Vietnam Keep Coming Through. Now Munro & Livornese Await

Good morning, pickleballers.

Another day in Da Nang, another Vietnamese pair still standing after an international draw which keeps finding increasingly difficult ways to test them.

Today we also leave the court for a moment and look at the minutes disappearing around it. Swedish tournament platform Raqt believes better scheduling can create more registrations, shorter days and better court utilisation without building a single additional court. The numbers deserve scrutiny. The question behind them deserves even more.

Vietnam’s home pair have come through everyone. Now Munro and Livornese stand in their way.

Lý Hoàng Nam and Nguyễn Ảnh Gia Huy have not been handed much at this Pickleball World Cup. First came Jay Devilliers and Émilien Burnel. Then Eunggwon Kim and Wong Hong Kit. In the semi-final, Quang Dương and Harsh Mehta took the opening game and forced them to come from behind.

The Vietnamese pair beat all three. Their reward is Jack Munro and Richard Livornese Jr, the established partnership which arrived in Da Nang carrying four consecutive APP titles together plus the English Open, and has looked every bit as difficult to remove here.

Gordon Watson watched the men’s draw courtside for WPM and came away talking about Vietnam’s depth. One player who caught his attention despite losing was 17-year-old Tống Nhật Minh, a former national youth table-tennis medallist whose transition into pickleball is already producing performances against international opposition.

The women’s draw provided a different version of the same World Cup test. Only days after Nicola Schoeman’s Opals beat Selina Turulja’s Heat for the Australian NPL title, the two are now partners and one victory away from World Cup gold. They face Domenika Turković and Katerina Stewart after both finalists survived three-game semi-finals.

That is what Da Nang is beginning to give us: players arriving with form built on different tours, in different countries and against different opposition, then discovering whether it travels. Hoàng Nam and Gia Huy have already answered that question three times.

Inside the World Cup doubles draw

What is a court hour actually worth?

Jens Larsson has developed an occupational hazard when he visits pickleball tournaments. While everybody else watches the matches, the Raqt founder notices the empty courts, delayed changeovers and minutes disappearing between one group leaving and another arriving.

Raqt says its new scheduling engine produced 6% higher court utilisation, 10–15% more sign-ups and approximately one hour less playing time per day when tested against real tournament data involving events of up to 6,500 matches.

Those are Raqt’s own figures rather than independently audited industry benchmarks. But they point towards a much more interesting economic question. An organiser with 20 courts available for ten hours begins with 200 court-hours. Once those hours have gone, another registration requires another court, a longer day or room somewhere inside the existing schedule.

Pickleball spends plenty of time asking where its next courts will come from. Larsson thinks tournament directors should also ask how much of the courts they already have is disappearing between matches.

Inside pickleball’s hidden scheduling problem

If you missed yesterday: Vietnam put three men into the singles semi-finals

The doubles run did not appear from nowhere. Lý Hoàng Nam, Phúc Huỳnh and Quang Dương had already occupied three of the four men’s singles semi-final places, with only Bulgaria’s Martin Stanchev preventing an entirely Vietnamese last four.

What interested us was not simply the nationality count. Hoàng Nam, Huỳnh and Dương arrived through different competitive pathways and with different games, yet kept appearing in the same closing stages.

Now Hoàng Nam has reappeared in the men’s doubles final alongside Gia Huy. One deep run can be a tournament story. Repeated appearances across disciplines start to tell us something more substantial about the player pool underneath it.

Why Vietnam’s men took over the singles draw

The interesting part of growth is what happens when the infrastructure gets tested

Da Nang and Raqt appear to be completely different stories. One is about players. The other is about tournament software. Underneath them sits the same pressure.

More serious players create stronger draws. More entrants create bigger tournaments. Bigger tournaments put more pressure on courts, schedules, officials and organisers. Pickleball’s next stage will not be measured only by how many people want to play. It will also be measured by how well the sport handles them once they arrive.

Your tournament deserves more than a camera pointed at the court

World Pickleball Studio is our production and broadcast arm, built to help tournaments turn their existing match coverage into something that feels like a proper sporting broadcast.

Commentary, graphics, studio presentation, sponsor integration, post-match programming and content around the competition can all sit around the stream you already have. The aim is simple: make more of the tournament without asking organisers to rebuild their entire production operation.

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