Two national championships, one Sunday, 1,180 miles apart

Five thousand people and one title

Go back four years. On Championship Sunday in November 2022, the Indian Wells Tennis Garden held 5,522 people at its peak for the USA Pickleball National Championships. USA Pickleball’s own history page calls it “the largest-ever pickleball attendance in history”, which is the sort of sentence only a governing body writes about itself, but fair enough. Nearly 2,300 players had registered. The pros were playing for $150,000. ESPNU showed a two-hour programme. If you had asked anyone in that crowd who the national champions were at the end of the day, they would have pointed at the court.

A year later the Nationals moved to Brookhaven Country Club in Farmers Branch, outside Dallas, as the “Biofreeze USA Pickleball National Championships powered by Invited and the PPA Tour”. USA Pickleball says 50,000 people came, 6,928 matches were played and more than 2.6 million TV viewers watched. It was the biggest event the sport had staged. It was also, as it turned out, the last time the governing body and the professional tour put on the national championship together.

This year Brookhaven is hosting again. It just isn’t hosting the Nationals.

What exactly is happening on 8 November?

Two things, at once. The 2026 Oceanview USA Pickleball National Championships run from 31 October to 8 November at Barnes Tennis Center in San Diego, its second year at that venue. There are 54 competition courts. The pro events are 32-team single-elimination draws with no qualifying, best of three games to 11, side-out scoring, and gold and bronze medal matches on the final day. Every athlete has to use a paddle that has passed USA Pickleball’s testing and carries its approval sticker.

Meanwhile the Opendoor Pickleball World Championships fill Brookhaven from 30 October to 8 November. The MLP Nations Cup opens the week; PPA qualifiers start on Monday 2 November; and, in the PPA’s words, “the pro draws run through Championship Sunday, November 8”. The PPA’s event page lists it as a Major worth 3,000 ranking points with a total payout of $1,648,641. The organisers say “more than 60,000 fans came out last year”.

So on one Sunday, two sets of champions. One lot will be national champions. The other lot will be world champions. I suspect most readers can already guess which lot will be on the highlights.

How did we get here?

Quickly, because the history matters but the arguments have been aired to death. In March 2024 the United Pickleball Association, which owns the PPA Tour and Major League Pickleball, stopped recognising USA Pickleball as its governing body and set up its own rules body, the UPA-A. The Dink reported that the PPA then created its World Championships for November. That August, PPA chief executive Connor Pardoe answered the obvious question on X: “I’ve been asked a few times whether MLP/PPA pro players will be playing in the USA Pickleball Nationals this year. The answer is no. The pro players have a packed November, with the PPA World Championships in Dallas, MLP playoffs, and PPA Milwaukee.”

In 2024 the two events at least sat in consecutive weeks: Worlds from 3 to 10 November, Nationals in Mesa from 10 to 17 November. In 2026 they overlap for the whole of the pro week and finish on the same afternoon. Nobody announced that as a decision. It is simply where both calendars ended up, which tells you how much either side now worries about the other.

A quick word on the method

The figures below come from the two organisers’ own pages, read on 30 October 2026: USA Pickleball’s Nationals history, professional and about pages, and the PPA and Worlds event pages. Purses are as advertised, not as paid. The distance is our own great-circle calculation between Brookhaven Country Club and Barnes Tennis Center, which comes out at about 1,180 miles; driving it is rather longer. I have not used attendance claims as evidence of anything except what each organiser wants you to believe.

Is the money the whole story?

The conventional view goes like this: “the PPA has the players because it has the money”. It is true, but it is not the most interesting number.

Start with the money anyway. USA Pickleball’s pro purse has gone from $75,000 in 2018 (then, it says, “the largest cash purse in the history of the sport”) to $150,000 in 2022 and $225,000-plus now. That is a tripling in eight years, which in any other sport would be a decent story. Against $1,648,641 at Brookhaven, it is about 14 cents on the dollar. Worlds pays roughly 7.3 times as much. The 2018 Nationals purse, the record of its day, would not cover a fifth of the gap between the two events this year.

Now the more interesting number. USA Pickleball’s professional page says its pro draws will be seeded “using APP points”. The APP is a separate professional tour. So the governing body’s national title is now seeded off a third party’s ranking, because it no longer has the top players’ results to seed from. That is not a criticism of the APP, which has kept a pro tour going outside the UPA’s contracts. It is simply the clearest evidence of where the sport’s elite results now live. When you seed your championship from somebody else’s tour, you are telling everyone which championship is the main event.

And a third. The Worlds website’s front page displays the World Pickleball Rankings: Ben Johns first on 18,060 points, Hayden Patriquin second on 14,450, Gabriel Tardio third. Those are the PPA’s own composite rankings, and the players at the top of them are, in the main, the players with UPA contracts. USA Pickleball had not published its 2026 pro entry lists when I checked. If the 2024 position still holds, and nothing suggests otherwise, the top of that table will be in Texas.

So what is the Nationals for?

This is where I’d like to make an argument that will make me unpopular in both Farmers Branch and San Diego. The Nationals has lost the pros’ title, and it should stop pretending otherwise, because what it still has is more valuable to the sport than one week’s pro draw.

Look at how USA Pickleball describes its own event. Its history page calls it “the longest-standing and only National Championships in pickleball”. The first half is simply true: the first Nationals, in 2009 at Sun City Festival in Arizona, had “just under 400 participants from 26 states and several Canadian provinces”, and the first medals went to Ken Kraft and Charlie Robinson in the men’s doubles 75-plus. The second half is a claim, and a pointed one: “only” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, in a year when a richer event a few states away is handing out titles of its own.

But follow the event’s growth and you see what it actually is. Under 400 players in 2009. More than 700 at Sun City Festival before the move to Casa Grande. Registrations past 1,300 within the first hour in 2017. A record 2,200 in 2018 and 2,342 in 2021, with 3,944 matches and 172 brackets. In 2021 a 14-year-old called Anna Leigh Waters became the youngest winner in the event’s history. This is an amateur festival with a ladder at the top of it. Amateurs qualify, The Dink noted in 2024, through the Golden Ticket programme; the schedule runs from junior doubles and wheelchair co-ed doubles on the first Saturday through age groups from 19 to 85-plus. The pro divisions, by the official schedule, do not start until the round of 32 on Wednesday 4 November.

That is not a lesser thing. Nobody thinks the London Marathon is diminished because Kipchoge is not in the club runners’ pen. The trouble is that USA Pickleball still frames its event, at least in part, as the place where the best player in America is crowned. On current evidence, it is not, and every year it implies otherwise, the comparison with Brookhaven gets a little more embarrassing.

Is there a case for the other side?

There is, and I take it seriously. A governing body’s championship is not just a tournament; it is the competitive end of the rulebook. USA Pickleball still writes the rules most clubs in America use. It runs paddle approval, and its Nationals is one of the few big events where every paddle is tested on site. A national title that is open to anyone who qualifies, run by a non-profit that says it has 120,000 members, has a legitimacy that a privately owned tour’s “world” title does not automatically inherit. Calling a week in Texas the World Championships does not make it one in the way the word means in, say, badminton.

That is the strongest version of the argument, and it is the main reason this is an essay and not a law. But legitimacy you cannot field a top draw with is a slowly depreciating asset. Fans follow players, not constitutions. Sponsors follow fans. The governing body’s best route to staying relevant is to own the part of the sport it plainly does own (the amateur, junior, wheelchair and senior game, plus equipment standards) rather than to keep pricing itself against a tour that can outspend it seven to one.

What does the rest of the world make of it?

Mostly, a shrug. Outside the United States, a national championship still means the national governing body’s event, and nobody is running a rival on the same weekend. Pickleball England’s English Nationals are on at Bolton Arena this very week, and nobody is staging a competing English title in Basingstoke. Germany’s championships are traditionally played in November at RTHC Bayer Leverkusen. The tension that matters elsewhere is not “which nationals?” but “how does our national federation fit with the international pro tours?”, which is a different, more manageable problem.

The PPA’s own week shows why. Worlds opens with the MLP Nations Cup, eight regional teams, from Team USA and Canada to Asia International, Asia Domestic, Europe West, Europe East, Latin America and Australia. They are not national federations’ teams; they are the tour’s. That is the template the UPA is exporting: the tour defines the teams, the titles and the rankings. A federation in Europe or Asia watching San Diego and Brookhaven this week should take one lesson: decide early what your championship is for, because if you let a private tour define “the best”, your title becomes the second thing on the calendar.

What should USA Pickleball do next?

Three things, none of them glamorous. First, stop framing the pro draw as the headline. Second, put the amateur story front and centre: the age-group champions, the junior and collegiate titles, the wheelchair events, the qualification ladder from local Golden Ticket events to San Diego. Third, never schedule against Worlds again. Finishing on the same Sunday guarantees that one event gets the attention and the other gets the comparison.

And the PPA? It has won the argument about the elite title. It might note that the governing body’s event has been running since 2009 and was getting 2,000-plus players before most of the UPA’s current stars had turned pro. A sport with two championships on one Sunday is not a sign of health. It is a sign that nobody was willing to blink.

So here is the verdict. On 8 November the world champions will be crowned in Texas, and the national champions in California will be playing for something else: the right to say they won the oldest title in the game. That is worth having. It just isn’t the same thing, and the sooner San Diego says so, the sooner those 1,180 miles stop mattering.