The inaugural season of the Premier Pickleball League launched this year with six teams made up of the cream of UK pickleball battling it out in different venues across England.
The teams competing are: Pickleball Store (captained by Thaddea Lock), Pickleplay (capt Louis Laville), Advanced Pb (capt Mollie Kubrick-Finney), RAQT (capt James Chaudry), SB Pickleball (capt Pei Chuan-Kao) and Scan (capt Freddie Powell).
But what is the actual format of the league? How does it work, and how will a team be declared the winners?
The captain and vice-captain of each team was decided through the UK DUPR Pickleball rankings, with the top three ranked men and women captaining a side. They were then matched with players from the opposite gender ranked four-six on a seeding format, with the number ones being matched with the opposite gender’s number sixes, the number twos matched with the number fives and the three’s matched with the fours.
From there, the teams entered into a draft, selecting players out of the 130 applicants in a snake format. This established the six sides of three men and three women each.
These teams compete against each other at various venues up and down the country in gendered singles, gendered doubles and mixed doubles. So far the league has competed in Basingstoke, Norwich and Woking.
The results from these fixtures create a league table where the teams are ranked from one-six based upon their results in the fixtures. Currently, Pickleball Store sit at the top of the league on 10 points.
The standings at the end of the six fixtures create the seedings for the play-offs, following the style of America’s Major League Pickleball (MLP). The sides who finish first and second progress straight through to the semi-finals, while the third ranked team take on the sixth and the fourth and fifth ranked sides face off against each other.
Following this, the competition progresses to a semi-finals and then a finals to officially crown the first ever Premier Pickleball League champions.
Speaking on the competition format, co-creator Edward Hares said: “It’s a format that speaks to a lot of people. It’s a good way of getting even competition because you can balance the top players across the teams.
“You get a format where you don’t know who’s going to win on a week to week basis. You don’t just have the same team dominating it, so it makes it a bit more exciting than the standard tournament.”
Edward added: “I feel that pickleball is growing pretty well in this country, but we want to do anything that we [the league] can do to help it really take off to the kind of explosion that it has seen in America.”
