giving regional players a high-profile competition to build toward. For viewers back home, it also means more pickleball on the calendar across more time zones, with the tour increasingly running events on multiple continents at once.

Major League Pickleball’s fourth stop of the 2026 season gets underway today at the Austin Pickle Ranch, and it comes with a twist: after three events indoors — including last weekend’s arena debut at Chaifetz Arena in St. Louis — this is the first outdoor stop of the year.

That changes the calculus. The Pickle Ranch is best known as one of the nicest indoor facilities in the country, but MLP is staging this event on outdoor courts built for the occasion. Players who have spent the spring in controlled conditions now have to contend with Texas in June: wind, glare, the threat of pop-up storms, and humidity that can turn a third game into a conditioning test. Expect softer, more patient pickleball — and a few upsets from teams that handle the elements better.

Eleven teams are in the field, split into two groups. Group A features the California Black Bears, Carolina Hogs, Columbus Sliders, Miami Pickleball Club, and SoCal Hard Eights. Group B has the Atlanta Bouncers, Bay Area Breakers, Dallas Flash, Florida Smash, New Jersey 5s, and Texas Ranchers.

The storylines to watch: the Columbus Sliders and New Jersey 5s come in as favorites to meet in the final, while the hometown-adjacent Texas Ranchers debut their biggest swing of the season — newly acquired Nico Acevedo, landed in a blockbuster trade that sent Dylan Frazier to Miami. The Dallas Flash, fifth at their own home stop earlier this year, are hunting for a deeper run.

Meanwhile, the St. Louis Shock sit atop the standings with 58 points after their perfect home weekend, so every team in Austin is playing catch-up in the season-long race toward the August playoffs.

Championship Sunday airs June 14 on MSG Network from 11 AM to 5 PM ET, with full coverage throughout the weekend on Pickleballtv.

Major League Pickleball’s second trade window of 2026 — open May 15 through June 30 — has produced a flurry of roster moves, and the biggest one landed in Texas.

On June 2, the Texas Ranchers acquired Nico Acevedo and Aiko Yoshitomi from the Miami Pickleball Club, sending Dylan Frazier, Ava Cavataio, and cash the other way. It’s the highest-profile trade of the season to date: Frazier has been one of the league’s steadiest men’s doubles players for years, and moving him signals the Ranchers are betting on Acevedo’s ceiling to push them into title contention. Acevedo makes his Ranchers debut this weekend at MLP Austin, so the league won’t have to wait long to see how the gamble looks on court.

The Acevedo deal headlined a busy June 2, which also saw the California Black Bears pick up Connor Mogle from the Carolina Hogs in exchange for Michael Loyd, and Genie Bouchard land with Texas as well. Bouchard’s path has been one of the window’s stranger subplots — the former tennis star went from the LA Mad Drops to Carolina on June 1, then on to the Ranchers a day later.

Carolina has been the league’s busiest trading partner overall, flipping Samantha Parker (acquired from Dallas on May 15, dealt to LA on June 1) and reshaping much of its roster mid-season. Elsewhere, the Columbus Sliders added Judit Castillo from the Phoenix Flames, and the Dallas Flash swapped Callie Smith to Las Vegas for Brooke Buckner.

Why it matters: MLP’s trade windows have become a genuine midseason chess match, with contenders shoring up DreamBreaker and singles depth before the August playoffs. With nearly three weeks left before the window closes on June 30, more moves are likely — especially from teams that stumble in Austin and St. Petersburg.

The St. Louis Shock turned their home stop into a statement. Playing in front of a hometown crowd at Chaifetz Arena June 4-7, the Shock ran the table — winning all four pool-play matches and dropping only two games along the way — before sweeping the LA Mad Drops 3-0 in Sunday’s final to claim the third event of the 2026 Major League Pickleball season.

The final was a rematch of the Dallas championship, where the Mad Drops had come out on top earlier in the year. This time St. Louis flipped the script decisively, taking the women’s match 11-1, the men’s 11-3, and mixed doubles 11-5. The lopsided scorelines capped a near-flawless weekend for the host team.

The win does more than even a rivalry. The Shock now sit atop the MLP standings with 58 regular-season points, overtaking the Dallas Flash for the top spot. The Mad Drops finished second in St. Louis but still lead the league in average points per event, setting up a season-long race between the two clubs.

There was history in the building, too. MLP billed the stop as its first event ever staged in a professional-level arena — the 10,600-seat venue on the Saint Louis University campus — and record crowds turned out to watch. It’s another marker of how far MLP’s team format has come since its scrappy early days on outdoor club courts.

A few subplots are worth tracking: the Mad Drops’ women’s pairing struggled at 2-4 on the weekend, Brooklyn’s Riley Newman missed the final two days with an injury, and former ATP pro Jack Sock continued to impress in his pickleball turn with Orlando.

With St. Louis 60% through the regular season, only St. Pete, the Mid-Season Tournament, and Orlando remain before the August playoffs. Next up: MLP Austin, June 11-14.

Adaptive pickleball is getting its own national stage. USA Pickleball will hold the inaugural Wheelchair National Championships June 19-21 in Colorado Springs, a first-of-its-kind event dedicated exclusively to wheelchair athletes. Hosted in partnership with local operator Peak Pickleball, the three-day championship brings together players from across the country — and internationally — for elite, wheelchair-only competition.

The format spans three divisions: Singles, Doubles, and a Hybrid bracket, played across 24 indoor oversized courts. Organizers are keeping the door wide open on skill level, with everyone from first-timers to seasoned national-caliber competitors welcome to register. In a touch borrowed from the sport’s biggest pro events, first-place finishers will take home national championship rings, with medals for second and third.

Why it matters: until now, wheelchair players have largely competed within mixed adaptive brackets or as add-ons to larger tournaments. A standalone national championship signals that USA Pickleball sees adaptive play as a permanent, growing part of the sport rather than an afterthought. It also gives wheelchair athletes something able-bodied competitors have long had — a clear competitive pathway with a title worth chasing.

The event fits a broader push from the national governing body around inclusivity, and it dovetails with other recent adaptive milestones, including the rollout of a dedicated wheelchair rating framework. Colorado Springs, already home to USA Pickleball’s national headquarters and a regular Golden Ticket host, makes a fitting venue for the debut.

Registration is open now, with all players required to hold a USA Pickleball membership at the Challenger or Champion level. For recreational players, it’s a reminder that pickleball’s famous accessibility isn’t just marketing — the same low net, compact court, and forgiving pace that hooked millions translate directly to adaptive play, and now there’s a national title to match.

Arlington, Virginia is about to cut the ribbon on its first dedicated outdoor pickleball facility, with a dedication ceremony set for June 10 at the Walter Reed Community Center. Play has already begun on the six new courts, arranged as two three-court clusters at 2909 16th Street S., ahead of the formal 5 p.m. ceremony.

For a sport that has exploded across the D.C. suburbs, the milestone is overdue. Pickleball had been the only court sport in Arlington without a venue of its own, with players borrowing time on shared and converted courts. The county flagged the gap back in its 2019 Public Spaces Master Plan update, then watched demand spike through the pandemic — the same arc that has played out in communities nationwide.

The more instructive part of this story is how the project got built. Like seemingly every new pickleball facility, it ran into the sport’s most persistent enemy: noise. Nearby residents pushed back over the distinctive pop of paddle on ball, a complaint that has stalled or killed court projects from coast to coast. Arlington’s response was to design around it, incorporating sound-dampening measures into the complex rather than fighting the objections outright. A previously shared basketball-pickleball court was also reverted to basketball-only use as part of the compromise.

That blueprint — dedicated courts, sound mitigation baked in from the start, and a few concessions to existing users — is becoming the template for how municipalities thread the needle between booming player demand and neighborhood pushback. The complex also added seating, landscaping, and stormwater management, signaling that local governments are starting to treat pickleball venues as permanent infrastructure rather than temporary line-painting on existing courts.

For Arlington’s growing community of players, the payoff is simple: a real home, with hours running weekdays 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. and shorter windows on weekends. For everyone else watching their own city debate where the courts should go, it’s another data point that the path forward usually runs straight through the noise question — and that designing for it early beats litigating it later.

Major League Pickleball and Paddletek have unveiled the first-ever Paddletek One Point Challenge, an amateur tournament with a format simple enough to explain in one breath: 128 doubles teams, 256 players, single elimination, and exactly one point decides each round. Win the point, advance. Lose it, go home. The whole bracket plays for a $25,000 purse.

The event runs July 9–12 at Belknap Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan, folded into the Edward Jones MLP Mid-Season Tournament — meaning amateurs get to compete on the same grounds where the pros are battling that week. Registration is limited to amateur players and closes July 8 at noon, or whenever the field fills, whichever comes first. All proceeds go to the Belknap Park Foundation.

What makes this worth a look is the format itself. A one-point-per-round structure is the great equalizer of pickleball. Over a full game to 11, the better team almost always wins — depth, consistency, and conditioning grind opponents down. But a single rally? Anything can happen. A lucky net cord, one cold serve, a perfectly timed Erne, and the higher seed is out. It turns a tournament into something closer to a lottery with a paddle, and that unpredictability is exactly the appeal.

For recreational players, it’s a rare chance to share a venue and a stake with the pro circuit without needing a 5.0 rating or a tour card. The buy-in is access; the format does the rest. It’s also a smart piece of fan engagement from MLP, which has spent 2026 looking for ways to pull amateurs deeper into the live event experience rather than leaving them as spectators in the stands.

Whether the one-point gimmick becomes a recurring fixture or stays a one-off novelty will likely come down to turnout in Grand Rapids. But as a low-friction way to put a competitive medal — and a charitable cause — within reach of everyday dinkers, it’s a format other tours may want to keep an eye on.

Major League Pickleball heads to St. Louis this week for the third event of its 2026 season, with four days of team play at Chaifetz Arena running June 4-7. The stop arrives just days after MLP Columbus wrapped, keeping the DoorDash-presented schedule on its tight late-spring cadence as teams chase standings points ahead of the August playoffs.

The headline storyline is a homecoming. The St. Louis Shock host inside the 10,600-seat arena on the Saint Louis University campus, and they arrive carrying real momentum: the Shock claimed the MLP Cup back in November 2025, and now they get to chase early-season points in front of their own crowd. Home court has been a genuine advantage in MLP’s arena era, where the energy of a packed building can swing the tight, rally-scored games that decide team matches.

As with every regular-season stop, the field splits into two groups for round-robin play across the first three days, with teams facing everyone in their division. Sunday’s deciding matches pit the top finishers against one another for event standings points. Familiar contenders are in the mix, including the Atlanta Bouncers and Palm Beach Royals, both of whom have been jockeying for position through the season’s opening swing.

Fans outside St. Louis can follow the action on PickleballTV throughout the week, with Championship Court matches carried on the main feed and Grandstand Court available through the PickleballTV app.

For the broader season, St. Louis is another early checkpoint on MLP’s revamped 2026 calendar, which runs from late May through August. Next up is MLP Austin (June 11-14), so teams are eager to bank points before the schedule tightens. And for recreational players, MLP’s team format remains the most accessible way into pro pickleball — fast-paced rally scoring, mixed-gender lineups, and a Ryder Cup-style atmosphere that translates whether you’re courtside or watching from the couch.

The list of paddles cleared for sanctioned play just got another refresh. The UPA-A approved paddle list was updated on June 1, and it now spans 221 models across 41 brands — a number that keeps climbing as manufacturers push new builds through the testing pipeline and as the sport’s equipment standards continue to tighten.

The latest batch of approvals, added in late May, includes the AEVUM Statera, Diadem Sports Hanabi, Ikigai Siida, and neonic Frost FLX, joining recent additions like the Engage X2 Widebody and Enhance MPP Turbo Widebody from April. Each model has to pass the program’s lab testing before it earns a spot on the list, the gatekeeping step that determines whether a paddle is legal at Golden Ticket events, USA Pickleball Nationals, and the rest of the sanctioned circuit.

Why it matters for the rest of us: if you play in any USA Pickleball-sanctioned tournament, your paddle has to be on the approved list and stay there. The catch is that the list isn’t only growing — paddles can also be removed or delisted if they fail later testing or run afoul of updated standards, which has tripped up players who showed up to a tournament with gear that was legal when they bought it but isn’t anymore. With a paddle-tech arms race driving constant new releases, the gap between “available to buy” and “legal to compete with” has never been wider.

The practical move is simple. Before you register for a sanctioned event, search your exact paddle model — including the specific size and version — on the official equipment database at equipment.usapickleball.org. Recreational dinkers playing casual games at the park don’t need to sweat it, but if there’s a medal on the line, it’s worth the 30-second check. The list updates regularly, so a paddle that passed last season isn’t guaranteed to pass this one.

Major League Pickleball rolls into Columbus, Ohio today for its second event of the 2026 season, with four days of team play at Pickle & Chill running May 28-31. The stop lands just three days after the Dallas season opener wrapped, kicking off a tight stretch of the DoorDash-presented schedule.

The field is split into two groups for round-robin play. Group A features the host Columbus Sliders alongside the Atlanta Bouncers, California Black Bears, Chicago Slice, Miami Pickleball Club, and New Jersey 5s. Group B includes the Carolina Hogs, Florida Smash, Las Vegas Night Owls, St. Louis Shock, and Palm Beach Royals. Teams play everyone in their group across the first three days, and group standings set the seeding for Sunday’s deciding matches, where the top finishers square off for event standings points.

The storyline locals care about most: the Sliders are defending their home court as reigning 2025 Premier Level champions. Their roster — Andrei Daescu, Parris Todd, CJ Klinger, and Danni-Elle Tow — drew a prime-time opening-night slot, a nod to the hometown crowd Pickle & Chill expects to pack in.

Fans outside Columbus can follow along on PickleballTV and its mobile app throughout the week, with Sunday’s championship action also streaming on MSG Network.

For the broader season, Columbus is a useful early checkpoint. MLP’s revamped 2026 calendar runs from late May through August after the PPA Tour Finals closed out the pro singles-and-doubles slate earlier in the month. With St. Louis (June 4-7) up next, teams are looking to bank standings points before the schedule heats up. For recreational players, the team format remains MLP’s most accessible entry point — fast-paced rally scoring, mixed-gender lineups, and a Ryder Cup-style energy that plays well whether you’re courtside or watching from the couch.

Pickleball’s grassroots momentum got a campus-sized boost this week. The Paddle House, a proposed 24/7 indoor pickleball facility dreamed up by Binghamton University students, won first place in the 2026 Binghamton Business Plan Competition, the city announced May 27.

The win comes with a $7,000 cash prize plus a package of startup support: help with online marketing, legal and accounting services, a professional business association membership, and business signage. For a student venture, that combination of cash and hands-on services is often more valuable than the check itself.

Founding member Kai Chen framed the award as a launching point rather than a finish line. “It brings us one step closer to making the facility a reality,” Chen said. “We’re grateful for anyone who supports local entrepreneurs.”

The concept targets a real gap in Broome County: year-round, always-open court access in a region where winter weather routinely sidelines outdoor play. A 24/7 indoor model would let early risers, shift workers, and night owls all find court time — a flexibility most public facilities can’t match.

Binghamton Mayor Jared Kraham praised the pitch for what it could add locally, saying the facility “adds something, I think, really new to our local landscape,” and pointing to its potential to create jobs and community opportunities. Rounding out the competition, Thready or Not, a sustainable textiles workshop, took second, with AI detection startup Serva LLC in third.

Why it matters: while national headlines focus on $225 million investment rounds and pro league expansion, stories like this one show where pickleball’s growth is actually compounding — in college towns and mid-size cities where a handful of students can spot unmet demand and build something around it. The sport’s next wave of facilities won’t all come from chains and private equity. Some will come from a campus pitch competition.

Major League Pickleball wrapped its 2026 regular season opener over Memorial Day weekend at Pickler Universe in Dallas, and the team that walked out with the most chips on the table wasn’t the host.

The Los Angeles Mad Drops were the only team to finish group play undefeated. That earned them the Group B top seed heading into Super Monday’s crossover matches, and a win there locked in 25 standings points — the most any team can pull from a single event this year. It’s a real early statement from a Mad Drops roster that was a quarterfinal-and-out story for most of last season.

Group A played closer to script. The Dallas Flash, hosting on their own floor with the league’s promotional weight behind them, navigated a tight pool that included the Brooklyn Aces and a reloaded New Jersey 5s. The much-hyped Jorja Johnson revenge angle delivered ratings if not the win column the 5s wanted — New Jersey leaves Dallas with work to do.

A few quick takeaways before the league moves on to its next stop:

• The LT Pro 48 played fine. First MLP event using the new league ball, and outside of a few players adjusting on serves and resets, it wasn’t the story.
• Crossover format is doing its job. Splitting standings points between Sunday seeding and Super Monday means a single bad day doesn’t end your event — but it also means group winners can still pad their lead, which is what LA did.
• Defending champion Columbus Sliders looked human. A mid-pack finish in their group is not a panic moment in May, but it’s a reset on the “repeat” conversation.

Next up: the regular season rolls on through August, with the expanded three-week playoffs returning to Dallas August 6-9. Full standings update on the MLP site.

The Picklr is going international. The franchise — already in 31 U.S. states — announced a multi-unit development agreement with Saskatchewan Pickleball Clubs Ltd. that will bring its indoor club model to Saskatoon and Regina, the company’s first locations in Canada.

The Saskatoon site is already under construction at 830 43rd Street East, where a 31,000-square-foot industrial space is being converted into a 10-court complex with locker rooms, a community lounge, and full league and clinic programming. Doors are targeted to open later this year. Regina is next, with site selection underway and a temporary pop-up planned for the summer to keep momentum going while the permanent build is finalized.

Local ownership is led by Larry Owen, a longtime Saskatoon pickleball organizer who has spent years building leagues and growing the sport at the grassroots level in the province. That kind of local-operator-meets-national-franchise structure is the same playbook The Picklr has used to scale quickly in U.S. markets without losing the community feel that drives recurring memberships.

Why It Matters

Pickleball Canada says participation in the sport more than doubled in the country over the last three years, and Saskatchewan in particular has been a quietly strong market. Until now, growth has been almost entirely organic — community courts, converted gyms, municipal builds — without a dedicated franchise operator with national resources behind it.

The deal also signals where the next leg of the franchise-club boom is heading. Most of the build-out story over the last two years has been Sun Belt cities, where outdoor play is brutal in summer and indoor courts are a heat-relief play. The Saskatchewan move flips the seasonality argument: indoor pickleball as winter infrastructure, in a market where outdoor courts are unusable for five months a year. If the Saskatoon opening proves out the membership math, expect more Canadian announcements before the year is over.

Paddletek officially unveiled the Honeyfoam TKO-X on May 13, the brand’s first elongated foam-core paddle and a clear signal that the company most associated with honeycomb construction is now competing in earnest on foam.

What’s In It

The TKO-X uses Paddletek’s three-foam Honeyfoam Multi-foam Core — a low-density EPP center, an EVA wrap, and a perimeter foam ring — under a PT-700 unidirectional raw carbon fiber face. It ships in both 14mm and 16mm versions at $249.99, sitting just below the top of the premium tier. An elongated shape and Shock Arrestor edge guard target players who want power without the trampoline feel that has gotten some Gen 4 foam paddles into hot water.

The Approval Wrinkle

Worth knowing before you buy: the 14mm TKO-X is approved for UPA play (PPA Tour and MLP) but did not pass USA Pickleball’s PBCoR testing in March, so it is not legal at USAP-sanctioned amateur events. The 16mm version cleared both governing bodies. If your league or tournament runs under USAP rules, the 16mm is the safer pick.

Why It Matters

Paddletek’s first foam paddle, the limited-edition Reserve Honeyfoam, sold out almost immediately when it dropped in January. The TKO-X is the production follow-up, and it puts a legacy honeycomb brand directly across the table from foam-first competitors like Bread & Butter, Honolulu, and Vatic.

For recreational players, the bigger takeaway is that the foam-core era is no longer the future — it’s the present. If you’re shopping in 2026, almost every major brand now has a foam paddle in the lineup, and the question is less “should I try foam” and more “which approval list do I need to be on.”

The Picklr added another Texas pin to its map on May 16, opening a 14-court indoor facility in Live Oak, the suburb just off Loop 1604 on San Antonio’s northeast side. It’s the latest stop on a franchise expansion that has already pushed The Picklr into 31 states.

What’s On The Floor

Picklr Live Oak follows the chain’s now-familiar template: purpose-built indoor courts with cushioned outdoor-style surfaces, a pro shop, programming for open play, leagues, and clinics, and reservation slots for private bookings. Fourteen courts is on the larger end of the Picklr footprint and gives the location enough capacity to host UPA-sanctioned amateur events and travel league nights without choking off drop-in play.

San Antonio Catches Up

San Antonio has been one of the more under-served big-city markets for dedicated indoor pickleball, especially compared with Austin two hours up I-35. Most local play has happened on converted tennis courts, shared rec center gyms, or outdoor public complexes that get unusable when South Texas hits triple digits in July and August. The Live Oak opening gives the metro area a legitimate climate-controlled option just as summer heat rolls in.

The Broader Pattern

It also fits the trend we’ve been tracking all spring: dedicated indoor clubs are quietly becoming the default infrastructure for pickleball growth, especially in Sun Belt markets where outdoor play is seasonal in the wrong direction. Boulder is breaking ground on a 12-court public complex this month, Rocklin just approved a $2.9 million 16-court build at Sunset Whitney, and Santa Barbara cut the ribbon on its own indoor club earlier in May. The Picklr is simply the franchise version of a shift that is now showing up at the municipal level too.

The 2026 Major League Pickleball regular season starts Friday. The Dallas Flash will host all 11 teams at Pickler Universe over Memorial Day weekend, May 22-25, for the league’s first stop of the season.

The format splits the field into two groups for round-robin play across the first three days, with seeded crossover matches on Sunday determining event points. Group A features the Dallas Flash, New Jersey 5s, and Brooklyn Aces. Group B is the bigger bracket: Bay Area Breakers, Carolina Hogs, St. Louis Shock, Los Angeles Mad Drops, Texas Ranchers, and Utah Black Diamonds.

The storyline writes itself. After two trade windows and a chaotic keeper deadline, Jorja Johnson lands at New Jersey on an $800K deal — and her first event of the season is against Dallas, the team that let her walk. Whether that matchup falls in group play or the Sunday crossovers, it’s the headliner.

Beyond the revenge angle, Dallas opens a season under real pressure. The Flash are the 2024 league champions and the hosts of both the season opener and the playoff opener (August 6-9), which means the schedule is built around them performing on their own floor. New Jersey, Bay Area, and Brooklyn all reshaped their rosters in the offseason and arrive in Dallas with something to prove.

This is also the debut of the LT Pro 48 as MLP’s exclusive on-court ball — the first season in which both MLP and the Carvana PPA Tour use the same ball. Expect rallies to look and sound a little different than what fans remember from last year. Tickets are available through Tixr, with streaming details on the MLP site.

Selkirk has bought one of pickleball’s most beloved boutique paddle brands. The Idaho-based equipment giant announced on May 12 that it has acquired Bread & Butter Pickleball Company, the family-owned label behind the Loco, the Filth, and the Invader paddles. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded in 2022 by the Sapusek family, Bread & Butter built a devoted following on a fun-first identity and unusually loud paddle designs — the Loco picked up “Paddle of the Year” nods in 2025 from multiple outlets. The brand’s blend of legitimate performance and meme-friendly marketing made it one of the few independents that consistently punched above its weight against the major manufacturers.

The press release is unusually specific about what will not change. Bread & Butter will keep its own website, marketing channels, and product strategy. The Sapuseks will continue to run creative, marketing, and product development. Selkirk’s contribution is operational: wholesale reach, international distribution, and back-end scale that a family-run shop simply can’t build overnight.

For players, the practical near-term effect is wider availability. Bread & Butter paddles have been notoriously hard to get during drops, with limited inventory and frequent sellouts. Selkirk’s distribution network should ease those bottlenecks and push the lineup into more brick-and-mortar shops.

The bigger picture is consolidation. Paddletek absorbed several brands in its post-merger reorganization, Joola continues to expand its roster, and now Selkirk has added arguably the hottest independent on the market. The era of paddle startups going it alone may be coming to a close — at least for the ones that get big enough to matter.

Major League Pickleball is building a feeder system. The league announced a partnership with Minor League Pickleball (MiLP) to run a series of Regional Showdowns inside select 2026 MLP event weekends, creating an amateur competition track that runs alongside the pro broadcasts and ends in a national championship.

The format is the part worth paying attention to. MiLP Regional Showdowns will be offered in two configurations: a four-player coed team event with two women and two men — directly mirroring the MLP roster format — and a three-player gendered team event. Both are designed to give recreational players the experience of competing on a team, on event-grade courts, in front of the same crowds that show up for the pros. Winners advance through the regional bracket toward a national title.

The bigger picture here is structural. Until now, the on-ramp from rec play to MLP-style team competition was basically empty: you could grind tournament singles and doubles, you could chase a DUPR rating, but there was no organized amateur version of the team format the pros play. MiLP fills that gap and gives the league a development pipeline it has been quietly missing.

It also gives MLP something useful on event weekends — a way to get hundreds of amateurs through the gates of every stop, paddles in hand, with skin in the game. That changes the energy of a venue in a way that pure spectating doesn’t, and it gives clubs and recreational organizers a national bracket to point their best teams toward.

For 4.0-and-up players who have been looking for something more structured than open-play and more accessible than the pro circuit, MiLP is the first organized answer. Expect registration details to roll out alongside each host MLP event over the coming weeks.

The fight over pay-to-play at Tucson’s Morris K. Udall Park is over, and the players won. On May 5 the Tucson City Council voted unanimously to rescind a Parks and Recreation proposal that would have charged $3.50 per player for every 90 minutes of court time, with an additional 25% to 50% surcharge for non-residents. The reversal came after weeks of organized opposition, packed council meetings, and a coordinated push from Tucson Area Pickleball (TAP).

Udall is one of the most heavily used pickleball venues in southern Arizona, with more than a dozen courts and a daily rotation of regulars who treat the place as a community hub. The proposed fees would have made it the only court complex in the city to charge per-session, and players argued that pickleballers were being singled out to plug a parks budget gap that other sports were not being asked to fill.

The deal that replaced the fees flips the maintenance arrangement: TAP will now oversee upkeep and future improvements at the courts instead of the city. Since the vote, roughly 30 new members have joined the group, and the organization plans to fund operations through a $25 annual donation model rather than per-session fees. About 80 players gathered at Udall on May 8 to celebrate the reversal — mid-game, on the courts, in a scene that probably tells you everything you need to know about how this community organizes.

For the rest of the country, the Tucson story is worth filing away. As parks departments wrestle with how to pay for booming pickleball demand, the volunteer-maintenance model is becoming a real alternative to user fees — provided there’s a local group willing to do the work.

Boulder, Colorado is finally getting a public pickleball home. After several years of pressure from a fast-growing local player base — and equally vocal pushback from tennis players over shared-court conversions — the city is breaking ground on a dedicated 12-court complex at Tom Watson Park near Boulder Reservoir.

The plans call for twelve lighted courts, three court shelters, and a network of walking paths connecting the facility to the rest of the park. Construction is expected to begin in late May or June, depending on final permitting and planning reviews, with a November target for opening play.

The project is the largest dedicated public pickleball build in the city’s history and reflects a broader trend playing out in parks departments across the country: cities that once let pickleball share painted lines on existing tennis courts are now committing capital to standalone facilities to ease the friction. Boulder’s tennis community had publicly objected to further shared-use conversions, and a dedicated complex is the compromise that keeps both sports separate and happy.

Lighting is the part that locals are watching most closely. With Colorado’s evening temperatures and limited daylight in the shoulder seasons, lit courts effectively double the usable hours of the facility — turning twelve courts into something that plays much larger.

For recreational players, it’s also a reminder that growing the sport is no longer about converting tennis courts; it’s about cities recognizing pickleball as a standalone amenity worth funding. Salt Lake City, Raleigh, and Murrieta have all announced similar dedicated builds in the past 12 months. Boulder is the latest, and likely not the last.

The 2026 PPA Tour season closed out at Life Time Rancho San Clemente over the weekend, and the brackets read like a coronation. Top seeds advanced almost everywhere they could, and the two names that have defined the past three seasons of professional pickleball took home the headline trophies.

In mixed doubles, Anna Leigh Waters and Ben Johns dispatched Federico Staksrud and Tina Pisnik 11-7, 11-2 in a final that, despite the brevity of the second game, lived up to its billing. The same pair has now owned mixed at virtually every major stop on the 2026 calendar.

Men’s doubles went to Ben Johns and Gabe Tardio, who did not drop a game all week and closed out Christian Alshon and Hayden Patriquin in four in the final. On the women’s side, Anna Bright and Anna Leigh Waters cruised past Parris Todd and Rachel Rohrabacher 11-7, 11-6, 11-2.

The singles finals were the only place where the storylines diverged. Federico Staksrud beat Chris Haworth in a tight semifinal swing before claiming the men’s title, while Kate Fahey didn’t lose a single game across the women’s draw — and famously pickled her good friend Brooke Buckner 11-0 in the final.

For the touring pros, there’s almost no time to exhale. The MLP regular season opens May 22-25 in Dallas, giving the field roughly ten days to recover, regroup with team rosters, and shift into league mode. For paddle sponsors and bracket trackers, San Clemente was as clean a confirmation of the current pecking order as the tour will see all year.

Hollywood and pickleball cross paths again on May 17, when the Television Academy Foundation hosts its second annual Emmys Pickleball Slam at the Calabasas Pickleball Club. Jason George (Grey’s Anatomy) and Phil Keoghan (The Amazing Race) return as cohosts for the doubles-format charity tournament, which runs from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

The celebrity field is stacked. Wayne Brady, Nancy Cartwright, Da’Vinchi, Shawn Hatosy, Simone Kessell, Jonathan Mangum, Jessie Prez, and chef Jet Tila are all confirmed to play. Boxing legend Sugar Ray Leonard rounds out the lineup — a notable crossover for a fundraiser that raised more than $450,000 in its inaugural year alongside the Emmys Golf Classic.

Proceeds support the Television Academy Foundation’s education and workforce development programs, which fund scholarships and mentorship for emerging television professionals. The Foundation has used the event to anchor pickleball as a sister fundraiser to the long-running golf classic, and last year’s debut performance suggested the new addition could eventually surpass the older event in reach.

Tickets are open to the public. Single-player entry is $200, doubles teams are $350, and VIP spectator passes go for $100 with a gift bag. Single entries get paired into doubles teams at registration, so anyone with a paddle and a charitable streak can effectively buy their way onto a court next to Wayne Brady.

For pickleball, events like this matter beyond the leaderboard. Celebrity tournaments are a steady drip of mainstream visibility — the kind of coverage that lands in entertainment columns rather than sports pages. They normalize the sport for an audience that may not yet have a paddle hanging by the door, and they keep the cultural runway open as participation numbers continue to climb.

The 2026 PPA Tour season is rolling into its final weekend, with the Toys ‘R’ Us PPA Finals running May 4-10 at Life Time Rancho San Clemente in San Clemente, California. Pool play sessions occupied Wednesday through Friday, setting the bracket for semifinals on Saturday (9 a.m. to 6 p.m. PT) and championship matches Sunday (9 a.m. to 4 p.m. PT).

The event drew more than 1,500 amateur entries alongside the pro field, making it one of the largest stops of the season. Coverage airs across PickleballTV and Fox Sports platforms over the weekend.

Anna Leigh Waters arrives in San Clemente on a hot streak, having taken the women’s doubles in Atlanta last weekend with partner Anna Bright. On the men’s side, Chris Haworth claimed his first title since rising to the top of the men’s singles rankings, and he’ll be looking to defend that position against a deep field that includes Ben Johns, Gabe Tardio, Federico Staksrud, and Hayden Patriquin.

This year’s calendar marks a streamlined approach for the PPA. After consolidating tour stops earlier in the spring, the Finals serve as the season-ending showcase before MLP team play takes over the summer schedule. The MLP regular season opens May 22-25 in Dallas, giving pros barely two weeks between PPA’s final point and the start of league action.

For fans, the Finals are also a useful checkpoint heading into the back half of the year. Rankings shift, paddle deals get tested under pressure, and partnership chemistry on the women’s side gets one last look before MLP scrambles the lineups. With singles, doubles, and mixed all on the line in a single weekend, San Clemente is shaping up to be a busy three days for everyone keeping score.

The capital raise we previewed in late April has officially landed, and it’s bigger than the early reporting suggested. Pickleball Inc. — the parent company of the PPA Tour and Major League Pickleball — closed a $225 million investment round on May 1, led by Apollo Global Management’s newly created Apollo Sports Capital fund alongside Tom Dundon’s Dundon Capital Partners. The deal values Pickleball Inc. at $750 million and brings total outside investment in the company to roughly $315 million.

Dundon, who already owns the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes and the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers and was an early backer of the sport, is doubling down rather than cashing out. Apollo Sports Capital is a brand new vehicle for the private-equity giant, and pickleball is one of its first major bets — a notable signal of where institutional sports money thinks growth is headed next.

Per the announcement, the new capital is earmarked for media expansion, event infrastructure, and acquiring additional pieces of the pickleball stack. Pickleball Central, the largest online retailer in the sport, and tournament-software assets are explicitly named as portfolio additions. That fits the vertically integrated platform thesis: own the league, the tour, the broadcast, the entry portal, and the gear funnel.

The numbers underneath the deal are worth pausing on. The MLP and PPA combined for roughly $30 million in sponsorship revenue and $60 million in total top-line revenue in 2025, with management projecting $74 million combined in 2026. USA Pickleball estimates 24 million American players. A $750 million valuation prices the upside of those participation numbers translating into media rights, ticket sales, and consumer spending over the next several years.

For recreational players, the immediate effect is invisible. The medium-term effect is that more of the apps, tournaments, broadcasts, and retailers you interact with are likely to share a parent company.

USA Pickleball and Pickleball Instruments have officially launched a field-testing program that puts professional-grade paddle verification into the amateur tournament tent. The rollout begins at the 2026 Golden Ticket event in Glendale, Arizona and will expand across the Golden Ticket calendar over the next two months before reaching clubs and other sanctioned venues.

Here’s how it works. Players bring any paddle they intend to use in competition to an on-site testing station. The check takes under five minutes per paddle and verifies compliance with USA Pickleball’s deflection, surface, and dimensional standards — not just whether the model appears on the approved list, but whether the specific paddle in your bag still meets spec. Each paddle that passes gets an RFID sticker. A companion mobile app, slated for broader release before this summer, lets players scan the sticker and pull up the test data, including how a given paddle’s readings drift over time.

The program is the most concrete answer yet to two problems that have been quietly eroding confidence in tournament play: paddles that pass at the factory but break in past the legal limit, and an emerging counterfeit market that piggybacks on popular approved models. Pickleball Instruments is positioning the framework as something that can eventually flag suspect paddles by cross-referencing manufacturers, factories of origin, and distributor records.

For Golden Ticket competitors, the practical change is small but meaningful. You can pre-test paddles during off hours to avoid lines on game day, and you can bring backups through the same process. Players caught using a non-tested or non-compliant paddle in a sanctioned match still face the 2026 rulebook’s forfeiture penalty, so the new program is best understood as the carrot that makes that stick more enforceable.

For everyone else, this is the first real preview of what equipment compliance is going to feel like at the local level a year or two from now.

Major League Pickleball has a new official ball. Life Time and MLP announced on April 29 that the LT Pro 48 will be the league’s exclusive on-court ball starting with MLP Dallas, May 22-25. The move makes it the only pickleball used across both of the sport’s two biggest pro properties, after the Carvana PPA Tour adopted the same ball last year.

The LT Pro 48 launched in 2024 and quickly became Life Time’s house ball at its athletic country clubs. It uses a 48-hole, precision-molded design with symmetrically spaced holes and chamfered edges meant to address two of the sport’s most persistent complaints: inconsistent flight and balls that crack within a few sessions in cold weather. Pro players have generally praised its bounce and durability since the PPA switched.

For MLP, the timing matters. The league is heading into a 2026 season that’s been retooled under new ownership, with team rosters reshuffled in back-to-back trade windows and a packed schedule that runs through the fall. Standardizing the ball with the PPA removes one of the small but real differences players had to adjust for when bouncing between formats — singles, doubles, and team play all on the same equipment.

For recreational players, the practical takeaway is simpler. If you’ve ever wanted to train with the exact ball the pros are using on television, you now only have to buy one. The LT Pro 48 is available at most major pickleball retailers and direct from Life Time, typically in the $30-40 per six-pack range.

Whether the ball lives up to its billing under the brighter lights of MLP — where rallies tend to be longer and matches more chaotic than PPA singles — will be one of the quieter storylines worth watching when Dallas opens the season three weeks from now.

Pro pickleball is about to get the reality-TV treatment. “Partners,” a six-part docuseries produced by Shutterstock Studios in association with Wavelength Productions, premieres May 5 on Prime Video, the Carvana PPA Tour’s YouTube channel, and PickleballTV.

The show follows more than 25 players, coaches, and executives across one full season of the Carvana PPA Tour, with cameras embedded everywhere from training sessions and locker rooms to the hotel bars where, as the press release puts it, players “train together, party together, date each other, and show up at the same hotel the morning after a loss, a breakup or a contract dispute.” Dan Bradley, who ran point on Netflix’s “Sprint,” serves as showrunner.

This is the first scripted-style sports docuseries the PPA has greenlit, and the multi-platform distribution is pointed. Prime Video gives it a mainstream audience that has never bought a paddle. PickleballTV covers the existing fan base. The PPA’s own YouTube channel — which has been steadily growing past the million-subscriber mark — handles the casual scrollers. It’s the kind of cross-platform play “Drive to Survive” used to make Formula 1 a household name in the United States, and the comparison isn’t subtle.

For the sport, this is a genuine inflection point. Pickleball has had no shortage of growth-stat headlines, but personality-driven storytelling has been the missing piece. Casual viewers know Anna Leigh Waters and maybe Ben Johns; they couldn’t pick Federico Staksrud or Catherine Parenteau out of a lineup. A reality series that turns 25 pros into actual characters could change that math fast — and likely accelerate the gap between players who can market themselves and those who can’t.

The trailer is already live on the PPA’s channels. The first episode drops Tuesday.

The Veolia Atlanta Pickleball Championships are underway at Life Time Peachtree Corners, where more than 1,700 players have descended on the 30-court complex for the final stop of the 2025–26 PPA season. Pro play runs through Sunday, May 3, with PickleballTV coverage starting at 10 a.m. Eastern most days.

The headline storyline on the men’s side: Ben Johns is not defending his Atlanta singles title. He’s still in the doubles draw with Gabriel Tardio — the pairing remains undefeated in calendar year 2026 and enters as the top seed — but the singles bracket is wide open. Chris Haworth comes in ranked No. 1 in the world, with Federico Staksrud seeded No. 2 after his Sacramento singles win last weekend. It’s a rare chance for someone other than Johns to walk away with a Slam-tier singles trophy.

Atlanta carries 2,000 ranking points, double what most regular tour stops offer, which makes the result outsized for the 2026 Race to the Finals standings. Expect a few mid-pack pros to play their hearts out this week — there’s real ladder movement available for anyone who can get hot through a progressive draw.

The pro side is using a one-round-per-bracket-per-day format, which means the early rounds bleed across multiple days rather than getting cleared out in a single afternoon. Saturday and Sunday are when the bracket compresses and the gold-medal matches land.

For recreational players, the bigger story is the venue itself. Life Time Peachtree Corners is one of the largest pickleball-tennis hybrid facilities in the country — 30 pickleball courts plus 18 tennis courts under one roof — and pro events there are increasingly being treated as templates for what a serious club build-out looks like in 2026.

USA Pickleball announced a national partnership with Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA) this month, naming the governing body the official pickleball provider for the organization’s network of clubs. It’s one of the larger youth-access initiatives the sport has seen on the grassroots side, and the rollout numbers are concrete enough to take seriously.

The launch state is Arizona — fitting, given USA Pickleball’s headquarters in Surprise — where all 75 BGCA locations across the state will receive pickleball starter kits. That puts the equipment in front of more than 50,000 youth in the first wave alone. USA Pickleball is putting up an initial $100,000 to support implementation and has committed to installing one new pickleball court at a Boys & Girls Club location every year as part of the program.

The framing matters. Pickleball’s growth story has been heavily skewed toward adults — the average rec player still trends older than every other racket sport — and youth participation has lagged the overall numbers. A direct pipeline through BGCA’s existing footprint is one of the more efficient ways to fix that. Clubs already have facilities, supervision, and after-school programming structures in place. Adding pickleball to that mix is closer to a software update than a ground-up build.

For the long-term health of the sport, this is the kind of news that doesn’t move the needle this week but matters a lot in five years. The pros currently dominating the PPA Tour mostly came from tennis or junior racket programs. The next generation of American pickleball talent — the players who grew up with the sport rather than converting to it — is going to come from initiatives like this one.

Whether other states get the same scale of rollout will depend on how the Arizona pilot performs. USA Pickleball hasn’t announced a timeline for expansion beyond the initial launch.

A lawsuit filed this week has pulled former “Real Housewives of New York” personality Jill Zarin into a messy legal fight over one of the pickleball world’s more curious new products: the Go-No-Go, a device marketed to recreational players as a way to verify their paddles meet USA Pickleball’s equipment standards before a tournament.

Plaintiff Noah Springer claims he helped develop the Go-No-Go and is seeking an injunction against GNG Enterprises — connected to Zarin and her partner Gary Brody — to stop sales, along with damages. The legal specifics will play out in court, but the existence of a consumer paddle tester finding a market at all tells you a lot about where the sport is right now.

USA Pickleball’s 2026 rulebook tightened enforcement considerably. Tournament players caught using a non-approved paddle during a match now face immediate forfeiture, with only pre-match discoveries allowing a penalty-free swap. Surface alterations, decals, and anything that could juice spin are under sharper scrutiny. That has rattled a lot of recreational competitors who own paddles purchased before the latest approved-list updates, or who have gear that’s been “broken in” enough to drift out of spec.

That’s the niche Go-No-Go and devices like it are trying to fill — give players a way to self-check before they show up to a sanctioned event and get disqualified. Whether a simple go/no-go gauge can meaningfully replicate USAP’s lab-grade testing is debatable, but the demand is real.

For players, the practical takeaway is unchanged: if you’re competing in sanctioned events, confirm your paddle is on the current approved list at usapickleball.org before you pay the entry fee. The gadget market will sort itself out in court.

Seattle’s pickleball community is bracing for a critical moment tonight as the city’s Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners receives an official briefing on a draft Racquet Sports Strategy that could erase roughly 40 percent of the city’s public pickleball courts.

Under the proposal, Seattle Parks and Recreation would remove pickleball lines from many of the shared-use “dual” courts that were striped on top of existing tennis courts during the pandemic-era boom. The net effect: 92 pickleball courts reduced to 56, with seven neighborhoods losing 36 courts as soon as June. Tennis, by comparison, would retain 107 courts.

The city’s rationale is that dual courts create friction — competing demand, net confusion, and maintenance headaches — and that separating the two sports will produce better facilities for both. Pickleball players aren’t buying the timeline. The Seattle Metro Pickleball Association has launched a petition asking the city to pause the plan until new dedicated pickleball courts are actually built, arguing that removing lines in June without replacement capacity effectively displaces thousands of active players.

It’s a preview of a fight happening in dozens of cities. Dual-striping was the fast, cheap solution that let pickleball scale during the boom. Now that both sports are competing for the same concrete, parks departments are being forced to choose — and pickleball, despite its participation numbers, often doesn’t have the entrenched infrastructure or political muscle that tennis does.

Tonight’s 6 p.m. briefing downtown is informational, not a final vote, but it will set the tone for how aggressively the Racquet Sports Strategy moves forward. Expect a packed room.

The Fasenra Sacramento Open presented by Zimmer Biomet wrapped up Sunday at Life Time Arden, and one of the week’s most memorable storylines played out in mixed doubles. Eric Oncins and Tyra Black — competing together as PPA partners for the first time — outlasted the sibling duo of JW and Jorja Johnson in a five-game final to claim gold.

It was Oncins’ first PPA mixed doubles title and his first gold on American soil. For Black, it was her second mixed doubles title of the 2026 season, following her Indoor National Championships win with Christian Alshon earlier this year. Pairing up with a new partner mid-season and immediately walking away with a Slam-caliber result is exactly the kind of chemistry test that usually takes months to develop.

Women’s doubles delivered another breakthrough. Parris Todd and Rachel Rohrabacher secured their first title as a partnership, a result that reshuffles the conversation near the top of the women’s doubles ladder heading into the Atlanta stretch.

Sacramento is always a bit of an outlier on the calendar — a mid-tier event sandwiched between bigger Slams — but the parity on display was noteworthy. Several matchups that looked like routine seeding exercises on paper turned into three- and four-game grinders, with qualifiers pushing deeper into draws than expected.

The tour now turns its attention to the Veolia Atlanta Pickleball Championships, a Slam-tier event running April 27 through May 3 at Life Time Peachtree Corners. Winners in Atlanta will take home 2,000 ranking points — double the haul available at most regular tour stops — making it a pivotal weekend in the 2026 Race to the Finals standings.

The United Pickleball Association — the holding company behind the PPA Tour and Major League Pickleball — is reportedly planning a capital raise of $150 million to $200 million, with a goal of building what sources describe as a vertically integrated pickleball platform. That means media rights, software, real estate, and league operations all under one roof.

The raise would value the combined entity somewhere near or above $800 million enterprise value, according to reporting from The Dink and Front Office Sports. Billionaire Tom Dundon, who already sits at the center of the UPA’s current structure, is positioned as the connective tissue linking the tour, the league, and a rumored merger with Pickleball Inc.

Why does this matter if you’re a recreational player who just wants to find a court on Saturday? Because the downstream effects reach further than the pro broadcast. A consolidated platform would likely influence paddle certification pathways, sanctioning and tournament software (DUPR is already in that conversation), court development deals with operators like Life Time and The Picklr, and the apps most of us use to find open play. Infrastructure decisions made at the top of the pyramid tend to shape what the bottom of the pyramid looks like a year or two later.

It’s also a notable tonal shift for the sport. For most of pickleball’s modern boom, the narrative has been about grassroots participation outpacing the institutions trying to catch up. A nine-figure private-equity-style rollup is a very different kind of growth story — one that looks more like the early days of MLS or F1 than a community rec league.

Terms, timing, and final structure are still reportedly in flux, and the raise is in its early stages. But if it closes anywhere near the rumored range, 2026 will be remembered as the year pro pickleball stopped being a collection of leagues and started being a company.

Andre Agassi is officially a pro pickleball player — with a win on the record to show for it.

The tennis Hall of Famer made his professional pickleball debut at the Franklin US Open Pickleball Championships in Naples on Wednesday, teaming with 18-year-old Anna Leigh Waters in the mixed pro division. One day after turning 55, Agassi and Waters took down a pair of teenagers 11-8, 9-11, 11-7 in the opening round before losing a tight Round of 16 match to Trang Huynh-McClain and Len Yang, 7-11, 11-4, 11-7.

A Milestone Cameo, Not a Career Change

Agassi has been circling pickleball for years as a JOOLA-sponsored ambassador, as the inaugural chair of Life Time’s pickleball and tennis board, and most recently as the face of the new World Series of Pickleball launching out of Las Vegas. But this is the first time he stepped into a sanctioned pro bracket.

He’s not pivoting careers. Agassi has been clear he doesn’t plan to chase the PPA Tour full-time. The US Open was a one-off — a chance to play alongside the greatest women’s player in the sport and see what pro pickleball actually feels like from inside the ropes.

Why It Matters

For the sport, Agassi on a pro scoreboard is exactly the kind of crossover moment that keeps pickleball in front of mainstream sports audiences. CBS Sports Network is broadcasting the US Open’s closing weekend, and Agassi-Waters clips will almost certainly outlast the Round of 16 result.

For Waters, it’s one more flex on an already unreal résumé — 173 PPA titles and counting, and now a pro debut partner who won eight Grand Slams. For Agassi, it’s a reminder that the pickleball-to-tennis crossover goes both directions now.

The paddle arms race just got another entrant. Honolulu Pickleball Company’s long-awaited Gen 4 lineup — the J6CR, J2CR, and J3CR — started shipping April 15 after pre-orders going back to last winter.

What’s Actually New

The headline tech is a patent-pending Core Reactor™ system paired with Control Joint Technology™, both wrapped around a Gen 4.5 multi-density foam core. That core is EPP (expanded polypropylene) in the center, interlaced with an EVA perimeter foam — a construction aimed at giving you plush feel in the middle of the face without losing pop near the edges. All three models use a CFC carbon fiber surface and all three are 16mm thick.

USA Pickleball approvals landed across the last four months: J6CR on December 11, 2025, J2CR on January 13, and J3CR on February 4. The Crystal Blue Endurance Surface variant of the J6CR — with crystal-infused grit for spin durability — is still pending UPA-A approval and ships in May.

The Price

All three paddles are priced at $195, putting Honolulu in the premium tier alongside Joola, Gearbox, and the post-merger Paddletek Group. That’s not a beginner price — but it’s also not the $250+ territory that some flagship paddles have drifted into.

Why It Matters

Honolulu has been one of the more interesting boutique brands of the last two years — the kind of shop that posts on paddle forums before it shows up at big-box retailers. With a full Gen 4 lineup now in hands, reviewers will start putting real numbers behind the Core Reactor claims.

For recreational players, the broader story is the same one we’ve been tracking all year: the sub-$200 premium category is getting crowded fast, and the gap between “boutique” and “pro-level” paddles is collapsing.

CityPickle is heading back to Central Park’s Wollman Rink for its fourth season, opening April 21 and running through early fall. The operation will once again transform the iconic skating venue into a 14-court pickleball destination — and this year, they’re adding a summer camp for kids.

What’s New

The biggest addition for 2026 is CityPickle’s first-ever summer camp, running July 27 through August 21 with half-day and full-day options. The program features expert coaching at an 8:1 camper-to-coach ratio, which is a solid setup for younger players looking to develop real skills rather than just whack a ball around. It’s also a sign that CityPickle sees long-term demand from families, not just the after-work crowd.

The Court Setup

The facility will offer 182 hours of pickleball play daily from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., with court rentals accommodating up to eight players per session. For players who don’t want to commit to a full rental, six court hours of Community Play are available daily at just $5 per person — serving roughly 336 players per week. Reservations open one week before opening day, with rolling seven-day-advance booking after that.

Why It Matters

When CityPickle first landed in Central Park in 2023, it was a novelty. Now it’s an institution. Turning one of the most famous public spaces in the world into a pickleball venue for four straight summers says something about where the sport sits in mainstream culture. The addition of youth programming is particularly notable — it suggests that CityPickle is evolving from a trendy pop-up into something more like permanent urban sports infrastructure, just without the permanent part. If you’re in New York this spring or summer, it remains one of the best places to play in the city.

India made a serious statement at the 2026 Franklin US Open Pickleball Championships in Naples, Florida, walking away with three gold medals in a performance that underscores the sport’s rapidly expanding global footprint.

The Wins

The standout was Arjun Singh, who pulled double duty and came away with two golds. In the Men’s Singles 5.0 bracket, Singh dispatched American Ashton Patterson in straight sets, 13-11, 11-6. He then teamed up with his older brother Aditya Singh to dominate the Under-18 Boys Doubles final, routing top-seeded Americans Ryder Brown and Soli Messiri 11-1, 11-5 in a match that was never really in doubt.

India’s third gold came from Dhiren Patel, who gutted out a three-set thriller in the 40+ Pro Men’s Singles final, winning 11-9, 3-11, 11-9 to claim the title.

How They Got There

The Indian contingent earned direct entry into the US Open through a partnership between the Indian Pickleball Association (IPA) and tournament organizers — a pipeline that’s starting to pay real dividends. India’s competitive pickleball scene has been building momentum since the IPA-sanctioned PWR 1000 Indian Open drew over 1,500 competitors from 19 countries earlier this month.

Why It Matters

The US Open is pickleball’s biggest stage, and international players winning gold there signals that the sport’s talent pool is genuinely globalizing. India, in particular, has emerged as one of the fastest-growing pickleball markets outside North America, with organized leagues, dedicated facilities, and now results at the highest amateur levels to show for it. For recreational players stateside, it’s a reminder that the next time you step on the court, your sport is truly worldwide.

College pickleball’s biggest weekend is officially here. The 2026 College Pickleball Tour Nationals kicked off today in Peachtree Corners, Georgia, with 64 schools descending on Life Time Peachtree Corners for a four-day, March Madness-style bracket tournament that runs through April 12.

Now in its fifth year, the event has grown from a niche gathering into a legitimate spectacle — and the stakes reflect it. Over $40,000 in prize money is up for grabs, with the first-bracket champion taking home $15,000. Second place earns $5,000, while third and fourth split $5,000 between them. A second bracket ($3,000 top prize), third bracket ($1,000), and a new singles tournament ($500 to the winner) round out the payout structure.

Who’s Favored?

Florida Atlantic enters as the team to beat, boasting the highest team DUPR rating at 21.937. That’s notable given that a separate FAU squad just captured the APP Collegiate Championship in Cape Coral last month. Utah Tech (21.641) is nipping at their heels, while defending champion Texas (20.161) will look to repeat despite a lower overall rating.

New Format Wrinkles

This year’s edition introduces several format changes designed to get more players on the court. A Thursday singles tournament opens the action, followed by a third-team bracket (up to 16 teams) running Friday and Saturday. A Challenger Bracket allows players to enter both mixed and gendered divisions, giving competitors more chances to play — and more paths to prize money.

Why It Matters

College pickleball is quickly becoming one of the sport’s most important pipelines. Events like this give young players competitive reps, visibility, and a taste of tournament culture before they ever step onto a pro court. With DUPR integration providing standardized ratings and the bracket expanding year over year, the CPT Nationals are starting to look like what the NCAA tournament is for basketball — the place where future stars announce themselves. Keep an eye on Peachtree Corners this weekend.

Pickleball’s global footprint just got a whole lot bigger. The Indian Open 2026, which wrapped up April 5 at Crosscourts in Hyderabad, became the first event in India to earn the IPA-sanctioned PWR 1000 designation — a milestone that signals the sport is moving from recreational curiosity to organized competitive infrastructure in one of the world’s largest markets.

The numbers tell the story: over 1,500 players from 19 countries competed across 56 categories for a $50,000 prize pool. Now in its fourth edition, the Indian Open — organized by Global Sports in partnership with the Indian Pickleball Association (IPA) — has attracted more than 4,000 total participants across its history.

What Does PWR 1000 Mean?

The PWR (Professional World Rankings) 1000 designation integrates the tournament into a unified international ranking system, meaning results from the Indian Open now carry weight on the global stage. For Indian players, this is huge — it means they no longer have to travel abroad to earn meaningful ranking points. For the sport’s governing bodies, it represents a model for how private tournament organizers and national associations can work together to legitimize the competitive ecosystem.

Why India Matters

India has emerged as one of pickleball’s fastest-growing markets, driven by a young population, an established racquet-sport culture (badminton and tennis are deeply rooted), and a growing middle class with access to indoor facilities. The IPA sanctioning lends the kind of institutional structure that can accelerate the sport from weekend hobby to genuine competitive pathway.

The Bigger Picture

This follows a trend of pickleball going increasingly international. Between the Pickleball Japan Federation events that made headlines earlier this year, growing interest in Southeast Asia, and now a flagship event in India drawing nearly 20 countries, the sport is no longer a North American story. Recreational players in the U.S. might not feel the impact directly, but a larger global player pool means more competition, more investment, and ultimately a higher ceiling for the sport overall.

The Picklr opened its newest indoor pickleball facility in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood on Saturday, converting the former Theo Chocolate factory at 124 N 35th St into a 27,000-square-foot pickleball hub. The location features 10 indoor courts — including one championship-size court — plus a pro shop and private event space.

The Details

The Fremont courts use pro-quality, outdoor-style surfacing, which should appeal to players who want their indoor game to translate to outdoor play without a jarring transition. The facility is open daily from 6 AM to 11 PM, and programming includes open play, leagues, clinics, and private court reservations.

The Picklr, which now operates locations in 31 states, has been on an aggressive expansion tear over the past two years. The franchise model has helped fill a gap in the market — purpose-built indoor facilities that offer consistent court quality and programming without the country club price tag.

Why Seattle Matters

There’s a nice bit of symmetry here. Pickleball was invented on Bainbridge Island in 1965, just a ferry ride from Seattle, making Washington state the sport’s literal birthplace. The Fremont opening adds to a growing cluster of dedicated pickleball facilities in the Seattle metro area, which has seen several new clubs and court complexes open in the past year alone.

The Bigger Picture

The Picklr’s continued expansion is part of a broader trend we’ve been tracking: the shift from repurposed gymnasiums and shared tennis courts to dedicated, amenity-rich pickleball facilities. For recreational players in the Pacific Northwest, more indoor courts mean fewer weather-related cancellations and more consistent play year-round — which, in a region famous for its rain, is no small thing.

The Franklin US Open Pickleball Championships is back in Naples, Florida from April 11-18, and this year’s edition comes with a milestone: the tournament turns 10. What started as a scrappy upstart event at East Naples Community Park has grown into the largest and most prestigious pickleball tournament on the planet — and the 2026 version is shaping up to match the occasion.

By the Numbers

Last year’s US Open drew more than 55,000 spectators and 3,400 players from all 50 states and 40 countries. The USOP National Pickleball Center will host play across roughly 60 courts surrounding the Zing Zang Championship Court, with the full festival atmosphere — vendor tents, food trucks, sponsor activations, and live entertainment — transforming the park into a weeklong pickleball campus.

What’s on the Line

The pro draw features the biggest names in the sport, including world No. 1 Anna Leigh Waters, who’ll be looking to add to an already absurd trophy collection. But the US Open has always been about more than the pros. The tournament’s amateur brackets are what give the event its unique energy — thousands of recreational and competitive players getting to compete on the same grounds, in the same atmosphere, as the sport’s elite.

How to Watch (and What It Costs)

Here’s the best part for casual fans: you can watch pro and amateur matches on 59 courts for free. Parking runs $10/day or $60 for a weekly pass. Tickets are only required for the Zing Zang Championship Court, where the marquee pro matches go down.

Why It Matters

Ten years ago, a pickleball tournament drawing 55,000 spectators would have sounded delusional. Now it’s just April in Naples. The US Open’s growth mirrors the sport’s trajectory — and for recreational players, it remains the best opportunity to experience top-level pickleball in person without a massive price tag. If you’re anywhere near Southwest Florida next week, it’s worth the trip.

The New York metro area just got a major upgrade on the pickleball front. PickleRage opened its doors on March 26 at 173 Huguenot Street in New Rochelle, debuting a 42,000-square-foot indoor facility that immediately becomes the largest dedicated pickleball complex in Westchester County.

What’s Inside

The facility features 13 regulation-size courts with CushionX surfaces — a joint-friendly flooring system that’s becoming the standard at higher-end pickleball clubs. Beyond the courts, PickleRage includes smart court technology with video recording and livestreaming capabilities, advanced LED lighting, locker rooms with showers, three Full Swing golf simulators, a pro shop, and a players’ lounge.

Programming is led by certified instructor Geoffrey Jagdfeld, who brings more than 30 years of racquet sports coaching experience. The club offers leagues, tournaments, clinics, open play, and private lessons across all skill levels.

Why It Matters

New Rochelle is PickleRage’s first New York location, and it fits a pattern we’ve been tracking all year: purpose-built pickleball facilities are getting bigger, more polished, and more amenity-rich. The days of repurposed tennis courts and community center gymnasiums aren’t over, but they’re increasingly sharing the market with clubs that treat pickleball as a premium experience.

Founding memberships are currently available at reduced rates, with a grand opening celebration planned for early April. If you’re in the lower Westchester area and tired of waiting for outdoor court time, this one’s worth a look.

Championship Sunday at Black Desert Resort delivered — and then some. Anna Leigh Waters captured her latest PPA Triple Crown, Christopher Haworth seized the world No. 1 men’s singles ranking, and the Ben Johns/Gabriel Tardio doubles partnership continued to look unbeatable.

The Results

Men’s Singles: Christopher Haworth defeated Federico Staksrud 11-9, 11-5 to claim his first No. 1 overall ranking. Six months ago, Haworth was seeded 57th. Now he sits atop the men’s singles standings — one of the most dramatic climbs the sport has seen.

Women’s Singles: Anna Leigh Waters beat Kate Fahey 8-11, 11-3, 11-2. Fahey took the opening game, but Waters flipped a switch and ran away with the match from there. The win extends a singles streak that’s become less of a streak and more of a geological era.

Men’s Doubles: Ben Johns and Gabriel Tardio outlasted Hayden Patriquin and Christian Alshon in a five-game battle, 13-11, 3-11, 3-11, 11-2, 11-7. Down two games to one, Johns and Tardio responded with a dominant final two games that showed why this partnership is the one everyone else is chasing.

Women’s Doubles: Anna Bright and Anna Leigh Waters steamrolled Parris Todd and Kate Fahey 11-3, 11-3, 11-0. The scoreline speaks for itself.

Mixed Doubles: Waters and Johns closed out the weekend with an 11-5, 11-0, 15-13 win over Anna Bright and Hayden Patriquin. The third game was the only real drama, but the result never felt in doubt.

What It Means

Haworth’s rise is the story of the 2026 PPA season so far. The former tennis prodigy has gone from virtual unknown to the top of the rankings in under a year — exactly the kind of talent pipeline the sport needs as it continues to grow.

For Waters, it’s business as usual. Another tournament, another Triple Crown. At this point, the conversation isn’t whether she’s the best women’s player in pickleball — it’s whether anyone can even make it interesting.

There’s something fitting about professional pickleball returning to Washington state — the place where the whole sport started on Bainbridge Island back in 1965. The APP Tour’s 2026 AARP Open kicks off today at Sideout Tsunami Pickleball Center in Seattle, running through Sunday, March 29.

What to Expect

The tournament features the full spectrum of competitive play, from 3.0 amateurs all the way up to the APP Tour’s top professionals. But the AARP Open has always been about more than just the pro brackets — it’s built around the idea that pickleball is a sport for every generation, and this year’s event leans into that harder than ever.

AARP Champions and AARP Masters divisions will run alongside the pro draw, giving senior players their own competitive spotlight. It’s the kind of intergenerational format that sets pickleball apart from virtually every other racquet sport.

Fan Experience

If you’re in the Seattle area, general admission and VIP tickets include access to on-court activities led by APP Ambassadors from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day — a nice touch for anyone who wants to hit a few dinks between watching the pros do their thing.

Why It Matters

The APP Tour continues to carve out its own identity alongside the PPA, and events like the AARP Open are a big part of that strategy. While the PPA leans into its marquee pros and resort-venue aesthetics, the APP’s partnership with AARP taps into the recreational player base that actually drives pickleball’s growth numbers. With participation still climbing year over year and the 50-plus demographic representing one of the sport’s fastest-growing segments, this kind of event makes both competitive and business sense.

Catch the action streaming on the APP’s channels through Sunday.

The PPA Greater Zion Cup is rolling through its second half this week at Black Desert Resort in Ivins, Utah, and there’s no shortage of storylines heading into Championship Sunday on March 29.

Early Results and Bracket Watch

Hunter Johnson turned heads in men’s singles with a three-game thriller over Federico Staksrud in the finals — a statement win that continues Johnson’s surge up the PPA rankings this season. In men’s doubles, Ben Johns teamed with Gabe Tardio to take the title, knocking off Christian Alshon and Hayden Patriquin in four games.

The mixed doubles bracket is shaping up as the marquee event of the weekend, with Anna Leigh Waters and Ben Johns, Jorja and JW Johnson, Anna Bright and Hayden Patriquin, and Rachel Rohrabacher and Christian Alshon all advancing to the semifinals.

Women’s Singles: Can Anyone Stop ALW?

Anna Leigh Waters enters the women’s singles draw riding a nearly two-year win streak in the discipline — a run so dominant it’s hard to even call it a streak anymore. Brooke Buckner, Kate Fahey, and Kaitlyn Christian are the names to watch as potential challengers, but unseating Waters in singles remains one of the hardest tasks in professional pickleball.

The Venue

Black Desert Resort, nestled in southern Utah’s red rock landscape, is quickly becoming one of the tour’s most scenic stops. The resort-style setting offers a refreshing change from the convention-center vibes of some PPA events, and the outdoor courts have delivered excellent conditions so far.

Championship Sunday broadcasts air March 29 on PickleballTV. If you’re looking for a reason to park yourself on the couch this weekend, this is it.

Metro Detroit just got a whole lot dinkier. Greystone Pickleball Club officially opened its doors in Auburn Hills, Michigan on March 14, unveiling a 60,000-square-foot facility that immediately becomes the state’s premier indoor pickleball destination.

The Details

The club features 17 indoor courts, including a championship court with seating for over 300 spectators — designed to host sanctioned tournaments and league play. The facility also includes a full kitchen, bar, lounge areas, and pro shop, positioning it as more than just a place to play. It’s a full social hub built entirely around pickleball.

Greystone joins a growing wave of purpose-built pickleball complexes popping up across the country. The PICKLR franchise is opening a location in Santa Barbara (converting a former Bed Bath & Beyond, naturally), and the New York Pickleball Club is targeting a spring opening in New City with nine cushioned courts and 22-foot ceilings.

What This Means for the Sport

The opening of dedicated, large-scale pickleball facilities like Greystone is one of the clearest signs that the sport’s growth isn’t slowing down. For years, players have been squeezing onto converted tennis courts and fighting for gym time. Purpose-built clubs with proper lighting, surfaces, and social spaces represent a maturation of the pickleball infrastructure — and they’re popping up in markets well beyond the Sun Belt.

For Michigan players who’ve been braving outdoor courts in questionable weather or waiting for court time at multipurpose rec centers, Greystone is a game-changer. Seventeen courts under one roof means more play, less waiting, and a reason to keep dinking year-round.

The Pickleball Slam is back for round four, and this year’s matchup might be the most intriguing yet. On April 15, tennis legends Andre Agassi and James Blake will square off against Anna Leigh Waters and Genie Bouchard in a mixed-gender doubles exhibition at Hard Rock Live in Hollywood, Florida — with $1 million on the line and the whole thing airing live on ESPN.

What’s Different This Time

Previous Slams have largely been tennis-vs.-tennis affairs, but the 2026 edition flips the script by pitting two of the sport’s crossover icons against two players who represent different sides of pickleball’s growing appeal. Waters, the undisputed queen of pro pickleball with 42 career PPA Triple Crowns, teams up with Bouchard, the former tennis star who’s become a legit force since joining Major League Pickleball’s LA Mad Drops.

On the other side, Agassi — a Pickleball Slam veteran at this point — partners with Blake, whose athleticism and hand speed have translated well to the smaller court.

Why It Matters

Love it or roll your eyes at it, the Pickleball Slam has become one of the sport’s biggest mainstream visibility events. Last year’s edition drew strong ESPN ratings and introduced pickleball to audiences who might never tune into a PPA broadcast. The mixed-gender format this time around feels like a smart evolution — it showcases the sport’s accessibility while raising the competitive intrigue.

For recreational players, the Slam is a reminder that pickleball continues to attract serious star power and serious money. ESPN’s commitment to broadcasting the event in primetime signals that networks still see the sport as a ratings draw, which bodes well for everything from MLP broadcast deals to local facility investment.

Mark your calendars: April 15, Hard Rock Live, ESPN. Paddles up.

If you needed more proof that pickleball is a genuinely global sport now, look no further than Ho Chi Minh City this week. The Pickleball D-Joy Tour 2026 — Leg 1, presented by Petrolimex, runs March 19–22 at the D-Joy South Saigon Complex and features a field that would be competitive at any tournament in the world.

Who’s Playing

The confirmed entry list reads like a greatest-hits collection of international pickleball talent: Kyle Yates, Sofia Sewing, Casey Diamond, Ryler DeHeart, Megan Fudge, and Jack Munro are among the pros making the trip. They’ll be joined by rising stars from India, Vietnam, and across Southeast Asia, including local favorites Quang Duong and Trinh Linh Giang.

Sewing is coming in hot after a Triple Crown performance at the APP Tour’s Kuala Lumpur stop — the first-ever Asian event on that circuit — which drew 1,760 players from 28 countries.

Why It Matters

This isn’t just an exhibition. The D-Joy Tour awards Global Pickleball Alliance (GPA) world ranking points and DRP rankings credit, meaning results here carry real weight on the international stage. The prize pool totals nearly 3 billion VND (roughly $120,000 USD), and Yates has even launched an academy in partnership with the D-Joy organization to develop local talent.

Vietnam’s pickleball scene has exploded over the past two years, building on a breakout 2025 Masters event that put the country on the competitive map. The government and corporate sponsors — Petrolimex is one of Vietnam’s largest state-owned enterprises — are investing heavily in facilities and events.

The Bigger Picture

Between the APP Tour’s expansion into Asia, the D-Joy Tour’s growing prestige, and the sport’s Olympic ambitions, international pickleball is entering a new phase. For American players and fans, it’s worth paying attention — the next wave of elite competition might not come from Texas or Florida, but from Ho Chi Minh City or Kuala Lumpur.

The PPA Veolia Texas Open wrapped up in McKinney over the weekend, and if you’re keeping count — and ALW definitely is — Anna Leigh Waters just picked up career Triple Crown No. 42.

Wind Was the Story

Mother Nature nearly stole the show. Gusting winds turned the outdoor courts at The Courts of McKinney into a chaotic proving ground, with players scrambling to adjust shot selection and dealing with unpredictable ball flight all weekend. It didn’t change the final outcomes much, but it made for some wild rallies and a few bracket upsets along the way.

Singles: Jansen and Johns Weather the Storm

Lea Jansen took women’s singles gold with a gutsy comeback against Salome Devidze, dropping the first game 9–11 before rattling off two convincing wins (11–7, 11–2) to claim the title. On the men’s side, Ben Johns did what Ben Johns does — lose the first game 2–11 to Chris Haworth, then flip the switch and close it out 11–3, 11–9.

Doubles: Dominant Performances

Waters and Catherine Parenteau were surgical in women’s doubles, dispatching Smith and Kovalova 11–3, 11–3, 11–4 in a match that never felt close. In men’s doubles, Dylan Frazier and JW Johnson took the title over Wright and Bar with a 9–11, 11–3, 11–5, 11–4 scoreline — dropping one tight game before pulling away decisively.

Waters and Johns paired up in mixed doubles to beat the Johnson siblings 11–2, 11–7, 11–9, completing Waters’ Triple Crown and giving Johns titles in two divisions.

What It Means

The Texas Open reinforced what we already suspected: the top of the PPA Tour is as stacked as it’s ever been, but the very best — Waters, Johns, Jansen — keep finding ways to win even when conditions conspire against them. For recreational players watching at home, the takeaway is simple: if the pros can dink in 30 mph gusts, you can handle a little breeze at your local courts.

College pickleball has a new powerhouse. Florida Atlantic University swept through the 2026 APP Selkirk U.S. Collegiate Championships in Cape Coral, Florida, claiming the team title over Utah Tech and stacking up individual hardware in the process.

The March 6–8 event brought 40 of the nation’s top college pickleball programs together for team and individual competition, and FAU left little doubt about who the best program in the country is right now.

FAU’s Alec LaMacchio Leads the Charge

Freshman standout Alec LaMacchio was the story of the tournament. He took the men’s singles crown with a 15-11, 11-15, 15-7 win over teammate Jayden Broderick in an all-FAU final, then teamed up with Broderick to win men’s doubles in a comeback thriller against Texas’s Jack Munro and Eli Trumeter, 4-11, 11-7, 11-9.

Florida State’s Tate Keber grabbed the women’s singles title with a dominant 15-9, 15-4 performance over Utah Tech’s Lauren Mercado, while Utah Tech’s Mary Monson and Liam Duffin took mixed doubles convincingly, 15-2.

Why This Matters

The collegiate pickleball scene has exploded over the past two years, and results like these are starting to matter for the pro pipeline. Players like Munro — who’s already registered for the D-Joy Tour in Vietnam later this month — are proving that the college-to-pro pathway is real and accelerating.

With USA Pickleball’s collegiate division continuing to expand and DUPR ratings now integrated into college play, expect the talent level at these events to keep climbing. FAU just set the bar for everyone else.

The PPA Tour rolled into The Courts of McKinney this week for the Veolia Texas Open, and the early rounds have already produced some storylines worth watching.

Over 1,100 pro and amateur players are competing at the March 9–15 event, one of the biggest PPA stops of the spring swing. The progressive draw format — one round per bracket per day — has kept the action spread across the week, with championship Sunday still ahead.

Haworth Takes Men’s Singles

The biggest headline so far: Chris Haworth captured men’s singles gold, defeating Christian Alshon in the final. Haworth worked his way through a stacked semifinal bracket that included Federico Staksrud and Matthew Finnerty, and his title run marks a significant moment in what’s been a steady climb up the PPA rankings.

Men’s Doubles: Johns and Tardio Roll

In men’s doubles, the top-seeded pairing of Ben Johns and Gabe Tardio lived up to their billing, taking down the No. 2 seeds Christian Alshon and Hayden Patriquin in the final. Johns continues to look unbeatable in doubles formats this season, and his partnership with Tardio has quickly become one of the most feared on tour.

What’s Still to Come

Women’s singles, women’s doubles, and mixed doubles championship matches are still on the schedule as the tournament progresses through the week. With the competitive depth on display in McKinney — and the momentum from an unpredictable early-season stretch — the remaining brackets should deliver plenty of drama heading into the weekend.

The Texas Open is the latest stop in what’s shaping up to be one of the most competitive PPA seasons yet, with parity across the board and new names challenging the established order.

DUPR announced it is developing a dedicated rating system for wheelchair pickleball athletes, with the framework set to officially launch at the 2026 Franklin US Open Pickleball Championships in Naples, Florida.

What It Does

The new system will be integrated directly into DUPR’s existing global platform — the same infrastructure that rates millions of able-bodied players worldwide. For wheelchair athletes, that means access to the same kind of reliable, data-driven ratings that have become standard across the rest of competitive pickleball.

The primary goals are practical: standardize tournament bracketing, reduce early-round mismatches, and give adaptive competitors consistent data to track their development over time.

Why It Matters

Wheelchair pickleball has been growing steadily, but competition has largely lacked the structured rating infrastructure that the broader sport takes for granted. Without standardized ratings, tournament organizers have had to rely on self-reported skill levels or subjective seeding — which can lead to lopsided brackets and a frustrating experience for players at every level.

A DUPR-backed system changes that. It brings the same algorithmic objectivity to adaptive play that has helped the platform become the default rating tool across recreational leagues, PPA events, and MLP.

Endorsed by the US Open

US Open president Ben Weinberger endorsed the initiative. The US Open already features a dedicated wheelchair division, making Naples a natural venue for the debut. The collaboration between DUPR, wheelchair athletes, and tournament organizers suggests this isn’t a token gesture — it’s being built with input from the community it’s designed to serve.

For recreational players who may not follow adaptive pickleball closely, this is a sign of how rapidly the sport’s infrastructure is maturing. Inclusion isn’t just a talking point anymore — it’s getting baked into the competitive framework.

The SXY Newport Beach Open delivered exactly what the preview promised — and then some. Anna Leigh Waters claimed her second triple crown of the 2026 PPA Tour season, winning women’s singles, women’s doubles, and mixed doubles across a dominant weekend in Southern California.

Waters Keeps Rolling

The women’s singles final was never in doubt. Waters dispatched Lea Jansen 11-2, 11-1 in a performance that extended one of the most staggering streaks in pickleball: she hasn’t lost a singles match in over 647 days. At this point, the question isn’t whether she’ll win — it’s whether anyone can take a game off her.

In women’s doubles, Waters and Anna Bright continued their perfect 2026 run, beating Rachel Rohrabacher and Parris Todd 11-4, 11-5, 11-3. The pair remain undefeated on the season. And in mixed doubles, Waters teamed with Ben Johns to top Tina Pisnik and Eric Oncins 11-4, 11-2, 12-10 — with the third game offering the only real resistance of the weekend.

Hunter Stays No. 1

On the men’s side, Hunter Johnson won his second singles title of 2026, edging Federico Staksrud in a tight final, 12-10, 11-9. Johnson maintains his grip on the No. 1 overall ranking and the top seed heading into the second half of the season.

Johns and Tardio Make It Four Straight

Ben Johns and Gabe Tardio captured their fourth consecutive men’s doubles gold, defeating Christian Alshon and Hayden Patriquin 11-6, 11-2, 3-11, 11-8. The third-game hiccup was a rare moment of vulnerability for a pairing that has looked nearly unbeatable all season.

Cinderella Run in Mixed

The mixed doubles bracket produced the tournament’s best underdog story. The 10th-seeded team of Tina Pisnik and Eric Oncins knocked off multiple higher-ranked opponents — including the No. 3 and No. 2 seeds — before falling to Waters and Johns in the final. It’s the kind of run that makes the progressive draw format compelling, even when the top seed ultimately prevails.

The PPA Tour now heads toward its second half, with players eyeing qualifying spots for May’s PPA Finals in San Clemente.

Alex Crum stepped back onto a PPA Tour court this week at the SXY Newport Beach Open, marking his first competitive action since undergoing surgery in late 2025 to repair a torn lateral meniscus. The 34-year-old had been sidelined for roughly three months — an eternity in a sport where the tour schedule barely pauses.

A Quiet Comeback for a Loud Singles Game

Crum became one of the more compelling stories on the 2025 PPA Tour with several deep singles runs that established him as a legitimate threat to the top of the draw. His aggressive, athletic style made him a fan favorite, and his absence from the first four stops of the 2026 season left a noticeable gap in the singles brackets.

At Newport Beach, Crum entered both men’s singles and men’s doubles, partnering with Chris Haworth in the doubles draw. The pairing is an intriguing one — Haworth rides momentum from his Mesa Cup singles title into the event and brings a complementary mix of touch and power.

What to Watch

The key question for Crum isn’t talent — it’s whether the knee holds up through a full tournament week. Meniscus injuries can be tricky, and competitive pickleball demands constant lateral movement, quick stops, and explosive transitions from the baseline to the kitchen. A few early-round wins would go a long way toward proving the rehab is fully behind him.

With the PPA Tour now at its midway point, Crum faces a compressed window to accumulate enough points for a top-8 singles qualifying spot at May’s PPA Finals in San Clemente. He’ll need strong results at Newport Beach and the remaining stops to make that math work, but if the knee cooperates, few players on tour match his raw singles ability.

Broadcast coverage of the Newport Beach Open continues through Sunday on Pickleballtv, with the Round of 16 beginning Thursday at 1 p.m. ET.

It didn’t take long for MLP Trade Window #2 to heat up. Just one day after the window opened on March 2, three trades involving six teams were announced on Tuesday, March 3 — several of which had reportedly been agreed upon during draft weekend and were waiting for the window to officially open.

The Deals

LA Mad Drops acquire Genie Bouchard from Florida Smash

The biggest name to move was Bouchard, the former Wimbledon semifinalist who has become one of pickleball’s most compelling crossover stories. Currently tied for No. 8 in the PPA Tour women’s singles rankings, Bouchard gives Los Angeles a potentially devastating singles lineup alongside Catherine Parenteau, Ben Johns, and Callan Dawson Joseph. Florida gets Paula Rives Palau and cash in return.

Brooklyn acquires Christian Alshon and Luca Mack from Texas Ranchers

Brooklyn shipped Dylan Frazier, Matthew Barlow, and cash to Texas in exchange for Alshon and Mack. Frazier is one of the more talented young players in the league, but Brooklyn appears to be betting on Alshon’s doubles versatility and Mack’s upside.

Texas Ranchers acquire Layne Sleeth from California Black Bears

In a separate deal, Texas picked up Sleeth while sending Sahra Dennehy and cash to California. Combined with the Frazier acquisition, the Ranchers clearly overhauled their roster philosophy in a single afternoon.

What It Means

The speed of these moves signals that teams are treating roster construction more aggressively than ever. With the trade window open through July 15 and a new waiver wire period available on July 1, expect more deals as teams evaluate early-season performance and look for the right chemistry heading into the playoff push.

For fans still getting used to MLP’s franchise model, this is the kind of offseason drama that builds emotional investment — knowing that your team’s roster can shift in meaningful ways between events. Whether these moves pan out won’t be clear until group play begins, but the early action suggests 2026 could be the league’s most competitive season yet.

Major League Pickleball’s second trade window of the 2026 season opened Monday, March 2 at 10 a.m. ET, giving teams until July 15 to make roster moves. After an offseason that featured a blockbuster draft and a flurry of Trade Window #1 deals, teams now have months to assess their lineups and make adjustments heading into group play.

What Happened in Trade Window #1

The first window closed February 15 and produced several notable moves. Among the highlights:

• Chicago acquired Zane Navratil from New Jersey, adding one of the sport’s most marketable and versatile players to their roster.
• Atlanta made two big additions, landing Kaitlyn Christian from Texas and Jay Devilliers from Miami to bolster their doubles depth.
• A three-team deal between Bay Area, Carolina, and Las Vegas reshuffled multiple rosters, with Carolina picking up DJ Young and Angie Walker while Las Vegas added Brandon French and Liz Truluck.
• Bay Area was the busiest team, involved in multiple trades and acquiring Pablo Tellez, Samantha Parker, and Mya Bui across several transactions — while sending Alix Truong to Miami.
• Palm Beach picked up Dekel Bar from Brooklyn and Tina Pisnik from Texas, investing in roster upgrades with cash-heavy deals.

What’s New in Window #2

The rules for Trade Window #2 include a waiver wire period on July 1, during which teams can swap out one rostered player for an available UPA-signed, non-rostered player. It’s a new wrinkle designed to give teams one last adjustment before the playoff push.

For recreational players, the trade activity is a reminder of just how much the team-based format has matured. MLP’s expanded 16-team structure — combined with keeper rules, drafts, and now multi-window trade periods — increasingly mirrors the roster-building mechanics of major North American sports leagues. Whether that translates to deeper fan engagement remains the big question for MLP’s 2026 season.

The 2026 PPA Tour rolls into Southern California this week for the SXY Newport Beach Open, running March 3–8 at the Tennis and Pickleball Club at Newport Beach. It’s the fifth of ten PPA Tour stops this season, and the stakes are quietly building as players jockey for top-8 singles and top-16 doubles qualifying spots ahead of May’s Finals in San Clemente.

Doubles Dominance

The biggest storyline heading into Newport Beach: two teams are still unbeaten in 2026. Ben Johns and Gabe Tardio haven’t dropped a men’s doubles match this season and enter as prohibitive favorites to keep that streak alive. On the women’s side, Anna Bright and Anna Leigh Waters have been equally dominant, rolling through every draw without a loss.

Both partnerships will be tested by the progressive draw format, which means the competition tightens as the week goes on, with broadcast coverage on Pickleballtv beginning Thursday.

Singles Shakeups

The singles draws have their own intrigue. Catherine Parenteau is sitting out the event entirely, while Ben Johns and Parris Todd are skipping singles to focus on doubles only. That opens the door for Chris Haworth, who rides momentum from his Mesa Cup victory into the No. 3 seed, and for other contenders looking to make a move in the standings.

Anna Leigh Waters remains the heavy favorite on the women’s side.

New Mixed Partnerships

Mixed doubles features some fresh pairings worth watching, including Alix Truong teaming with Christian Alshon and Tyra Black partnering with Noe Khlif. With the progressive draw format giving every match weight, new partnerships will be tested quickly.

The Newport Beach Open comes just eight days after the Mesa Cup — a tight turnaround that could reward depth and fitness as much as pure skill.

If you’ve ever screamed “that was out!” at a rec game — or, worse, watched a pro match decided by a questionable line call — Major League Pickleball just announced the beginning of the end for that particular brand of heartbreak.

MLP has partnered with Owl AI, a sports technology startup, to bring automated line calling and faster video challenge resolution to the 2026 season. The league is joining Owl AI’s Trailblazer Program, which will integrate AI-powered computer vision with existing broadcast camera feeds — no expensive proprietary hardware required.

The system uses generative AI and computer vision to analyze video in real time, delivering what Owl AI calls “human-level accuracy” in line-call judgments. It will work alongside MLP’s existing referees rather than replacing them, providing an additional layer of accuracy and dramatically speeding up the challenge process.

“It is paramount for MLP to strategically align with innovative companies like Owl AI to enhance the reliability of our challenge system,” said MLP Commissioner Samin Odhwani.

The technology is set to debut at the Carvana PPA Tour event in Zion, Utah in March before rolling out across the full MLP 2026 season.

Why This Matters

Line calls have been one of the most persistent pain points in professional pickleball. Unlike tennis, which has used Hawk-Eye electronic line calling for years, pickleball has relied almost entirely on human referees and player honor calls. At the pro level, where points are worth prize money and ranking points, disputed calls have led to some genuinely ugly moments.

Owl AI’s software-only approach is notable because it keeps costs down — a critical factor for a sport still building its infrastructure. The company, founded in May 2025, previously gained attention for AI-judging professional snowboarding at X Games Aspen earlier this year.

For rec players, the immediate impact is zero — nobody’s installing computer vision at your local YMCA. But if the tech proves reliable at the pro level, it sets a standard for how the sport handles disputed calls as it continues to grow.

If you’ve been eyeing a shot at the USA Pickleball National Championships, the path just got wider. USA Pickleball has released the 2026 Golden Ticket Tournament schedule, and it features returning favorites alongside new stops stretching from coast to coast.

Golden Ticket Tournaments remain one of the most direct routes to Nationals qualification. Every Golden Ticket event automatically awards 4,500 Tiered Point System (TPS) points — exactly the minimum needed to meet Nationals eligibility. Medal with gold, and you’ll earn priority registration on top of that.

2026 Golden Ticket Stops

The schedule includes tournaments in Jacksonville, FL (May 13–17), Glen Allen, VA (May 15–17), Wayne, NJ (June 5–7), Grand Rapids, MI (July 7–12), and Seattle, WA (July 8–12), with additional stops expected to be announced. The geographic spread is deliberate — USA Pickleball partnered with local tournament directors to bring sanctioned events to regions that haven’t historically had a direct pipeline to Nationals.

Senior Players Get More Opportunities

One of the biggest changes for 2026 is the expanded access for players in the 70+, 75+, and 80+ age brackets. USA Pickleball has significantly increased opportunities for senior players to obtain early registration to Nationals, reflecting the sport’s massive and growing older demographic.

The Big Picture

The 2026 USA Pickleball National Championships return to Barnes Tennis Center in San Diego from October 31 through November 8. It’s a familiar venue that hosted a well-regarded Nationals in previous years.

For competitive rec players, the Golden Ticket system is worth understanding even if you’re not planning to compete at Nationals this year. These tournaments draw strong fields and offer a level of organization and officiating a step above typical local events. They’re also a good benchmark for where your game stacks up regionally.

Full details and registration links are available at usapickleball.org/goldenticket2026.

Hampton Roads is quickly becoming one of the hottest pickleball markets on the East Coast, with multiple new indoor facilities either opening now or on deck for 2026.

Palace of Pickleball — Virginia Beach

The newest addition is Palace of Pickleball, opening this month at 4239 Holland Road in Virginia Beach. The facility features seven regulation-size courts with CushionX surfaces, along with locker rooms, a party room for private events, and grab-and-go food options. VIP members get keyless entry for maximum flexibility.

Owner Lisa Cardona said the project grew from a personal obsession. “I fell in love with the sport, but even more than that, I fell in love with the way it brings people together,” she told the Daily Press.

The Pickle Pad — Newport News

Coming this summer, The Pickle Pad will take over a 22,000-square-foot space inside Patrick Henry Mall in Newport News. The concept goes beyond courts — the facility will feature tournament-ready playing surfaces alongside social yard games and Crave Social Eatery, a full-service bar and restaurant. It’s the latest example of the “pickleball as social hub” model that’s driving the indoor facility boom nationwide.

A Region Catching Up to Demand

Hampton Roads already has the Hampton Roads Pickleball Club, which opened eight climate-controlled courts at the DW Center in Newport News last September and has been running beginner lessons, clinics, and round-robin play seven days a week. Norfolk Indoor Sports Turf also offers a single court available 24/7 in the Ghent neighborhood.

The wave of openings tracks with a national trend. USA Pickleball added over 2,300 new playing locations to its database in 2025, pushing the national total past 18,000. For recreational players in Hampton Roads, the days of fighting for outdoor court time are quickly becoming a thing of the past.

The PPA Tour’s Carvana Mesa Cup wrapped up Championship Sunday in Mesa, Arizona with a pair of statement upsets that shook up the early-season picture.

The Mixed Doubles Stunner

Anna Bright and Hayden Patriquin finally got over the hump against Anna Leigh Waters and Ben Johns, taking the mixed doubles title 11-8, 11-9, 11-3. The win was especially sweet — Bright and Patriquin had lost all six of their previous meetings with the top-seeded duo, with most going the distance. This time, they didn’t just win. They dominated in the third game.

It’s a huge confidence boost for a partnership that’s looked increasingly dangerous in 2026 and signals that the mixed doubles field may be more open than anyone expected heading into the season.

Haworth’s Perfect Run

Chris Haworth turned in the most impressive individual performance of the weekend, rolling through the men’s singles bracket without dropping a single game — including a decisive 11-6, 11-6 win over Ben Johns in the final. It’s Haworth’s second gold of 2026 and moves him to third in the PPA men’s singles rankings. Johns, who had a packed Championship Sunday across multiple events, didn’t have his sharpest stuff in the final.

Business as Usual Elsewhere

Anna Leigh Waters reasserted her dominance in women’s singles, losing just 21 points across five matches en route to gold, capping the run with an 11-3, 11-1 demolition of Kate Fahey in the final.

In women’s doubles, Waters teamed with Bright to take the title over Jorja Johnson and Tyra Black in three games. And Ben Johns bounced back from his singles loss by pairing with Gabe Tardio to win their fourth consecutive men’s doubles gold, edging Patriquin and Christian Alshon in a tight four-game final.

What It Means

Two tournaments into 2026, a clear theme is emerging: Ben Johns and Anna Leigh Waters are still the standard, but the field is closing in — especially in mixed doubles and men’s singles. With MLP’s first event on the horizon, the battle for partner chemistry and ranking points is only going to intensify.

Andre Agassi is getting into the pickleball business — and he’s not messing around.

The tennis legend and longtime Las Vegas resident announced the launch of the World Series of Pickleball, a new professional competition that will be headquartered in Las Vegas. Agassi Sports Entertainment Corp. has partnered with TEAM Marketing AG, a Switzerland-based sports events development company with over 30 years of experience — including work on the UEFA Champions League — to build the series into a global property.

“Pickleball has become a meaningful part of my life as a player, a fan, and someone who genuinely enjoys the sport,” Agassi said. He emphasized the sport’s unique accessibility and competitive potential, saying the series aims to provide “a global stage, where anyone who steps onto the court has the opportunity to compete and win.”

TEAM Marketing CEO Ronald Boreta pointed to the firm’s deep background in developing major international sporting events as a foundation for building the World Series of Pickleball into a commercially viable, lasting property.

What This Means

Details on format, schedule, prize money, and player involvement haven’t been announced yet — but the partnership alone signals serious ambition. TEAM Marketing’s resume includes some of the biggest events in world sports, and Agassi’s name carries enormous crossover appeal.

The pickleball landscape already features the PPA Tour and Major League Pickleball as established circuits. Where the World Series of Pickleball fits into that ecosystem remains to be seen, but Agassi’s involvement and the Las Vegas headquarters suggest a competition designed for spectacle and mainstream attention.

For recreational players, the bigger story is what another high-profile investment means for the sport’s trajectory. More money, more eyeballs, more legitimacy — and Las Vegas as a potential pickleball destination city.

The Zimmer Biomet Cape Coral Open (Feb. 10–15) delivered drama, milestones, and a reminder that the sport’s top players aren’t loosening their grip anytime soon.

The Highlights

Anna Leigh Waters and Ben Johns each walked away with two gold medals. They teamed up to win mixed doubles in a five-game thriller against Anna Bright and Hayden Patriquin, surviving a match point in game four before closing it out 11-7, 9-11, 3-11, 12-10, 11-5. Waters also paired with Bright to sweep women’s doubles without dropping a single game, averaging a dominant 11-3.6 scoreline per match.

In men’s singles, Argentina’s Federico Staksrud earned his 18th career singles gold — on his 30th birthday, no less — defeating Hunter Johnson 11-9, 11-7 in a tactical cat-and-mouse final. Kaitlyn Christian took the women’s singles title with a come-from-behind win over Genie Bouchard, losing game one 15-13 before rattling off 11-6, 11-2 victories. Ben Johns and Gabe Tardio claimed men’s doubles gold over CJ Klinger and JW Johnson.

Milestones

Anna Bright reached a notable career landmark, joining the exclusive 30-30-30 Club — 30 gold, 30 silver, and 30 bronze medals on the PPA Tour. Catherine Parenteau is the only other player to achieve the feat.

Full Results

Event	Gold	Silver	Bronze
Women’s Singles	Kaitlyn Christian	Genie Bouchard	Lea Jansen
Men’s Singles	Federico Staksrud	Hunter Johnson	Christian Alshon
Women’s Doubles	Bright / Waters	Jade & Jackie Kawamoto	Johnson / Black
Men’s Doubles	Tardio / Johns	Klinger / JW Johnson	Alshon / Patriquin
Mixed Doubles	Waters / Johns	Bright / Patriquin	Rohrabacher / Alshon

The PPA Tour continues its 2026 season with events running through May before the MLP season kicks off.

Anna Leigh Waters’ new signature paddle with Franklin Sports — the Aurelius — has officially received UPA-A certification, clearing the way for the world’s top-ranked player to use it in professional competition.

The approval, granted on February 6, came roughly a month after Waters announced her departure from longtime sponsor Paddletek and signed a long-term deal with Franklin. The Aurelius name draws from the Latin word for “golden,” a fitting nod to ALW’s dominant run atop the sport.

The paddle is available in three core thicknesses: a 12.7mm model (which Waters will compete with), a 14mm, and a 16mm. All three share the same 15.7" x 7.9" face dimensions and 5.1" handle. Under the hood, the Aurelius features Franklin’s T700 carbon fiber surface for spin, double thermoforming construction, and a PowerFlex core designed for pop without sacrificing stability.

For recreational players eyeing the same setup as pickleball’s most decorated pro, the Aurelius is currently available for pre-order and should start shipping March 1. It’s worth noting the paddle has UPA-A approval but has not yet received USA Pickleball certification — something to keep in mind if you play exclusively in USAP-sanctioned events.

Waters joins a growing Franklin pro roster that includes Parris Todd, Hayden Patriquin, Megan Fudge, and Will Howells. With Nike handling her apparel and footwear as of January, ALW’s brand refresh heading into 2026 is now complete — and the rest of the tour is officially on notice.

Major League Pickleball’s keeper deadline came and went on February 15, and the fallout is significant. All 20 teams submitted their keeper rosters, and several franchise-caliber players are now headed to the draft pool.

The biggest surprises? Anna Bright was released by the St. Louis Shock, Jorja Johnson was dropped by the Dallas Flash (most analysts expected teammate Tyra Black to go instead), and reigning champion Columbus Sliders voluntarily parted ways with Lea Jansen — a move nobody saw coming from a team that didn’t need to make it.

Perhaps the most dramatic overhaul belongs to the Phoenix Flames, who kept only Jessie Irvine and released their entire remaining roster, including Tyson McGuffin, Jack Sock, Genie Bouchard, Alex Walker, and Pesa Teoni. On the opposite end, the Palm Beach Royals stood pat and dropped nobody, while the SoCal Hard Eights went full teardown with zero keepers.

The LA Mad Drops are going all-in, retaining Ben Johns, Catherine Parenteau, Jade Kawamoto, and Max Freeman at a league-high roster cost of $805,000. Over in New Jersey, the 5s locked up Anna Leigh Waters, Will Howells, and Noe Khlif as their core heading into the season.

With this many elite players now available, the upcoming MLP draft is shaping up to be one of the deepest talent pools in league history. For fans, that means more competitive parity — and for team owners working the phones, a very busy few weeks ahead.

The MLP season kicks off May 22.

Major League Pickleball has officially announced its 2026 season will feature 16 teams, up from 12 in 2025. The expansion includes new franchises in Nashville, Denver, Portland, and Philadelphia.

Team ownership groups include a mix of professional athletes, entertainment figures, and private equity firms. The expanded format will include a longer regular season with more events across the country, giving fans more opportunities to see top-level professional pickleball in person.

“This expansion reflects the incredible momentum our sport is experiencing,” said MLP Commissioner. “Each of these four cities demonstrated overwhelming demand for professional pickleball, and we’re thrilled to bring the competition to them.”

The 2026 season is expected to begin in March with a new draft format that will allow expansion teams to build competitive rosters from day one.

The Dink City Sports Complex opened its doors in Austin, Texas this week, boasting 48 indoor courts across 120,000 square feet. The facility represents the largest single-site pickleball complex in the world.

Features include climate-controlled courts with professional-grade surfaces, two fully stocked pro shops, training academies run by certified professionals, recovery suites with cold plunge and sauna facilities, and a restaurant with views overlooking the main show courts.

“We wanted to create a destination, not just a place to play,” said the facility’s founder. “Pickleball is a lifestyle, and this space reflects that.” The complex also includes dedicated spaces for youth programs and adaptive pickleball for players with disabilities.

Court reservations are already booking out weeks in advance, with membership options starting at $79 per month for unlimited court time during off-peak hours.

New data from USA Pickleball and the Sports & Fitness Industry Association shows continued explosive growth, with an estimated 48.3 million Americans having played pickleball at least once in the past year.

The core player base — those playing 8 or more times per year — grew 25% to 11.2 million. The sport remains the fastest-growing in America for the fifth consecutive year, outpacing padel, flag football, and trail running.

Growth is strongest in the 25-34 age demographic, challenging the perception that pickleball is primarily a retirees’ sport. Facility construction has responded accordingly, with over 1,500 new dedicated pickleball venues opening in 2025 alone.

“We’re seeing a generational shift,” said the SFIA’s director of research. “The sport has crossed from niche to mainstream, and there’s no sign of it slowing down.”

USA Pickleball’s rules committee has announced that rally scoring and modified serve rules will be tested in select tournaments throughout the 2026 season.

The proposed rally scoring format would award a point on every rally regardless of which team served. Proponents argue it creates more predictable match durations for broadcast schedules and increases excitement. Critics worry it fundamentally changes the strategic nature of the game.

The serve modifications under review would allow a drop serve from any height, removing the current below-waist restriction. This change aims to simplify the rules for new players while maintaining competitive balance.

“These aren’t final decisions — they’re experiments,” clarified the rules committee chair. “We’re committed to evolving the sport thoughtfully, and player feedback from these test events will drive any permanent changes.”

The first test events are scheduled for April, with results expected to inform the 2027 rulebook.