The schedules for Pro Pickleball 2025 come into focus

If you enjoy watching professional pickleball, then 2025 might be the year for you.

Today, the Association of Pickleball Players (APP) released a pre-release announcement with comprehensive details of the planned program for 2025. It includes:

• Fourteen (14) major APP Tour stops, including four Majors, eight Tier 2 tournaments (all of which are also USAP Golden Ticket events), and two specialty events at the APP Women’s Open and the APP US Collegiate Championships.
• Twenty (20) new events for 2025, covering professional and amateur competitions, including two events they have run in the past (AARP Champion’s Cup and the APP Atlantic Cup)
• A total of eight NextGen events (divided into two NextGen levels)

This looks like a similar number of main pro events for the tour to this year (there have been nine pro stops so far, with five more planned for the rest of the year). Their main events this year were Miami in March, Memorial Day weekend in NYC, Newport Beach in July, and the planned debut of “The Fort” in Fort Lauderdale in December. This looks like a decent expansion of the NextGen schedule, and of course the “20 new events” brings the total number of APP events for the year to nearly 50.

By now, we know that the Pro Pickleball Association (PPA) will likely host a number of events comparable in size to their 2024 schedule. They’ve hosted 17 events so far this year, and have another 7 planned for the rest of the year (including the Atlanta Slam this week). In addition to this aggressive pro schedule, PPA CEO Connor Pardoe appeared on the King of the Court Podcast in late August and announced the PPA’s plans to host a PPA-run “Challenger” tour starting in 2025 with 20-25 events to serve as a proving ground for new pros. So, between the PPA’s main and Challenger tours, they could have nearly 50 events of their own.

Next up is Major League Pickleball (MLP). MLP has taken months to get going this year, but they’ve managed to hold five events so far (Atlanta, DC, Grand Rapids, SLC, and KC) with four more scheduled (NYC, Va Beach, Vegas, and Miami) before two playoff rounds in November. Their organizational issues earlier in the year cost them at least five scheduled events from January to early May, so you can probably expect an MLP schedule of 12-14 events in 2025, sandwiched between the 24 or so PPA pros. We’ve heard rumors that the MLP may just play a summer schedule, but it seems highly unlikely that the PPA will simply pause their touring activities for months to support the low-revenue MLP brand.

And we haven’t even talked about the potentially taboo subject: the newly announced Pickleball World Ranking (PWR) group, set to launch in Dubai in late July 2024 and led by CEO Pranav Kohli (possibly with involvement from MLP founder Steve Kuhn). PWR promises $15 million in prize money for its 2025 events and $1.5 million specifically for the GCC World Series scheduled for March 2025. $1.5 million, for comparison, is 30% more prize money than even the major PPA associations are offering. PWR group backers include The Times Group, a Mumbai-based media conglomerate that has already shown it can and does host major professional events. The PWR schedule is not final, but its “World Series” schedule includes at least six events and the PWR World feeder tour will include events across Asia and other locations worldwide.

Phew. That’s a lot of pro pickleball. It’s almost guaranteed that there will be competing pro events on almost every weekend of play in 2025. But there are some interesting questions at this point:

• Is the PPA’s “Challenger” tour a direct attack on the APP? It seems so, and Pardoe essentially expressed that in his interview. He quoted: “We see the need for a proper feeder tour that is not run by the APP. We need one that we actually control. We want everything to go through our system and not through another organization.” After years of animosity between the organizations, this is the latest direct attack by the PPA on the APP’s livelihood.
• Can the professionals signed by the UPA handle a full PPA and MLP schedule? Players are now struggling with the volume of events and as a result, non-Cup/non-Slam events often lack big names. This is essentially the same problem professional tennis has currently, with its global schedule overload and only the Slams having full field attendance.
• How many top pros will drop out of MLP entirely in 2025? Following the leaked emails/texts from Collin John expressing his deep disdain for the MLP format, will we see more stars leave MLP entirely given a packed travel schedule and issues with contracted appearances? 2024 saw a number of names drop out (Arnold, Stratman, Lucy & Matt, the Brascia sisters, and AJ Koller); what happens if someone of Ben Johns’ caliber refuses to play?
• What impact will the PWR Group have? It’s obviously early in the process, but with seven-figure prize money available overseas, it’s only a matter of time before professional players in the U.S., who typically compete for first prizes in the $4,000-$5,000 range, are regularly booking flights to the Middle East. And how will the PPA handle complaints from players who are locked in for relatively small sums (especially the early MLP signees who got much, much less money than their peers) and who are contractually prohibited from competing for prizes that could literally double their salary in a weekend?
• Will we see a complete disappearance of talent from the feeder events or are we still early enough in the life of professional pickleball to continue to see top players pouring into these Challenger level events and having enough success to make a splash on the main tour? I believe the answer to that is yes, at least for the men’s tour, as we continue to see male players achieve major success month after month seemingly out of nowhere. The women’s tours still don’t seem to have the depth of talent to sustain enough quality competition to support all of these scheduled events.

Nevertheless, the influx of money, investment and infrastructure will only help the squad of professional players to continue to grow, which can only be beneficial for the state of the game.

FYI, I maintain a Google calendar to keep track of all of these professional and other major events from all of the major organizations (APP, PPA, MLP, PWR, SPT, NPL, US Open, USAP as well as other interesting events as they are announced (such as conferences, made for TV events like PickleSlam and other notable events). As soon as the actual dates are announced for all of these organizations, I will add them to the calendar.

I encourage my readers to bookmark the calendar and make suggestions if I miss any events. The calendar goes back to the beginning of the pro tours and also includes tabs for all of the known history of Nationals, the US Open and other major events prior to the APP/PPA. I hope you enjoy this resource.