The English Open Grew Up at the NEC. Now Comes the Hard Part

The 2026 English Open was bigger, louder and more ambitious than anything Pickleball England had attempted before. Six days at Birmingham’s NEC showed how far the tournament has travelled. It also raised a more interesting question. What should it become next?

At nine o’clock on Monday night, it did not look ready.

The courts were down inside Birmingham’s NEC, but nets were still going up. Numbers needed attaching. Equipment was being sorted. Volunteers moved around an enormous space that, the following morning, was supposed to receive thousands of pickleball players and begin functioning as one of the largest indoor pickleball tournaments yet staged.

There is a particular feeling you get before a major sporting event when you have arrived early enough to see behind the curtain.

Surely they aren’t going to finish this.

Then you return the next morning and somehow they have.

By Tuesday, the place was alive.

Six days later, after the last mixed doubles final had finished and Jack Munro and Roos van Reek had completed the professional programme with gold, it was difficult to connect the tournament we had just witnessed with that unfinished hall from Monday night. Pickleball England had built a 60-court venue across three halls at the NEC. The leap from Telford was unmistakable.

That might be the best way of understanding the 2026 English Open.

Pickleball England took an enormous step.

Now it has to work out what to do with the thing it has built.

There were really two English Opens

From the commentary position, there were moments when the English Open could feel deceptively small.

Championship court existed within its own bubble. Cameras. Referees. Production. Players waiting to come on. Statistics appearing on screens. Video reviews. Interviews.

Walk away from it and the scale changed completely.

Three halls stretched out in front of you. Courts disappeared into the distance. Players dragged increasingly enormous pickleball bags through the walkways. Matches were starting everywhere. Friends gathered behind barriers. Clubs colonised little areas of the venue. People ate, watched, talked, warmed up and waited.

The noise never really stopped.

That distinction matters because it would be easy to judge the English Open entirely by what happened on the show courts.

That was only part of it.

The professional competition provided some exceptional pickleball. The more significant achievement might have been making something of this size function at all. Pickleball England went into the event targeting more than 3,000 player registrations, having welcomed 2,350 players and 4,321 event registrations in 2025.

The NEC’s three-metre walkways initially sounded like one more logistical restriction for the organisers to negotiate. In practice, they helped enormously. Anyone who remembers trying to squeeze between the vendor village and courts at previous editions will understand why.

Players could move. Spectators could move. A tournament of this scale needs space to breathe, and for the most part it did.

That does not mean everything worked perfectly. It shouldn’t. This was the first attempt at the NEC.

But there is a difference between problems caused by an event failing and problems created because an event has suddenly become much bigger than it used to be.

Most of the interesting questions from Birmingham belong in the second category.

The senior game provided the first reminder

Marcello Paiva Jardim arrived as one of the obvious attractions and left having reinforced almost everything people already thought about him.

The pickleball was only part of it.

Jardim won the 50+ men’s singles title and partnered Richard Love to take the men’s doubles gold. In mixed, Lee Whitwell and Jardim took another title ahead of Pialena Ander and Christian Singer, with Kirsty Gray and Stephen Lucas collecting bronze.

That was the scoreboard.

The more revealing part came away from it.

Jardim had travelled from Chicago, was competing across multiple disciplines and still turned up on Unity Cup day to play with recreational competitors when he could quite reasonably have disappeared back to his hotel.

He made time for people.

So did Whitwell.

One of the memorable moments of the week came after Whitwell had played Jasbir Tutt. The match finished and Whitwell spent another ten or fifteen minutes talking through elements of Tutt’s game with her.

Nobody had asked her to. There was no camera requirement. It was simply what she did.

Those things matter at an event where elite pickleball and recreational pickleball are occupying the same building.

The senior draw offered plenty more.

Ian Marshall and Nathan Hill reached the men’s doubles final before losing to Jardim and Love, while Rupert Robinson and Bernie Audibert took bronze. Audibert had also won the 4.5+ 35 men’s doubles with David Illescas Cases later in the week, another reminder of how reliably he continues to appear near the sharp end of these events.

On the women’s side, Teresa Tarn and Whitwell won the 50+ doubles ahead of Antonella Sonda and Natascia Sciolti, with Anna Linton and Rochelle Penrose third. Pialena Ander then won the senior women’s singles, Amanda Evans taking silver and Sonda bronze.

Evans’ run was particularly good. She made the final after Sonda had eliminated Whitwell, and got a proper look at the level required against Ander.

There was also the other reality of senior tournament pickleball.

Bodies have limits.

Stefano Cucuzza reached the men’s singles final against Jardim and suffered physical trouble almost immediately. He retired rather than turn a problem into something potentially much worse. Richard Love took bronze.

Juan Carlos Hintze was another illustration of the physical toll. Deep runs meant early starts, late finishes and another alarm clock the following morning.

Tournament success becomes its own punishment.

For senior players in particular, recovery between matches can matter almost as much as anything that happens during them.

And that leads to one of the first things the English Open should examine.

The competitive format needs another look

Whitwell’s singles exit raised a question that never received a completely satisfactory answer during the week.

She won her group.

Yet she still had to play a quarter-final while another player received a bye into the semi-finals.

Whitwell made no excuse for losing to Antonella Sonda. Sonda played better and deserved to advance.

The wider question remains.

At this level, the route through a draw needs to be immediately understandable.

If there are unavoidable byes, their allocation should follow a transparent competitive logic. Ideally, at the professional end of the English Open, they disappear wherever the numbers permit.

The open doubles competition produced a different version of the same issue.

In the women’s event, the top four pairs from each five-team group advanced. The men’s event also sent four teams through from groups in which, in some cases, only one partnership was eliminated.

That guarantees court time.

It does not always guarantee jeopardy.

There is an important distinction here.

A 3.5 player who has travelled across Britain or flown into England for the Open should be guaranteed meaningful matches. The round robin is part of what they have purchased. Nobody wants to travel hundreds of miles, lose once and spend the rest of the day watching.

Professional competition has a different purpose.

By Saturday and Sunday, there were early matches where the outcome was overwhelmingly predictable. Two established professionals beating a considerably weaker partnership 11-0 does little for the players, the tournament or the broadcast.

Perhaps the answer is double elimination.

Perhaps it is smaller round-robin groups.

Perhaps it is simply a tougher qualification threshold for the pro division.

But the English Open is now good enough that paying an entry fee should not necessarily be sufficient qualification to enter its highest category.

That is not elitism.

It is what happens when a tournament develops a genuine elite level.

Men’s singles was the counterargument to predictability

If anyone wanted evidence of how deep the top end has become, Friday provided it.

The men’s Open singles draw contained 59 entries, with names such as Bálint Bakó, Ignasi de Rueda, Héctor Sánchez Vidal, Théo Platel, Louis Laville, James Chaudry and defending champion Ronan Camron among them.

Then the tournament started removing them.

Josh Roberts beat Jayden Broderick and still did not escape his group. Players with serious reputations were disappearing before the knockout draw had properly settled.

Once it did, things became even less forgiving.

Defending champion Camron went.

Laville went.

Bakó, one of Europe’s strongest singles players, was beaten 15-7 by de Rueda.

Chaudry lost to Mateusz Matysik.

There was no safe section of the draw.

One of the matches of the tournament arrived in the quarter-finals between Jake Bower and Richard Livornese.

Bower raced away. Livornese dragged the match back towards the slower, more cerebral contest he wanted. The rallies lengthened. Players moved from baseline to kitchen and back again. Around 10-10, with the match balanced, Bower put on a wristband.

Nobody, including Bower afterwards, seemed entirely sure why.

He barely lost another rally.

Pickleball analysis may not yet have a statistical category for wristband-adjusted performance, but Bower had found something.

He carried that intelligence into the final.

De Rueda won the gold, Bower took silver and Matysik bronze, with Jayden Broderick fourth.

The result mattered, but the final was absorbing because of how Bower tried to solve it.

He changed pace and location. Drops became drives. Drives became drops. A third-shot drop might set up a fifth-shot drive before another soft ball altered the shape of the rally again.

Bower was not simply hitting shots.

He was trying to construct them several moves ahead.

De Rueda eventually found enough answers, and for European pickleball his victory was significant.

For several years, the conversation has been about whether Europe is closing the gap to the United States.

Friday offered some evidence that, individually at least, Europe’s best can increasingly occupy the same conversation.

Saturday provided a rather less comforting answer.

Then America reminded Europe how large the gap can still be

Théo Platel and Ben Cawston are not ordinary European players.

They are among the strongest men’s partnerships on the continent.

Richard Livornese and Jack Munro beat them 11-0, 11-0 in the semi-final.

There are scorelines that require interpretation.

That one doesn’t need much.

Livornese and Munro went on to win the title, with Tristan Dussault and Ronan Camron taking silver and Randy Blanco and Brandon Lane bronze. Platel and Cawston finished fourth.

Europe has improved considerably.

America has not been waiting.

Both things can be true.

The gap also varies depending on what version of pickleball we are discussing. De Rueda could win an elite singles tournament containing leading Americans. European doubles partnerships can compete with them. Yet the speed, patterns and sustained pressure produced by the best American teams remain another problem entirely.

The English Open was useful because it put those comparisons on the same courts.

No theoretical rankings debate required.

The women’s tournament belonged to Europe and Roos van Reek

The women’s singles produced an all-European podium.

Domenika Turkovic retained the title, defeating Roos van Reek, with Claudia Caymel taking bronze.

Beating van Reek across a three-game final was a serious result.

Van Reek then spent the rest of the weekend demonstrating why she has become such an uncomfortable opponent.

Calling her consistent almost undersells what she does.

Drops land.

Resets come back.

Balls that appear attackable against somebody else are suddenly being countered.

Then, when the opportunity appears, she attacks from positions where many players are still thinking about neutralising the rally.

Shelby Bates and van Reek won the women’s doubles, beating Katerina Stewart and Bobbi Oshiro-Alconcel in the final. Kara Wheatley and Megan Fudge took bronze, with Karolina Owczarek and Caymel fourth.

Bates gave van Reek an ideal platform. Her defensive work from the baseline and transition zone kept rallies alive long enough for the Dutchwoman to change them.

Then came Sunday.

Van Reek and Munro had Glauka Carvajal Lane and Brandon Lane in the semi-final.

The Americans had opportunities.

Van Reek adjusted.

The point of attack changed. The match changed with it.

In the final, van Reek and Munro beat Domenika Turkovic and Jae Centonze to take gold, with Carvajal Lane and Lane earning bronze and Evie Kenna and Tristan Dussault finishing fourth.

For van Reek, the week finished with two golds and a silver.

For Munro, another English Open ended with two titles.

Neither feels remotely like a novelty at this event any more.

The technology worked. Now the process has to catch up

The English Open also became a test bed.

Stupa’s video review system was one of the clearest successes.

For the first time at the tournament, close calls could be checked against video rather than leaving players, officials and spectators arguing over imperfect human sightlines.

It improved the competition.

It improved the broadcast.

And once the production added a visible “decision pending” stage, it created a little theatre around the review as well.

There was, however, an unintended consequence.

Louis Laville demonstrated it beautifully.

Out of timeouts and needing to interrupt an opponent’s momentum, Laville requested a video review on a ball that had appeared comfortably out.

Reviewing it took time.

Time was exactly what he needed.

There is nothing particularly outrageous about that. Athletes use the rules available to them.

The question is how the rule should now evolve.

The simplest answer might be to require players to remain on court during reviews. No coaching. No retreat to the corner. No extended opportunity to refuel.

You retain the right to challenge a decision without creating a substitute timeout.

More important was a communication issue.

The process around when a referee’s call could still be taken to video changed during the tournament, but that adjustment was not consistently communicated to everyone involved in the broadcast.

That cannot happen at the next level.

Once technology affects competitive decisions, any procedural change needs a clear briefing mechanism for referees, players, commentators and production.

Again, this is not an argument against the technology.

It is almost the opposite.

The technology is good enough that the structure around it now needs to become equally professional.

Pickleball data has reached about 1988

Stupa also introduced far more statistical information into the broadcast.

That was another step forward.

It also showed how young pickleball analytics remain.

Football went through this.

There was a period when possession percentages, total shots and corners suddenly appeared everywhere because technology allowed broadcasters to count them.

The numbers looked impressive.

Whether they actually explained the match was another matter.

Only later did football analytics begin asking better questions.

Pickleball is somewhere around that first stage.

We can count things.

Now we need to decide which things matter.

A statistic without context is decoration.

The opportunity for Stupa, and for the sport more broadly, is substantial because pickleball is unusually suited to tactical analysis. Third-shot decisions, transition success, speed-up locations, counter effectiveness, patterns under pressure and the ability to convert neutral rallies into attack all tell us more than a raw number without comparison.

The hard part is collecting useful information at scale without requiring somebody to spend half a day manually coding a single match.

That is where the next breakthrough sits.

The important thing about Birmingham was that the conversation has started.

The broadcast should stop pretending the court is the whole event

Another lesson came from leaving the commentary position.

Some of the most interesting material had nothing to do with the match currently on screen.

Players warming up. Referees explaining their work. Paddle testing. Vendors. Adaptive pickleball. People wandering around the venue. The stories behind the people playing on court 47 rather than championship court.

Traditional sports broadcasting worked this out decades ago. Wimbledon coverage is not eight uninterrupted hours of a fixed camera pointing at Centre Court.

There is analysis. Interviews. Features. Other courts. Crowd shots. Statistics. Context.

The English Open now has enough happening around its courts to do the same.

That becomes particularly useful if the professional format retains large round robins.

If a championship-court match is 9-0 and moving towards its inevitable conclusion, the broadcast does not have to remain imprisoned by it.

Go somewhere else.

Show us the tournament.

That requires more production planning, floor management and people.

It is also where this event is heading.

Thursday might have mattered more than the finals

The Unity Cup could easily have felt like the day between the serious stuff.

It didn’t.

Professionals arrived and played exhibition pickleball with people they would never normally share a competitive court with. Younger American players used it to adjust to the conditions and then started entertaining the crowd.

Adaptive players competed.

A deaf player provided an opportunity to explain the signals officials use to communicate.

Wheelchair competition allowed the adaptive rules to become part of the broadcast rather than something hidden in a handbook.

Two men who had undergone prostate procedures played together and used their time on court to encourage other men to get checked.

And somewhere in the middle of it all was Lou Stevens, apparently requiring a chair to command the hall despite possessing a voice that rendered the chair entirely unnecessary.

That was the English Open too.

Maybe it was the most important part.

Because there is a danger approaching pickleball.

Professional pickleball is becoming sufficiently good, sufficiently commercial and sufficiently separate that it could start feeling like another sport from the one most people actually play.

That would be a mistake.

We cannot build two pickleballs

World Pickleball Magazine followed a group of ordinary players on their Road to the English Open.

We started with 12.

Different ages. Different standards. Different ambitions. Different reasons for being there.

Most had never met.

By Birmingham they had become a little team of their own, finding each other’s courts, watching matches and sending messages of support.

One member of that group, Kath Noles, never made it.

Her husband became seriously ill in the weeks before the tournament and died shortly before the Open.

Suddenly whether somebody reached the knockout stage of a pickleball tournament didn’t feel terribly important.

Yet the community that had formed around the project did.

That is the bit professional sport can easily forget once prize money, broadcasts, rankings and sponsors arrive.

The English Open needs Jack Munro.

It needs Roos van Reek.

It needs Ignasi de Rueda, Marcello Jardim, Lee Whitwell and the young American players capable of doing things with a pickleball that most of us cannot properly comprehend.

But it also needs the 3.0 player arriving nervously for their first major tournament, the club group wearing matching shirts, the 70-year-old who has discovered competition late in life and the adaptive player getting a genuine place inside the same event.

It needs volunteers.

It needs somebody standing behind a barrier watching their mate play on court 52 as though it were Centre Court at Wimbledon.

The volunteers built this thing

That is why any account of Birmingham eventually returns to the people running it.

Pickleball England remains heavily dependent on volunteers.

That sentence becomes harder to comprehend when you stand inside an event of this size.

Courts need monitoring. Balls need distributing. Referees need assigning. Sponsors have requirements. Players have questions. Schedules move. Equipment breaks. Somebody fails to arrive. Somebody else can only volunteer for two hours rather than six.

Then thousands of players walk through the doors.

Lou Stephens somehow managed the volunteer operation through all of it.

Kelly Dawson and the referee operation had the considerable task of putting officials onto matches across the tournament. Around 45 international referees came into Birmingham, while tournament directors and the PickleBook team spent the week solving scheduling and operational problems most players never knew existed.

Karen Mitchell carried the broader weight of an event that had grown far beyond its previous footprint.

The best event organisation is often invisible.

People notice the court is ready.

They rarely notice the person who made sure it was.

At the NEC, there were hundreds of those little acts.

By Sunday, plenty of the people responsible looked exhausted.

They should.

What they had pulled off was enormous.

Success is why the criticism matters

The English Open does not need another week of being told how wonderful it was.

It was excellent.

That is precisely why some of the old assumptions now deserve scrutiny.

The professional qualification system should be reconsidered. The round-robin structure at the top level needs a proper review. Communication around video decisions has to become tighter.

The data can become much more useful, and the broadcast can become much more ambitious.

Those are not complaints from people who think Birmingham failed.

They are the consequences of Birmingham succeeding.

Telford could operate like Telford.

The NEC cannot.

The next English Open should not simply be the 2026 version with another few hundred entries added.

The event has crossed into different territory.

That requires different thinking.

Sunday morning felt different

Before the final day began, Nick Hobbis arrived early enough to sit alone inside the arena.

For once, it was silent.

There is something useful about seeing a sporting venue like that. Empty courts strip away the spectacle and leave you looking at the thing itself.

A few years ago, the idea of Pickleball England occupying this much of the NEC would have sounded ridiculous.

Now they have done it.

By Sunday evening, Munro and van Reek had finished the mixed doubles final and the noise finally began to disappear. Players left. Equipment started coming down. Volunteers who had spent the week making the whole thing work faced the much less glamorous job of taking it apart again.

The obvious question is whether the move to Birmingham worked.

It did.

That is no longer the difficult part.

The difficult part begins next year, when everybody walks back into the NEC and expects this to be normal.

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Further Reading

• Road to the English Open: The Tournament Hasn’t Changed. The Players Have
• Life Refuses to Wait for Birmingham
• When a Hobby Starts Becoming Part of Who You Are
• Tour Watch: Europe

Listen: This article grew out of Chris Beaumont and Nick Hobbis’ post-tournament conversation on the World Pickleball Podcast, looking back on six days inside the NEC and asking where the English Open goes next.