Four weeks after leaving Austin without a standings point, the Dallas Flash completed an unbeaten MLP San Diego run by defeating Columbus and former player Tyra Black in the final.
- Dallas beat the Columbus Sliders 3-1 to win its first Super Sunday belt of the season and collect 25 standings points.
- Danni-Elle Townsend and Augie Ge defeated Townsend’s trade counterpart Tyra Black and CJ Klinger 11-4 to complete the final.
- The Flash have gone 12-4 since changing their roster, while the retained partnership of JW Johnson and Ge has improved from 8-6 before the moves to 9-2 since them.
The trade worked for Tyra Black when she and Parris Todd won the opening women’s doubles game of the MLP San Diego final for Columbus. It remained successful for the Dallas Flash when Danni-Elle Townsend and Augie Ge beat Black and CJ Klinger 11-4 to complete a 3-1 victory.
Black has given the Sliders another elite women’s partnership. Townsend has helped give Dallas its season back.
The Flash left MLP Austin four weeks ago with a 1-4 record, no standings points and little evidence that their original roster could recover enough ground to challenge the league’s strongest teams.
The response came from the front office. Black was sent to Columbus for Townsend, while Alix Truong arrived from Phoenix in a separate move. Dallas has since gone 12-4.
In San Diego, that recovery became a tournament win.
The Flash completed an unbeaten weekend, collected 25 standings points and claimed their first Super Sunday belt of the season by defeating the defending champions at the same venue where Columbus ended their 2025 campaign.
Dallas did not repair its season by waiting for the original plan to improve. It changed the plan.
The final put the trade on both sides of the net
Columbus struck first through the partnership created by its side of the deal.
Todd and Black won the women’s doubles game, extending their unbeaten run together to eight matches and giving the Sliders the early advantage. If the final had ended there, Black’s move would have provided the simple conclusion.
Dallas won the next three.
The decisive game placed the exchanged players directly inside the result. Townsend partnered Ge against Black and Klinger with the Flash leading the tie 2-1. Their 11-4 victory removed the need for a DreamBreaker and completed Dallas’s turnaround.
Townsend and Ge are now 11-2 as a mixed doubles pairing.
That record helps explain why Dallas improved so quickly. The Flash did not merely replace one strong women’s player with another. They found a mixed combination capable of turning close ties before a singles tiebreak became necessary.
The outcome also resists an easy declaration that one team won the trade and the other lost it.
Black and Todd have become one of the league’s most dependable women’s partnerships. Columbus reached the San Diego final after an unbeaten run and took 18 standings points from the event. Townsend, meanwhile, supplied Dallas with a pairing that helped decide the championship against the player she replaced.
The trade improved both finalists. It changed Dallas more.
The unchanged partnership that improved most
The clearest evidence of Dallas’s wider improvement may be found in the two players who stayed together.
JW Johnson and Ge were 8-6 as the Flash men’s pair before the roster moves. Since the trade window reshaped the team around them, they have gone 9-2.
Their San Diego victories included Ben Johns and Max Freeman of the Los Angeles Mad Drops, followed by Andrei Daescu and Klinger of Columbus.
The timing suggests that the roster changes created better conditions around Johnson and Ge, although the results alone cannot prove why their partnership improved. Dallas now has more credible routes through a team match, which may have reduced the number of situations in which its men were required to repair a difficult start or protect a narrow route towards the DreamBreaker.
That is the part of the turnaround that matters beyond one exchange.
MLP roster moves are often assessed by comparing the players involved. Black against Townsend is the obvious calculation because their names appeared on opposite sides of the transaction and then opposite sides of the final.
A trade can alter every partnership on the line-up card.
Dallas found an 11-2 mixed combination with Townsend and Ge, added further flexibility through Truong and watched its existing men’s pair produce markedly better results. The new roster has not dominated every category, but it has given the Flash enough different ways to win.
San Diego supplied the clearest evidence yet.
Dallas reverses its history at Barnes
The Barnes Tennis Center gave the result another layer.
Columbus eliminated Dallas from the 2025 playoffs at the same venue, beginning the postseason run that ended with the Sliders winning the championship. Flash co-owner and general manager Mark Molthan admitted before the rematch that he had experienced “bad dreams about this place for the last year and that team we played.”
The memory could not decide Sunday’s final, but it measured how far Dallas had travelled.
One year ago, Columbus used San Diego to end the Flash season. This time, Dallas beat the defending champions there after rescuing a campaign that had appeared to be slipping away a month earlier.
The 25-point weekend moved the Flash to third in the latest post-event MLP power rankings, behind the St. Louis Shock and New Jersey 5s. That is an editorial assessment rather than the official league table, but it reflects how sharply perceptions of Dallas have changed.
Columbus was placed fourth after completing its regular-season events without an event victory, despite reaching Sunday with four players inside the PPA Tour’s individual top 10.
Those rankings may move again. The more durable conclusion from San Diego concerns how quickly the MLP hierarchy can change once a front office accepts that its first answer was wrong.
Dallas was 1-4 in Austin. The Flash did not allow that result to become a season-long identity.
They traded Black, added Townsend and Truong, found an 11-2 mixed partnership and watched Johnson and Ge go 9-2. Four weeks later, the rebuilt team beat Black and the defending champions for a tournament title.
The trade worked for Columbus.
For Dallas, it changed what the season could become.
Further Reading
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Chris Beaumont
Founder and Editor-in-ChiefChris Beaumont is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of World Pickleball Magazine. Chris follows the global game closely, reporting on the latest news, developments, stories and tournaments from all five continents. He also hosts the World Pickleball Podcast, interviewing people at…
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