The first event of Major League Pickleball’s highly anticipated 2023 season is in the books, with some intriguing results and a great kickoff event at one of Pickleball’s better venues in Mesa, Arizona.

If you’re new to pickleball, and you have no idea what Major League Pickleball (MLP) is, then here’s a quick overview. MLP is a team-based competition of Pickleball professionals (not entirely unlike World Team Tennis) created by Austin-based Hedge fund guru and Pickleball enthusiast Steve Kuhn in the fall of 2021. Teams of four players (two men and two women) compete against each other in mini-matches for a team championship at the end of each event. Cumulative team results throughout the course of a season result in a year-end team championship. That prize is called the Pritchard Cup, so named after Pickleball’s founder Joel Pritchard, and it comes with a significant monetary prize for the winning team. The total purse of the season’s six events plus the final is reportedly $5 million.

Thanks to their November 2022 strategic partnership with the Professional Pickleball Association, MLP teams are comprised of the best players that Pro Pickleball has to offer. The 2022 Pritchard Cup winning MLP team was the stacked California BLQK Bears, who cruised to victory at the October MLP Columbus event. However, it is a new season and the teams were re-drafted in Mid-December in Las Vegas. 2023 is anyone’s game.

MLP has seen a slew of celebrity and athlete investments over the past year, with dozens of famous names throwing their money into the MLP team ownership ring. MLP’s Kuhn noted that when LeBron James was announced as a team-owner in September, the league got billions of hits and significant added attention.

The 2023 league structure is new: there will be 12 “Premier” teams in an Upper division competing against one another, with an additional 12 “Challenger” teams competing in a lower division. The teams will play six events, split into two mini seasons, and will re-draft at the halfway point. Then for 2024 the best twelve teams will be in the upper league and going forward there will be a European Soccer-style Promotion/Relegation system put in place where the best teams from the lower division move up, and the worst teams from the Upper division move down. This is thus the first US-based professional league to adopt Promotion/Relegation. The full details are still being worked out, but the word is that 2-3 teams will move up/down after each mini season, which creates great drama at both sides of the standings table throughout the year.

Here’s the competition structure at each event: each team meeting features a Men’s Doubles match, a Women’s Doubles match, then two Mixed Doubles matches. These matches use modified rules and modified scoring: the matches are one-game to 21, use rally scoring, and only feature one serve per “turn.” Teams can only win a game on their own serve, which results in some interesting end-of-game stress. If there’s a 3-0 sweep of the first three matches, the second Mixed Doubles match is abandoned/not played, though this has resulted in some points-based tie-breaker controversies. If the teams tie 2-2, then a trademarked tie-breaker called the “Dreambreaker” is utilized, featuring all four players playing singles (in 4-rally increments), with the unique possibility of mixed-gender singles points occurring in a race to 21.

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With all that said as a backdrop, let’s recap the season’s first event, the 2023 MLP Mesa by Margaritaville. Here’s some helpful links to follow along with the action.

Premier Division Recap

Challenger Division Recap

Observations from the first weekend’s event:

This wraps up the first MLP event of the year. The next MLP event will be at the end of March in Daytona Beach. Next up on the Pro Pickleball Calendar will be the JW Marriott Desert Ridge Open PPA event this coming weekend in Scottsdale, Arizona.