Team captain Anna Linton can’t wait for the Premier Pickleball League Masters after team line-ups for its debut season were announced this week.
Anna and Rob Williams are co-captains of RW Pickleball who will take on five other teams in the inaugural 2024/25 PPL Masters (for 50+ players) which starts in Bolton on 6 July.
The addition of a Masters and a Challenger PPL (for juniors) alongside the main Franklin PPL expands and augments the format for its second season.
Anna and Rob are joined by Stu Simpson, Helen Kenna, Rachel Kirk and Andy Hill in the RW Pickleball line-up. The other teams are Team SCAN (captained by Julie Mac), JDS Food Fighters (Nathan Hill), Wimbledon Royale (David Youngs), UK Pickleball Shop (Nohemi Reynoso) and MCMX (Richard Love).
All PPL Masters teams have three women and three men. Each fixture in the Masters PPL format includes one singles match, gender doubles and a mixed doubles match, with a dreambreaker in the event of a 2-2 tie.
After Bolton next month, the PPL visits Norwich (31 August – 1 September), Southampton (19-20 October), Kingsley Tennis Centre near Aldershot (4-5 January) and Basingstoke (22-23 February) before a grand finale at a date and location to be confirmed.
Masters team captain Anna, who has also been selected in Mollie Knaggs’ team in the premier PPL competition, told Pickleball52: “The team format makes it more fun and it will probably give everyone just the right level of competitiveness.
“We’ll play four rounds before the final and our performances give us an advantage in the finals weekend, so there is obviously an incentive to do well and at the same time everyone has an opportunity to win the final.
“Rob and I pick the team so that gives us a lot of responsibility in each match. It’s up to us to decide who plays singles, doubles and mixed and to judge which combinations work well.”
Anna won medals at the recent Dutch Open and Reballution Cup in Rota, southern Spain, which were her first tournaments outside of the UK.
As a teenager, Anna earned a tennis scholarship to a US college and remained in the States for over a decade after graduating. She returned to her native Norwich but her tennis participation was hampered by an injury in her 40s. In search of that competitive buzz in other sports, she tried golf and netball, but her eureka moment came when she was introduced to pickleball by David Youngs (another PPL Masters captain) at the University of East Anglia.
“As soon as I played it, I thought, ‘I’ve found it! I’ve found my new sport!'” says Anna. “Pickleball came a bit easier to me because of my tennis background and I loved it straight away.
“We’ve got a brilliant club in Norwich with loads of opportunities and great people running it. I immediately had loads of people to play against in my 50+ age category and I can drop down an age category or two, or even play Open and 19+ and get a brilliant game.”
