Recreational pickleball at Trung Kính Hạ playground, Hanoi, March 2026. Photo: Hrothgarr3B / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The short answer: Pickleball will be a medal sport at Vietnam’s 10th National Sports Games for the first time. Matches run from 23 to 29 November at the Djoy Nam Saigon Pickleball Club in Tan My Ward, Ho Chi Minh City, with five events and a minimum age of 12. Lý Hoàng Nam, the former ATP No.231, will play for the People’s Police team.
Most sports wait a long time to get into a national multi-sport games. Pickleball in Vietnam has not. According to Báo Văn Hóa, via vietnam.vn (9 October), the sport’s debut at the Games, which return to Ho Chi Minh City for the first time in 20 years, will be played over five events with a familiar format. Draws with 16 or fewer entries will be round robin; larger draws will be knockout. Matches are best of three games to 11, win by two, capped at 15.
The age rule is unusual: players must have been born in 2014 or earlier, which means a 12-year-old can, in principle, win a national games medal. In a country where junior pickleball has grown quickly (WPM covered the national youth championship in July), that matters.
The Lý Hoàng Nam question
The headline name is Lý Hoàng Nam. He was once ranked 231 in the world in tennis and won National Games gold in that sport. Now he will represent the People’s Police in pickleball. He is no novice. At the Pickleball World Cup in Da Nang in September, he reached four finals in a single day. Gold here would give him National Games titles in two racket sports.
Why it matters beyond Vietnam
A sport sits inside a state’s sporting system once it enters a national games. That means provincial teams, ministry budgets, coaches on salaries and selection pathways. The official charter for the event has been published by the Vietnam Sports Administration.
Vietnam already has the D-Joy Tour, a Ho Chi Minh City stop on the 2027 PPA Tour Asia calendar and, as we argued in June, a depth the rest of Asia cannot yet match. The Games add the one thing a private tour cannot buy: the state.
Verdict: America invented pickleball. Vietnam is wiring it into the machinery of national sport. Watch the provincial squads in late November; they are next decade’s tour players.
