How to Watch Professional Pickleball: PPA, APP, and the Pro Tours Explained

Pro pickleball isn't one tour — and the landscape changed a lot in the last two years

If you played pickleball at your local rec center a few years back and then tuned into a pro match on TV expecting the same sport, the gap probably surprised you. The paddles are the same size, the court is the same 20×44 footprint, but the serve looks different, the pace is faster, and — confusingly — the tournament you're watching might be branded PPA, APP, or MLP, run by organizations with overlapping histories and, as of a 2024 merger, overlapping ownership.

This guide sorts out who runs what in pro pickleball right now, how the pro game differs from the one you play on Saturday mornings, where you can actually watch it, and who the sport's current top players are. Tour structures, broadcast deals, and rankings in pickleball move fast — this guide reflects what we could verify as current as of mid-2026, with sources at the bottom, and it flags anywhere the picture is still shifting.

The tours, as they actually stand right now

There are two organizations worth knowing, and one of them is really two brands under a single parent company.

The PPA Tour (Professional Pickleball Association) is the individual-tournament tour — the format most people picture when they think "pro pickleball": a multi-day event at a single venue with singles, doubles, and mixed doubles brackets, and a deep, mostly exclusive roster of contracted pros. It was founded in 2019 by Connor Pardoe and held its first tournament in early 2020 at the Mesa Tennis Center in Arizona. Pardoe still runs the PPA today.

Major League Pickleball (MLP) runs on a completely different, team-based model — closer in spirit to a franchise sports league than a tennis-style tour. Roughly 20 teams (the exact count shifts slightly season to season as franchises are added, sold, or merged) draft rosters of six players — three men, three women — and compete across a season of multi-team events, with matches contested as a mix of doubles, mixed doubles, and a tiebreaker format called DreamBreaker. For the 2026 season, MLP moved to a 20-team format split into round-robin groups feeding a Sunday knockout, with rosters filled via a dynamic-bidding draft.

Here's the part that trips people up: PPA and MLP merged. In February 2024, the two organizations combined under a new holding company called the United Pickleball Association (UPA), backed by a $75 million investment led by the private equity firm SC Holdings, along with existing PPA and MLP ownership. The two tours kept their separate brands, schedules, and formats — PPA is still the individual-tournament circuit, MLP is still the team league — but they now share a parent company, a combined pool of contracted athletes (over 150 pros signed multi-year deals as part of the deal), and, notably, a shared broadcast home (more on that below). If you see "UPA" mentioned anywhere, that's the holding company, not a third tour you need to follow separately.

The APP Tour (Association of Pickleball Players) is the other major tour, and it is genuinely independent of the PPA/MLP/UPA structure — no shared ownership. Founded in 2019 by Ken Herrmann, the APP is the tour officially sanctioned by USA Pickleball, the sport's national governing body, and it runs its events differently by design: rather than signing players to exclusive contracts, the APP lets any qualified professional enter any event, and — its signature feature — amateurs compete at the very same tournaments as the pros, on the same courts, over the same weekend. That "pro-am" structure is part of the APP's identity and a real point of differentiation from the PPA's closed-roster model.

There have been reports of individual players moving between tours or expressing frustration with scheduling and exclusivity terms — that kind of roster friction is common in a sport this young and financially volatile, and it's worth checking a specific player's current tour affiliation before assuming it hasn't changed, since player movement between PPA/MLP and APP has been an active storyline.

How pro pickleball actually differs from your Saturday rec game

The court, net height, and paddle size limits are identical between pro and rec play — pickleball doesn't have a separate "pro" court like some sports do. The differences that actually matter are in serve mechanics, scoring format, and equipment approval:

The serve. Pro play does not allow the "drop serve" that's become popular and legal in recreational and many amateur tournament settings (where the ball can be dropped and bounced before being struck). Pro-level serves must be struck as a volley serve — hit directly out of the air, released downward from the hand rather than tossed upward, with contact below the hip. It's a stricter, more traditional serve motion than a lot of rec players use today.
The let serve. This is a genuine, confusing divergence between levels. USA Pickleball eliminated the "let" rule for standard play in 2021 — a serve that clips the net and lands in the correct box is now just a live ball at the rec and most amateur-tournament level. Pro play, however, still replays a let serve (a serve that clips the net cord and lands in remains a do-over, the way it works in tennis). If you're watching a pro match and see a serve replayed after clipping the tape, that's not a rules error — it's a rule that's specifically different at the pro level from the version most rec players learned.
Scoring format. This varies by tour and even by event. PPA Tour events mostly use traditional side-out scoring to 11 (only the serving side scores). MLP uses rally scoring — a point on every rally regardless of who served — typically to 21, which produces faster, more predictable-length matches built for TV. Check the specific tour or event before assuming which format you're watching.
Equipment approval. Every paddle used in sanctioned pro play has to appear on USA Pickleball's approved paddle list, which tests things like paddle roughness and the "paddle deflection test" (a measure of how much spring/pop a paddle's face has). Thermoformed paddle technology and where to draw the roughness/spin line has been a genuinely contentious, evolving rules fight in the sport over the last couple of years — worth knowing if a "banned paddle" headline crosses your feed.
Pace and shot quality. No rule enforces this, but it's the difference you'll actually notice watching: pro dinks are flatter and more aggressive, pro third-shot drops land consistently instead of occasionally, and points that would end in an unforced error at the rec level turn into 20-shot exchanges at the top of the pro game.

Where to actually watch

Broadcast arrangements in pickleball have expanded fast and changed hands more than once, so treat the following as accurate for the 2026 season and expect it to keep evolving.

PickleballTV is the sport's dedicated streaming home — a 24/7 channel launched in early 2025 as a joint venture between Tennis Channel and the UPA (PPA/MLP's parent company). It's the primary place to find both PPA Tour and MLP coverage, running roughly $5.99/month or $59.99/year, with a 30-day free trial typically available. Beyond PickleballTV, PPA and MLP events also air across a genuinely broad set of partners — Fox, FS1, CBS, ESPN and ESPN2, and Tennis Channel among them — with marquee events like the PPA Finals landing on broadcast networks (Fox/FS1) rather than being streaming-only.

The APP Tour has its own separate broadcast relationships, independent of PickleballTV: CBS Sports Network and ESPN2 carry recap and live coverage, with ESPN+ and the APP's own streaming platform (APP TV) carrying extended livestream coverage of events. The APP's 2026 schedule includes 13 nationally televised events across its tour.

Both tours also run free YouTube channels with livestreams and highlights of many matches — a reasonable no-cost starting point if you just want to sample the level of play before committing to a subscription.

Practical tip: if you're trying to watch a specific tournament, check that event's own page on ppatour.com, majorleaguepickleball.co, or theapp.global — broadcast windows and which network carries which match (versus which ones are streaming-only) vary event to event, and those official schedules are more reliable than a general search.

Who's actually winning right now

Naming "current top players" in a sport moving this fast is a fair way to publish something outdated within months, so the players below are ones with rankings or results we could verify as current in 2026 — not a full list, and worth double-checking against live rankings before you repeat a "current #1" claim yourself.

Anna Leigh Waters is, by a wide margin, the dominant figure in the women's game — ranked No. 1 across singles, doubles, and mixed doubles, with a career win rate reported at 94.3% and well over 100 professional gold medals as of early 2026. She's been the sport's most consistent story for several years running.

Ben Johns remains the standard-bearer on the men's side in doubles and mixed doubles — ranked No. 1 in men's doubles and mixed doubles as of 2026 — and is widely regarded as the most complete player, historically, to compete across all three formats (singles, doubles, mixed) at an elite level simultaneously.

Christopher Haworth is the notable new name: a former competitive tennis player who only picked up pickleball in 2022, he rose to the No. 1 PPA men's singles ranking in early 2026 after winning the Greater Zion Cup, overtaking longer-tenured pros like Federico Staksrud — a genuinely fast rise even by this sport's standards for quick ascents.

Other players who show up consistently near the top of PPA and MLP results as of 2026 include Anna Bright and Federico Staksrud, both frequently in the mix in doubles and mixed events — but rankings across singles, doubles, and mixed shuffle event to event, so treat any specific ranking as a snapshot rather than a fixed hierarchy.

How fast the pro scene has actually grown

The participation numbers underneath all of this are the real story. The Sports & Fitness Industry Association (SFIA) reported roughly 24.3 million Americans played pickleball in 2025 — up about 23% year over year and up 171.8% over the prior three years, extending pickleball's run as the fastest-growing sport tracked in the US for a fourth consecutive year.

The money has followed. As part of the PPA/MLP merger, the UPA has stated it will pay out roughly $31 million in total player earnings starting in 2026 — reported as close to a 250% increase in combined player payouts compared to pre-merger 2023 figures. At the very top, elite pros are now reportedly earning between $1 million and $3 million a year in combined prize money and endorsements; Ben Johns has publicly disclosed earnings around $2.5 million. On the broadcast side, the PPA has described its current media agreements as the largest in the organization's history, and the APP's CBS/ESPN2 deal — in place since 2023 and continuing into the current season — was itself described as a first-of-its-kind broadcast commitment when it was announced.

None of that guarantees stability — a sport that's grown this fast, with this much recent M&A activity (the PPA/MLP merger is barely two years old as of this writing), is still a reasonable bet to see more consolidation, rebranding, or broadcast-partner changes before the picture fully settles. If you're reading this more than a few months after the publish date above, it's worth a quick check of the tours' own sites for anything that's shifted.

What to watch first if you're new to this

If you want to sample the sport before committing to anything: a PPA Tour singles final on YouTube will show you the cleanest one-on-one version of elite shot-making; an MLP team event will show you the louder, faster, more chaotic team-format version with its DreamBreaker tiebreaker; and an APP event is worth a look specifically because of its amateur-alongside-pro format, which plays differently from either. All three are legitimately different products built from the same sport — there's no wrong place to start.

For the rules that govern what you're actually watching — the serve, the kitchen, scoring — see our pickleball rules guide. If you want to understand the bracket and pool-play formats that structure most of these events, our tournament formats guide breaks those down too.

Sources

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