Pickleball Pros forming World Pickleball Players Association Advisory Group

Are we about to have another “Tour Wars” chapter?

A potential shot across the bow of the United Pickleball Association, parent group of the leading Professional Pickleball Association, has been fired in the recent wake of radical contract renegotiation demands being made of its 150+ pro players, and it’s coming from some surprise sources.

Late Friday, word broke on both ESPN and the Sports Business Journal of a new advisory organization called the World Pickleball Players Association (WPPA), a “player-led organization formed to strengthen our sport through unity, professionalism, and collaboration.”

The WPPA’s named board is:

• Tina Pisnik, President
• Dekel Bar, Treasurer
• Jessie Irvine, Secretary
• Augie Ge, Board Member
• Collin Johns, Board Member
• Jay Devilliers, Board Member
• Gabriel Tardio, Board Member

The WPPA claims “a few dozen” pros to start, but what’s immediately interesting is the nature of the named WPPA Board. It includes several PPA stalwarts who have never previously wavered from allegiance to the tour. Tina Pisnik (the WPPA president), Dekel Bar (its Treasurer), and board members Collin Johns & Jay Devilliers have been PPA-true-blue since day one of the tour wars, dating back to when the PPA’s fight was with rival tour Association of Pickleball Players and through the PPA-MLP August 2023 split. These four signed PPA-exclusive deals in 2023, which barred them from the rival MLP league that year, plus they stayed true to the PPA’s cause in August 2023 during the massive pro tour split in Kansas City. However, today, these four stand with veteran Irvine, respected low-key pro Ge, and perhaps most surprising teenage sensation Tardio, who just a few months ago signed a massive 3-year contract worth more than $800k to commit to the tour.

This week also saw the UPA re-announce its established Player Council, called the UPA Pro Player committee, a group who (in theory) has the same goals as the new WPPA. The UPA’s Pro Player committee consists of:

• Zane Navratil – President
• Roscoe Bellamy
• Brooke Buckner
• Jorja Johnson
• Allyce Jones
• Eric Oncins
• Catherine Parenteau
• Federico Staksrud
• Anna Leigh Waters
• Matt Wright

What’s interesting here? Navratil (now the elected president) was an incredibly out-spoken critic of the PPA in the pre-tour wars era, yet is now the president of its internal player council. This group includes an interesting mix of never-wavered PPA players (Buckner, Jones, Parenteau, Waters, and Wright) along with some Aug 2023 MLP signees Bellamy, Johnson, Staksrud. Missing from either group? Ben Johns, the highest paid male player and brother of Collin, who’s intimately involved in the breakaway. When prompted for comment by the Dink, “The UPA confirms that this committee is the only formally acknowledged and authorized voice of its athlete base.”

According to press releases, the new group’s interests are in “include health and safety along with transparency as it pertains to compensation.” While there’s definitely been some griping on tour lately about the use of rollout courts in certain venues, the driving factor here has to be the compensation changes coming to the sport.

A month ago, the tour sent out new contracts that it’s essentially demanding that its pros sign, which convert their salaries into 3-year runway payoffs and pivots to an entirely prize-purse driven revenue model for players. This pivot may be welcomed by some and may very well be the necessary way to move forward as a professional sport, but it still represents essentially a forced change to signed and executed employment contracts with relatively harsh penalties for not abiding by its terms. Non-contracted pros are by definition only eligible for a small fraction of stated prize money (for example; a non-contracted pro who wins a Grand Slam doubles title would get just $3,000 prize money, while a full-member PPA player would get $45,000 for the same win), and that’s if they’re even allowed to compete (the PPA has put in contract terms for its “gold card” members this year that basically block out certain players from ever being able to compete if they’re not contracted with the tour if they’re ranked high enough).

The new WPPA is being advised by the same group (Sports Solidarity) who helped minor league baseball players unionize, and they the support of the Professional Tennis Players Association, an organization that pursues similar goals for touring tennis players. This is notable since (like tennis) pickleball pros technically are independent contractors, and the disparate priorities of the players make unionization nearly impossible across such a wide group of players.

Will this group have any meaningful voice in the state of the contract negotiations? It remains to be seen. In the fall-out of the late 2023 Tour Wars saga, the 100 or so players who signed with MLP at the time formed a Player’s Collective led by fierce PPA critic Jill Braverman, in an attempt to counter the 40% salary cut demands being made of them by the UPA. The monopoly-power of the UPA won out, and players by and large were forced to take the cuts or face being effectively ousted from the tour (Braverman no longer plays on the UPA, whether by choice or by banishment, and many MLP players took far larger cuts than their PPA aligned fellow pros).

One thing seems sure; we’re heading into another interesting chapter in the growth of the professional side of the sport.