Zoey Weil: Growing Pains

Inside professional pickleball’s most important year yet, by Chris Beamont

Zoey Weil laughs before we have even started.

Not because of a question about professional pickleball, or Major League Pickleball, or paddle technology.

Because of her surname.

“I honestly don’t mind,” she says. “I get ‘Wheel’, ‘While’, ‘Whale’… pretty much everything.”

The correct pronunciation, for the record, rhymes with “Kyle.”

It is the sort of conversation that normally disappears from an interview transcript. Small talk. A few seconds while microphones settle and everyone relaxes.

This time it stayed with me because it immediately established something that would continue throughout the next hour.

Professional pickleball may be changing at extraordinary speed.

Zoey Weil has not become particularly interested in taking herself too seriously.

She had arrived home less than twenty-four hours earlier.

Three weeks on the road had finally come to an end. Major League Pickleball was over. The suitcase was somewhere in the house, although she admitted she had barely had time to think about unpacking it. She was also fighting off a cold, apologising in advance if she sounded slightly different.

The timing was almost comical.

After weeks travelling around the country, competing, training, signing paddles and answering questions, home lasted exactly one week.

Then she would pack everything again and head back to another tournament.

“That’s basically the schedule now,” she says with a shrug.

There is no complaint in her voice.

Only acceptance.

For a growing number of professional pickleball players, this has quietly become normal life.

Airport.

Hotel.

Tournament.

Airport.

Home.

Laundry.

Repeat.

It sounds glamorous until you realise that home increasingly exists as a brief pause between flights.

Professional pickleball rarely looks like that from the outside.

Fans see the highlight reels.

The championship points.

The medal ceremonies.

The packed grandstands.

What they rarely see is the washing machine running at midnight because another flight leaves on Tuesday morning.

Or the paddle bag permanently sitting by the front door because it hardly seems worth putting away.

Or the quiet satisfaction of sleeping in your own bed for a few nights before doing it all again.

Spend an hour talking to Weil and something becomes clear remarkably quickly.

She is not simply describing life as a professional athlete.

She is describing life inside a sport that is still trying to work out exactly what professional means.

That distinction matters.

Every rapidly growing sport reaches a moment where success begins to create its own problems.

Participation rises faster than facilities.

Prize money grows faster than governance.

Professionalism develops faster than tradition.

Pickleball has reached that point.

Almost every conversation surrounding the sport eventually returns to growth.

More players.

More tournaments.

More sponsors.

More countries.

More investment.

More television.

The numbers are impressive.

The reality is considerably more complicated.

One of the first questions I ask Weil is about that growth.

Not whether it exists.

Everybody can see that.

But whether life inside professional pickleball feels as exciting as it appears from the outside.

She pauses.

Not because she disagrees.

Because she wants to answer properly.

“I think people see all the exciting stuff,” she says. “They see bigger venues, more fans, more sponsors and all these amazing things happening.”

Another pause.

“But managing growth is something people don’t realise is as difficult as it is.”

That sentence quietly becomes the thread running through almost everything else we discuss.

Managing growth.

Not creating it.

Not celebrating it.

Managing it.

Those two words perhaps explain professional pickleball in the summer of 2026 better than any attendance figure or sponsorship announcement ever could.

The sport has already proved that people want to play.

Now it has to prove it can sustain everything that follows.

From the outside, June looked like another successful month.

Major League Pickleball continued attracting large crowds.

The APP strengthened its international footprint.

New facilities opened across Asia.

Participation continued climbing around the world.

Every headline suggested momentum.

Inside the sport, however, players were having rather different conversations.

About rollout courts.

About temporary venues.

About travel.

About franchise identity.

About teenagers entering the professional ranks.

About what actually makes somebody a professional pickleball player.

They are not the sort of debates that attract millions of views on social media.

They are considerably more important.

Because they are the conversations that shape what the sport becomes next.

Weil has watched those conversations evolve almost in real time.

Like everyone else inside professional pickleball, she has experienced the strange contradiction of competing in a sport that somehow feels both established and experimental at exactly the same time.

“It feels like every tournament we learn something,” she says.

Not in the sense that organisers are getting things wrong.

Quite the opposite.

The sport is building itself while simultaneously asking players to compete at the highest level.

That is an unusually difficult balancing act.

“We’ve seen them make changes really quickly,” she says. “If players raise concerns, people are listening.”

She mentions Columbus, where additional run-off space was introduced after players raised concerns.

She talks about rollout courts.

About temporary stadiums.

About the atmosphere that comes from taking professional pickleball into places where permanent facilities simply do not exist.

“Obviously you don’t want bad bounces,” she says, smiling.

“But most of us are okay with one every now and then because the venues are really cool.”

It is an answer that perfectly captures the maturity of her thinking.

She is not pretending everything is perfect.

She is simply recognising context.

Professional pickleball has reached the stage where perfection is no longer the expectation.

Progress is.

Every tournament becomes another lesson.

Every venue teaches organisers something new.

Every unforeseen problem quietly improves the next event.

Perhaps that is what makes this period in pickleball history so fascinating.

Very few professional sports have had to build themselves this publicly.

Football’s growing pains happened generations ago.

Tennis evolved over decades.

Basketball had time to establish traditions before millions of people were watching every weekend.

Pickleball is doing all of that simultaneously.

Players are not simply competing.

Owners are not simply investing.

Tours are not simply staging tournaments.

Together, they are writing the first draft of what professional pickleball will eventually become.

And that raises a surprisingly simple question.

What exactly does “professional pickleball player” mean in 2026?

Because, as Zoey Weil was about to explain, the answer is far less straightforward than most people imagine.

Part 2

What Makes Someone a Professional?

It sounds like the easiest question in the world.

What makes somebody a professional pickleball player?

Prize money?

A contract?

World ranking?

Playing on television?

Travelling every week?

I ask Zoey the question expecting an immediate answer.

Instead, she stops.

Not awkwardly.

Thoughtfully.

“That’s actually a really good question,” she says.

There is a pause while she works through it in her head.

“I think there’s a lot of grey area.”

That hesitation tells us almost everything.

Professional pickleball has reached the stage where thousands of people now call themselves professional players.

The sport itself is still deciding exactly what that means.

Unlike football or golf, pickleball has not had decades to establish clear boundaries.

Some players compete full-time.

Some coach between tournaments.

Some still work conventional jobs while travelling to professional events.

Others are technically under professional contracts while continuing to build entirely separate careers away from the court.

Professionalism, in pickleball, exists on something closer to a spectrum than a line.

“I think there are people trying to become professionals,” Weil says. “They’re trying to earn contracts, trying to make enough money to do this full time, but they’re not quite there yet.”

She smiles.

“They’re still working another job.”

It is perhaps the most honest description of the sport’s current reality.

Professional pickleball is no longer a hobby.

It is not yet a universally sustainable career either.

For some athletes, it is both at the same time.

That nuance often disappears online.

Fans understandably divide players into simple categories.

Professional.

Amateur.

Good enough.

Not good enough.

Life inside the sport is considerably messier.

One name quickly enters the conversation.

Matt Wright.

If there is one player who perfectly illustrates pickleball’s unusual moment in history, it may be him.

Multiple national titles.

One of the defining competitors of his generation.

A player respected throughout the sport.

Also…

A lawyer.

“I always think about Matt,” Weil says.

“I genuinely believe that if Matt knew pickleball could support him for the rest of his life, he’d probably be happy just playing pickleball.”

She pauses again.

“But he’s worked incredibly hard to build that career too.”

It is a point that rarely receives enough attention.

The decision to remain in another profession is not necessarily evidence that pickleball isn’t successful.

Sometimes it is evidence that life is more complicated than choosing one dream over another.

Professional athletes are still human beings.

They think about mortgages.

Families.

Future security.

Retirement.

The same things everyone else worries about.

Pickleball simply happens to be making many of those decisions in public because the sport itself remains so young.

Other sports travelled this road years ago.

Semi-professional football.

Semi-professional rugby.

Cricketers balancing county contracts with winter employment.

Elite athletes often existed between two worlds before professional sport became financially stable enough to support them completely.

Pickleball feels remarkably similar.

Only much faster.

Because the sport is developing at extraordinary speed, careers are changing almost annually.

Someone coaching forty hours a week last season may be travelling internationally this season.

A player splitting time between tournaments and another profession may suddenly find sponsorship opportunities allowing them to commit full-time.

The definition of professional keeps shifting because the sport keeps shifting with it.

Weil believes another factor also contributes to the confusion.

One that has nothing to do with contracts or prize money.

“It’s funny,” she says.

“I think for a lot of people, pickleball is the first thing they’ve ever been really, really good at.”

She laughs.

“They suddenly think, ‘Wait… I’m actually really good at this.'”

It is a wonderfully human observation.

Not dismissive.

Not cynical.

Simply honest.

Pickleball is uniquely accessible.

Improvement happens quickly.

Club players discover they can compete.

Tournament success arrives sooner than many experienced in other sports.

That accessibility is one of pickleball’s greatest strengths.

Occasionally, it also blurs the line between excellence and professionalism.

Being exceptional at something does not automatically make it your profession.

Equally, earning money from something does not automatically make you elite.

Those ideas comfortably coexist inside modern pickleball.

Perhaps they always will.

Yet listening to Weil, another thought begins to emerge.

Maybe professional pickleball has been asking the wrong question altogether.

Instead of asking:

Who is a professional?

Perhaps the more useful question is:

Who is living a professional life?

Because professionalism is not simply measured by rankings.

It is measured by airports.

By hotels.

By missing birthdays.

By constantly chasing the next tournament while trying to build some sort of normal life around it.

It is measured by coming home after three weeks away, catching a cold somewhere between flights, knowing you have barely enough time to unpack before everything begins again.

Professional pickleball is often judged by the glamour that surrounds it.

The reality, as Weil quietly demonstrates, looks considerably more ordinary.

Laundry.

Recovery.

Training.

Travel.

Repeat.

That rhythm has become familiar for today’s professionals.

The more intriguing question is whether the next generation will arrive differently.

Because, unlike Zoey Weil, many of them may never have another sport before pickleball at all.

Part 3

The Talent Pipeline

Zoey Weil does not romanticise her journey into professional pickleball.

She doesn’t rewrite history.

She doesn’t pretend she always knew this was where she would end up.

In fact, she says almost exactly the opposite.

“I’ll be completely candid,” she says, leaning forward slightly.

“I wasn’t good enough to be a professional tennis player.”

There is no embarrassment attached to the sentence.

No sense of regret.

Just honesty.

She had enjoyed an excellent college career, first at the University of Washington before completing graduate studies at Minnesota. Tennis had taken her further than most athletes ever reach.

It simply wasn’t going to become her profession.

“I graduated and there wasn’t really any part of me thinking, ‘I’m going to go and play professionally now.'”

Instead, life moved on.

Graduate school meant a different routine.

More flexibility.

More free time.

Like countless others, she picked up a pickleball paddle almost by accident.

“It honestly just gave me something to do.”

She laughs.

“I wasn’t sitting there thinking, ‘This is going to become my career.'”

That story matters because it reflects the journey of much of professional pickleball’s current generation.

The sport has not built its own production line of elite athletes.

Not yet.

Instead, it has become remarkably good at attracting exceptional competitors from somewhere else.

Spend a weekend watching professional pickleball and the pattern quickly becomes obvious.

Former college tennis players.

Former ATP professionals.

Former WTA professionals.

Former junior champions.

Athletes who spent twenty years mastering one racquet sport before unexpectedly discovering another.

It is one of pickleball’s greatest strengths.

It may also be one of its biggest long-term questions.

Because every emerging sport eventually reaches the same crossroads.

Not…

Can we attract good athletes?

But…

Can we produce our own?

Weil believes pickleball has not reached that stage.

Yet.

“The talent pool is still pretty American,” she says.

“I think that’s going to change.”

She isn’t talking about participation.

That battle has largely been won.

She’s talking about where elite athletes come from.

The more pickleball spreads internationally, the larger the talent pool inevitably becomes.

More countries.

More sporting cultures.

More children growing up with a paddle rather than discovering one after another sporting career.

“If pickleball becomes an Olympic sport…”

She stops for a moment.

“I think everything changes.”

That isn’t simply wishful thinking.

Olympic status changes behaviour.

National governing bodies receive greater support.

Governments invest.

Schools introduce programmes.

Parents view the sport differently.

Children dream differently.

The talent pipeline becomes considerably wider almost overnight.

For now, however, tennis remains pickleball’s greatest development academy.

Interestingly, Weil does not see that as a weakness.

Quite the opposite.

If she had children tomorrow, would she immediately hand them a pickleball paddle?

“No.”

The answer comes surprisingly quickly.

“I’d probably tell them to play tennis.”

She laughs again.

“Or soccer. Or basketball.”

It isn’t because she doubts pickleball’s future.

It is because she understands what other sports still provide.

Years of athletic development.

Movement.

Coordination.

Competition.

Scholarship opportunities.

Professional structures built over generations rather than years.

“I’d probably tell them to go get a scholarship.”

Only then, she suggests, would pickleball enter the conversation.

It is an answer that feels wonderfully free from tribalism.

Many young sports spend years trying to prove they no longer need established neighbours.

Weil sees something different.

She sees partnership.

Tennis has helped create many of pickleball’s best players.

One day, perhaps, pickleball will do the same for itself.

That day has not arrived.

Not because the sport lacks talent.

Because it simply hasn’t existed long enough.

There are children playing pickleball today who have never seriously played another racquet sport.

Some of them are already frighteningly good.

Others are still years away from reaching professional level.

Together, they represent something the current generation never experienced.

A complete pickleball education.

Their footwork will be different.

Their instincts will be different.

Their tactical understanding will begin with pickleball rather than being adapted from tennis.

That may eventually transform the sport more than any paddle technology or rule change ever could.

Listening to Weil, it becomes obvious that professional pickleball is currently living between two eras.

The first generation largely found pickleball after another sporting journey.

The next generation may never need another sport at all.

If that happens, the game we watch ten years from now may look very different from the one we recognise today.

And, in truth, there are already glimpses of that future.

Some of them are still too young to drive.

Part 4

The First Pickleball Generation

Cam Chaffin is still a teenager.

Kelly Goodnow is younger still.

Only a few years ago, stories like theirs would have felt almost impossible in professional pickleball.

Now they feel inevitable.

When I ask Zoey Weil about the next generation of players, her face immediately lights up.

There is none of the defensiveness that sometimes accompanies conversations about younger athletes arriving to challenge established professionals.

Instead, there is genuine admiration.

“Cam’s incredible,” she says.

“Honestly, he’s wise beyond his years.”

She laughs almost immediately.

“When I was his age, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.”

It is a throwaway remark.

It is also surprisingly revealing.

Weil belongs to a generation that discovered pickleball.

Players like Chaffin belong to a generation that has simply grown up with it.

That distinction may eventually reshape the sport more profoundly than any rule change or equipment innovation.

For today’s professionals, pickleball was usually the second chapter.

For tomorrow’s professionals, it may be the first.

That changes everything.

The way players move.

The way they construct points.

The shots they instinctively choose under pressure.

Even the way coaches think about developing talent.

For decades, pickleball has borrowed athletes.

Soon, it will begin producing its own.

The transition has already started.

One of the defining moments of June came when fourteen-year-old Kelly Goodnow stepped into Carolina Hogs’ Major League Pickleball line-up following a series of injuries.

Many expected the occasion to overwhelm her.

Instead, she partnered Michael Loyd to defeat veteran pairing Tina Pisnik and Tyson McGuffin in mixed doubles, producing one of the stories of the month.

It immediately reignited an increasingly common debate.

How young is too young?

Should children really be competing in professional sport?

Weil understands why the question keeps resurfacing.

“It’s complicated,” she says.

There is another pause.

One thing that becomes increasingly noticeable during our conversation is that she rarely rushes difficult answers.

She thinks.

She weighs them.

She seems determined not to offer the easy response simply because it sounds better.

“I think if you’re good enough to be there, you’re good enough to be there.”

She stops.

“But…”

The “but” matters.

“…if you’re choosing to play professional sport, then people are going to treat you like a professional.”

That, she believes, is the important distinction.

Professional competition cannot change according to somebody’s age.

It would be unfair to opponents.

It would also be unfair to the young player themselves.

“If I’m playing against a thirteen-year-old…”

She smiles.

“…I’m still trying to win.”

There is no apology attached to the sentence.

Nor should there be.

Professional sport has always worked this way.

Nobody expected Coco Gauff’s opponents to ease off because she was fifteen.

Nobody asked seasoned gymnasts to lower their standards for teenage Olympians.

Elite competition only has one standard.

That is precisely what makes it elite.

Weil believes young players deserve that same respect.

Not protection.

Respect.

Treating them as genuine competitors is, in many ways, the greatest compliment professional sport can offer.

“I think that’s actually showing respect,” she says.

“You’re saying, ‘You belong here.'”

It is an interesting way of looking at the debate.

Much of the public conversation focuses on safeguarding younger athletes.

Weil focuses on belonging.

If someone has earned the right to stand on the same court, then they have earned the right to be treated exactly like everybody else.

That does not mean ignoring the wider responsibilities that accompany youth sport.

Travel.

Education.

Family.

Mental wellbeing.

Those conversations remain hugely important.

But they are separate from what happens once the first serve is struck.

Professional pickleball is entering unfamiliar territory.

Its first generation largely consisted of adults changing careers.

Its second generation may include athletes who have never seriously considered another sport.

That raises fascinating questions.

Will future professionals even have tennis backgrounds?

Will coaching look different?

Will the tactical language of pickleball evolve as players develop entirely within the sport rather than adapting ideas borrowed from elsewhere?

Nobody knows.

Not yet.

What is becoming clear, however, is that the transition has already begun.

Children who once stood behind the barriers collecting autographs are increasingly walking through the players’ entrance instead.

They are not arriving with memories of another sporting life.

They are arriving with pickleball as the only language they have ever spoken.

For Zoey Weil’s generation, that feels simultaneously exciting and slightly surreal.

The future they once imagined is no longer somewhere over the horizon.

It is already asking for a wildcard into the main draw.

Part 5

Where Is the Line?

Every sport has moments that reveal more than the score.

Sometimes they arrive in championship finals.

Sometimes they happen in defeat.

Sometimes they emerge from a debate that refuses to disappear.

Professional pickleball’s version is remarkably simple.

The body bag.

Mention the phrase in almost any pickleball club and opinions appear almost instantly.

Some players see it as smart tactics.

Others see it as unnecessary.

Many seem to believe it depends entirely on who delivered the shot and who happened to be standing on the receiving end.

When I raise the subject with Zoey Weil, she laughs.

Not because she dismisses the debate.

Because she knows exactly why it exists.

“I think context is everything,” she says.

It is another answer that refuses to live in absolutes.

There is no declaration that body shots are either completely acceptable or completely unacceptable.

Instead, she starts talking about intent.

“I think there’s a huge difference between trying to win a point and trying to embarrass somebody.”

That distinction quietly reframes the entire conversation.

At professional level, attacking the body is not unusual.

In many situations, it is simply the highest percentage shot available.

Aim at the hips and you reduce angles.

Take away reaction time.

Force awkward contact.

Professional players spend thousands of hours learning exactly when that option gives them the greatest advantage.

Nobody accuses a tennis player of poor sportsmanship for serving into an opponent’s weaker return.

Nobody criticises a fast bowler for targeting the base of off stump.

Elite athletes are expected to exploit percentage plays.

Professional pickleball is no different.

“If it’s the right shot, you hit it,” Weil says matter-of-factly.

“That’s your job.”

She pauses.

“But…”

Again, the “but” changes everything.

“…there’s a difference between playing the percentages and trying to show somebody up.”

The players themselves even have different language for it.

One body shot.

One point.

No issue.

Repeatedly firing the ball at someone after the outcome is already obvious?

That becomes something else entirely.

“I think that’s what people mean when they talk about a ‘full bag’,” she says, smiling.

“It’s different.”

The humour in her voice is important.

This is not a player trying to defend poor behaviour.

Nor is it someone pretending elite competition should somehow become gentler.

She is simply recognising something every experienced competitor understands.

Sport is rarely defined by individual actions.

It is defined by intention.

The same tackle in football can be applauded or condemned depending on why it happened.

The same appeal in cricket can be considered either competitive or unsporting.

The same body shot in pickleball can exist on either side of that invisible line.

What makes the discussion particularly interesting is pickleball’s unique relationship between professionals and recreational players.

Few sports blur those boundaries quite so completely.

On Saturday, a professional may be competing for a title in front of television cameras.

On Tuesday, they might be running a clinic with forty club players.

They occupy both worlds simultaneously.

That creates opportunities.

It also creates misunderstandings.

“We have to remember that what we’re doing isn’t always what someone should be doing at their local club,” Weil says.

It is one of the most thoughtful comments of the entire interview.

Professional sport is, by definition, different.

The objective is singular.

Win.

Everything else becomes secondary.

Club pickleball exists within a far more complicated ecosystem.

People want competition.

They also want community.

They want challenging matches.

They also want everyone to come back next week.

Those priorities can happily coexist.

Provided players recognise the difference.

“I think every match has its own context,” Weil says.

“It’s different if you’re playing for a title than if you’re playing at your local social session.”

That may sound obvious.

Yet it is a lesson recreational sport repeatedly forgets.

Social media has made elite athletes more visible than ever before.

Every ATP.

Every Erne.

Every speed-up.

Every body shot.

Within hours, club players around the world are trying to recreate what they have watched.

Sometimes that inspires improvement.

Sometimes it removes context entirely.

Professional pickleball is still writing its own culture.

Not just through rules.

But through behaviour.

Through the examples players choose to set.

Through the understanding that fierce competition and genuine respect are not opposites.

They are partners.

The more we talked, the clearer it became that Weil sees no contradiction between those ideas.

She wants professional pickleball to remain uncompromising.

She also wants it to remain welcoming.

The line between those two ambitions cannot be painted onto the court.

It exists somewhere less tangible.

If you’re following how the global game is shifting day by day, the World Pickleball Report breaks this down in our daily briefing.

In judgement.

In experience.

In knowing not simply what shot to play.

But why you’re playing it.

For a sport still defining itself, that may prove one of its most important lessons.

Because culture is rarely built through rulebooks.

It is built one decision at a time.

And often, those decisions begin with something as simple as choosing where to hit the next ball.

Part 6

Don’t Copy the Pros

Professional athletes spend much of their careers becoming examples.

Whether they like it or not.

Every weekend, somewhere in the world, somebody watches a professional match, walks onto their local courts the following morning and tries to recreate what they have just seen.

The ATPs.

The Ernes.

The lightning-fast hands battles.

The shoulder-high speed-ups.

The impossible recoveries.

It is one of sport’s oldest traditions.

Children have always copied their heroes.

The problem, Zoey Weil believes, is that professional pickleball can sometimes be too convincing.

“I actually think people should be careful about trying to copy the pros too much.”

She smiles as she says it, fully aware of the contradiction.

Professional athletes spend years perfecting shots that they then advise most people not to attempt.

“It sounds funny, doesn’t it?”

It does.

Until she explains why.

The biggest misconception recreational players have, she believes, is assuming professional pickleball is defined by spectacular winners.

It isn’t.

It is defined by the shots nobody notices.

The resets.

The neutral balls.

The patient dinks.

The decision not to attack.

The willingness to play one more safe shot instead of one risky one.

“I think everybody wants to hit the winner.”

Another smile.

“But sometimes the best shot is just making one more ball.”

It is a deceptively simple observation.

Spend an afternoon watching highlights on YouTube and you could easily conclude that professional pickleball is built around aggression.

Spend an afternoon watching an entire match and a different picture emerges.

The spectacular moments exist because of everything that came beforehand.

The patient exchanges.

The tiny positional adjustments.

The subtle changes in pace.

The refusal to attack before the opportunity genuinely exists.

Professionals do not win because they attempt outrageous shots.

They win because they know when not to.

That distinction is easy to lose when highlights compress a twenty-shot rally into a three-second clip.

“The patience is probably the biggest thing,” Weil says.

“People see the last shot.”

They rarely appreciate the previous nineteen.

It is a fascinating insight because it mirrors conversations taking place elsewhere in modern sport.

Football supporters celebrate the final pass without noticing the movement that created the space.

Tennis fans remember the winner but forget the four defensive shots that kept the point alive.

In pickleball, spectators naturally remember the speed-up.

Professionals often remember the dink that quietly forced a weaker reply three shots earlier.

The difference is not technical.

It is conceptual.

One group watches the finish.

The other watches the construction.

Equipment creates another interesting divide.

The paddle arms race has become one of pickleball’s defining stories over the past two years.

Every few months another manufacturer promises more power.

More spin.

More pop.

More technology.

Many recreational players have understandably concluded that better equipment automatically leads to better pickleball.

Weil is unconvinced.

“I honestly think people overvalue power.”

She doesn’t say it critically.

More as someone who has learned the lesson herself.

“Control wins a lot more points than people realise.”

That answer feels almost unfashionable.

Modern sport loves innovation.

The newest paddle.

The newest technology.

The newest performance advantage.

Yet the fundamentals remain remarkably stubborn.

The overwhelming majority of recreational matches are not lost because somebody lacked power.

They are lost because somebody missed one extra ball.

Or attacked one rally too early.

Or tried to finish a point that had not yet been built.

“I think people get excited by what looks fun,” Weil says.

“And I get it.”

She laughs.

“It is fun.”

That generosity runs throughout the conversation.

At no point does she sound dismissive of club players.

Quite the opposite.

She understands exactly why somebody watches Ben Johns or Anna Leigh Waters and immediately wants to try the same shots.

She probably would have done exactly the same.

The difference is that professionals have spent thousands of hours earning the right to make those decisions.

For everyone else, improvement usually looks much less dramatic.

Better positioning.

Better patience.

Better decision making.

Making one more return.

One more dink.

One more reset.

Those improvements rarely appear on social media.

They do, however, appear on scoreboards.

As our conversation drifts towards its next topic, it strikes me that this philosophy extends well beyond shot selection.

Professional pickleball itself is succeeding for much the same reason.

The spectacular growth attracts headlines.

The quieter decisions underneath are what make that growth sustainable.

Sometimes making one more ball is not just good advice for players.

It is good advice for an entire sport.

Part 7

Building a Safer Sport

Every growing sport reaches a moment when success begins to expose its own weaknesses.

Professional pickleball arrived at that moment in June.

The footage from New York spread quickly.

During a Major League Pickleball match, a sudden gust of wind caught a large LED baseline scoreboard and blew it onto Brooklyn Pickleball Team player Rachel Rohrabacher. The structure trapped her leg, bringing play to an immediate halt while players, officials and medical staff rushed across the court.

Thankfully, Rohrabacher was able to walk away.

The images, however, lingered.

“It was scary,” Zoey Weil says quietly.

“The biggest thing is that Rachel was okay.”

There is no attempt to make the incident sound more dramatic than it was.

Equally, there is no attempt to dismiss it.

Rohrabacher is not simply another professional player.

She’s a colleague.

A friend.

Someone Weil has spent countless hours competing alongside throughout the season.

“You never want to see that happen to anybody.”

That humanity is easy to lose when incidents immediately become talking points online.

Within hours, social media had divided into familiar camps.

Some blamed organisers.

Others defended them.

Some questioned temporary venues altogether.

Most simply expressed relief that the injury had not been worse.

Weil sits somewhere more measured.

She does not excuse what happened.

She also understands the context in which it happened.

“This sport is growing so quickly,” she says. “People don’t always realise how many things are happening behind the scenes.”

That sentence brings us back to where our conversation began.

Managing growth.

Not celebrating it.

Managing it.

Professional pickleball has become remarkably ambitious in a remarkably short period of time.

Major League Pickleball now builds temporary stadiums in city centres, public parks and entertainment districts that were never designed to host elite professional sport.

The results often look spectacular.

Packed grandstands.

Sponsor villages.

Prime television backdrops.

Fans standing only a few feet from the action.

The atmosphere is unlike anything pickleball had previously experienced.

Those environments also create challenges.

Wind behaves differently.

Temporary structures require different engineering.

Run-off areas change from venue to venue.

Court surfaces vary.

Every new location presents organisers with another set of variables to solve.

Rather than criticising that process, Weil almost seems fascinated by it.

“I think they’ve actually done a really good job of listening.”

She immediately offers an example.

Earlier in the season, players raised concerns about the amount of space surrounding the courts at one venue.

By the following event, adjustments had already been made.

“They widened things.”

Simple.

Practical.

Responsive.

That, she believes, is perhaps the most encouraging aspect of the sport’s current growth.

Problems are rarely ignored.

They become lessons.

The same conversation has surrounded rollout courts throughout the season.

Traditionalists often dislike them.

The occasional unpredictable bounce becomes immediate evidence that permanent facilities remain superior.

Players, interestingly, often see the trade-off rather differently.

“Honestly…”

She smiles.

“…most of us are okay with the odd bad bounce.”

She quickly explains why.

“The venues are really cool.”

It sounds almost too simple.

Then she starts describing what those venues actually create.

The grandstands.

The energy.

The crowds pressed close to the court.

The sponsor activations.

The sense that professional pickleball has become an event rather than simply another tournament.

“You walk in and it feels different.”

That feeling matters.

Professional sport has always been about more than competition.

It is theatre.

Experience.

Memory.

Atmosphere.

Sometimes the perfect venue on paper produces an ordinary event.

Sometimes an imperfect venue creates something unforgettable.

Professional pickleball is still learning where that balance lies.

That process inevitably involves trial and error.

It also requires trust.

Trust that organisers genuinely want to improve.

Trust that players will continue giving honest feedback.

Trust that every unexpected problem becomes another item on next month’s checklist rather than next year’s headline.

Listening to Weil, I am reminded how easy it is to judge growing sports by the standards established sports took decades to reach.

Wimbledon has refined its operations over more than a century.

The Masters has been learning from mistakes since before television existed.

The NFL has spent generations perfecting event management.

Professional pickleball is attempting to compress that evolution into little more than a decade.

That does not mean standards should be lower.

Elite athletes deserve elite environments.

Growing commercial success brings growing responsibility.

But it does perhaps explain why perfection remains elusive.

Every tournament still teaches the sport something.

Sometimes that lesson arrives through innovation.

Occasionally it arrives through an incident nobody ever wanted to witness.

Either way, the expectation inside professional pickleball now feels remarkably clear.

Do better next time.

Because the sport is no longer trying to prove people want to watch.

It is trying to prove it can build an environment worthy of the athletes competing within it.

That responsibility extends beyond courts, scoreboards and safety.

Ultimately, it reaches something even more fundamental.

If professional pickleball wants to become one of the world’s great sporting leagues, it cannot simply build bigger tournaments.

It has to build something far more difficult.

Belonging.

Part 8

Building Teams, Not Just a League

Every successful sporting league eventually discovers the same truth.

Launching teams is easy.

Giving people a reason to love them takes much longer.

When our conversation turns to Major League Pickleball, it becomes clear that Zoey Weil sees the league through two very different lenses.

As a player, she believes the standard has never been higher.

As a fan of sport, she also recognises that the league is still searching for something less tangible.

Identity.

“I think we’re still figuring that part out,” she says.

Not the pickleball.

Not the quality.

The connection.

“It still feels like people support players more than they support teams.”

It is hardly surprising.

Major League Pickleball is still one of the youngest professional franchise leagues anywhere in the world.

Supporters have not yet spent decades passing allegiances from one generation to the next.

Children have not grown up wearing the same colours as their parents.

There are no hundred-year rivalries.

No folklore.

No inherited loyalties.

Instead, fans naturally gravitate towards familiar faces.

Anna Leigh Waters.

Ben Johns.

Tyson McGuffin.

Federico Staksrud.

People before places.

Weil understands why.

“If your favourite player changes teams, you’re probably following the player.”

She laughs.

“I think that’s just where we are right now.”

Again, she offers the answer without judgement.

It is not a weakness.

It is simply the reality of a young league finding its feet.

The conversation becomes particularly interesting when we begin talking about geography.

Florida, after all, is home.

She plays for the Florida Smash.

Does she feel like she represents Florida?

She smiles.

“Honestly…”

Another pause.

“Not really.”

The answer catches me slightly by surprise.

Not because she dislikes the franchise.

Quite the opposite.

She talks warmly about the organisation.

About ownership.

About her teammates.

About the people around the team.

Those relationships feel real.

The geographical identity feels less important.

“I feel connected to the people.”

That distinction may ultimately define Major League Pickleball’s next stage of growth.

Traditional sport teaches us to support places.

Modern sport increasingly encourages us to support personalities.

MLP currently sits somewhere between those two ideas.

It is still building the emotional bridges that eventually turn a franchise into something resembling a sporting institution.

History suggests that process cannot be rushed.

Liverpool Football Club did not become Liverpool overnight.

Neither did the New York Yankees.

Or the Boston Celtics.

Or the Green Bay Packers.

Identity accumulates.

One season becomes five.

Five become twenty.

Championships create memories.

Defeats create rivalries.

Players become legends.

Supporters become families.

Professional pickleball has barely begun writing those chapters.

Yet the foundations are starting to appear.

The New Jersey 5s have become synonymous with sustained excellence.

The St. Louis Shock have built one of the league’s strongest home atmospheres.

Brooklyn has developed its own personality.

Texas feels different from Orlando.

Slowly, almost without anybody noticing, franchises are beginning to acquire characteristics beyond the names printed across their shirts.

The league’s proposed structural changes reflect exactly the same ambition.

Salary caps.

Franchise tags.

Longer-term roster stability.

Each proposal attempts to create continuity.

Because continuity creates familiarity.

Familiarity creates attachment.

Attachment eventually becomes loyalty.

Professional sport cannot survive indefinitely on novelty alone.

Eventually, supporters need reasons to care beyond who happens to be winning that particular weekend.

Weil believes that day will come.

“I think it’ll happen naturally.”

She sounds completely unconcerned by the pace.

“People just need time.”

Time.

It is an answer that surfaces repeatedly throughout our conversation.

Time to define professionalism.

Time for younger players to emerge.

Time for tours to improve.

Time for venues to evolve.

Time for franchises to become part of their communities.

Time, perhaps, is the one thing professional pickleball cannot accelerate, no matter how quickly everything else grows.

Epilogue

When we finish talking, Zoey Weil still has a cold.

The washing still needs doing.

The suitcase probably still hasn’t been completely unpacked.

In a few days, none of that will matter.

The paddle bag will be back over her shoulder.

Another airport.

Another hotel.

Another practice court.

Another tournament in a sport that somehow looks slightly different every time it returns.

That, perhaps, is the defining experience of professional pickleball’s first generation.

They are not simply competing.

They are living through a period of constant reinvention.

Every month brings another conversation that previous generations of athletes never had to have.

What does it mean to be a professional?

How should teenage players enter elite sport?

Where is the line between ruthless competition and healthy sporting culture?

What should recreational players actually learn from the professionals?

How do temporary venues become world-class arenas?

How does a franchise become something supporters genuinely love?

These are not questions born from failure.

They are questions born from possibility.

Professional pickleball has already proved that people want to watch.

It has already proved that people want to play.

The challenge now is considerably more ambitious.

It must become a sport that can sustain everything it has created.

That means building traditions as carefully as tournaments.

Culture as deliberately as commercial partnerships.

Communities as thoughtfully as calendars.

Throughout our conversation, Zoey Weil never claimed to have all the answers.

In many ways, that was the most refreshing part.

She thought before she spoke.

She changed gears when conversations became more complicated.

She admitted uncertainty where uncertainty genuinely existed.

Professional pickleball, she seemed to suggest, does not need people pretending every problem has already been solved.

It needs people willing to solve them together.

Perhaps that is why the sport feels so compelling in 2026.

Not because everything has arrived.

Because so much is still being invented.

The next generation of players.

The next generation of fans.

The next generation of leagues.

The next generation of ideas.

Zoey Weil will board another flight next week.

She will play another tournament.

Sign more paddles.

Answer more questions.

Then she’ll come home again, unpack another suitcase and begin the cycle once more.

From the outside, it will look like another stop on the calendar.

From the inside, it will be another small step in the construction of a sport still discovering what it wants to become.

And years from now, when professional pickleball finally feels settled, those who lived through this extraordinary period will probably remember it not for the trophies or the rankings.

They will remember the feeling.

The sense that every tournament, every conversation and every new idea was helping build something that had never existed before.

That is the privilege, and the responsibility, of being part of a sport growing up in public.

Zoey Weil understands that better than most.

Because while she may spend her weeks travelling from tournament to tournament, she is also travelling through one of the most fascinating periods in pickleball’s history.

And the journey, for both player and sport, is only just beginning.

Further Reading

• Latest pickleball news from around the world
• Tournament coverage and results
• Rankings and player profiles
• Regional pickleball coverage