Dallas Flash Sweep A Tough Major League Pickleball Weekend In Austin

After a quick break for the Atlanta Slam, Major League Pickleball (MLP) presented by DoorDash returned to action with its third event on the 2025 slate in Austin, Texas. This week’s event was hosted by the Texas Ranchers (owned by Austin-based Tim Klitch, the patriarch of a pickleball-obsessed family that includes former MLB Commissioner Jenny Klitch and MLP super-fan and leading pickleball data aficionado Matt Klitch, known as “Matty Pickles” on social media) at the Austin Pickleball Ranch, and Austin fans were treated to a fantastic event.

The six Challenger teams were in action for the first time, and they played a true round-robin amongst themselves on the weekend. There was a limited Premier league team slate in Texas, but the teams that did show up include arguably four of the best five teams in the league, which made for great pickleball all weekend.

Key Links for tracking the event this weekend, which featured livestreams from the two primary courts at the facility on MLP’s YouTube channel and on PickleballTV.com.

Transaction Recap

Ahead of the weekend, the first MLP Waiver wire period was held, but we did not see a ton of player movement this early in the season. A quick summary of moves included:

– SoCal picked up Roscoe Bellamy and waived Ivan Jakovljevic. Bellamy impressed many with his play in Columbus so it’s no surprise he got picked up.

– Columbus replaced Jakovljevic with Ohio-native Ross Whitaker, who literally signed a contract minutes before subbing for the light-complaining Johns brothers at the previous event.

– Dallas swapped bench players, adding Jakovljevic and dropping Wyatt Stone.

– Lastly SoCal also swapped out some bench players, adding Jalina Ingram and dropping Lauren Hidalgo-Smith

News and Noteworthy

Ahead of the event, here’s some news and noteworthy items for MLP.

– On May 7th, just after the Columbus event’s fall out (covered extensively in my recap of that event here), the league sent a strongly worded letter to all UPA-signed players warning them that perceived “lack of effort” in matches going forward will be dealt with harshly, up to and including termination of contract.

Premier League Recap

Day 1 Observations

• Texas opened their hosting weekend by embarrassing Orlando 4-0, including an 11-2 stomping of Staksrud/Frazier.

Day 2 Observations

• Staksrud & Frazier rebounded from yesterday, but the rest of Orlando got waxed against the top-ranked Dallas team, losing 3-1.
• ALW blasted her way to two 11-2 wins to power New Jersey to their first win this weekend, 3-1 over Miami, who will struggle to win a match in Texas.
• In one of the best battles of the weekend, Alshon and Jorja powered their team in the doubles stage, then Dallas squeaked out a 22-20 DB win over the host Texas.

Day 3 Observations

• NJ dominated the first three matches for a 3-0 lead before dropping the final to beat Orlando 3-1 and keep pace with Dallas at the top.
• The Match of the weekend between last year’s regular season champs (NJ) and post-season champs (Dallas) gave fans everything they wanted. NJ rebounded from a shocking 11-3 ALW loss in gender doubles to win Mixed #1 over the Johnsons and force the DB. There, Dallas destroyed the top-notch NJ singles attack 21-11

Day 4 Observations

• Orlando sent Miami home winless in this top-loaded event with one final beatdown 3-1.
• Perhaps stung by yesterday’s loss to Dallas, New Jersey took out its frustration on the Texas Ranchers with a dominant sweep 4-0 to finish their weekend on a high note.

Challenger League Recap

Day 1 Observations

• Night Owls newcomer Delgado lost both his ties in his MLP debut, but Las Vegas persevered by overpowering the Chefs 21-11 in the DreamBreaker.
• Florida’s debut proved the pundits wrong, with Cason Campbell leading the way to a 3-1 upset over California. Unfortunately this would prove to be their sole win on the weekend.

Day 2 Observations

• Las Vegas’ Wang & Tellez remain undefeated in an easy win over California, then the team wiped out the Bay Area Breakers, including an 11-0 beatdown in mixed #1 by Tellez & Wang. LV is easily looking like the class of Challenger.
• DC gets into the action with a solid win over the veteran-laden Florida team.

Day 3 Observations

• Nashville Stunned the DC PB team, coming back from 0-2 down to sweep Mixed and edge them in a 22-20 DB for their first win.
• Bay Area highlighted a significant weakness in the DC team: singles. They got to the DB and crushed it 21-11

Day 4 Observations

• DC took out some of its frustration of yesterday with a 4-0 beatdown of the Black Bears.
• Nashville pounded the hapless Breakers three straight before losing the meaningless final, then turned around to sweep the first three games against Florida to finish the weekend in 2nd place.
• LV finished the event late Monday afternoon with one last win, a solid 21-12 DB win.

Team Standings Update post Event

Reminder: since there’s an unbalanced schedule, I use Points-per-match (PPM) as the standings metric, not total points.

In Premier

• Despite remaining undefeated on the season, Dallas slipped from 1st to 2nd place in PPM behind St. Louis. Both teams are now 8-0 on the season, with STL having one more point
• New Jersey now sits 8-2: its only two losses being one each to Dallas and St Louis. They’re comfortably in 3rd place. It only took three events for the predicted cream of the league to have separated themselves at the top.
• Orlando has now played 15 of its scheduled 25 matches, while SoCal has played just 2. This unbalanced schedule just looks weird.
• Despite going winless, Miami only dropped from 8th to 9th place. They still seem like they’ll stay afloat and apart from the bottom 4-5 teams in the league, and seem like they can push for a playoff spot.

In Challenger

• To the surprise of few, Las Vegas went undefeated this weekend and seems like it could continue that run throughout the season. They were pressed to DreamBreakers by both DC and Nashville, not surprising since those were the 2nd and 3rd best teams on the weekend.
• Nashville is the big winner of the weekend to this observer, beating my preseason #2 DC and pushing Las Vegas to a DreamBreaker.
• I had Florida picked to be last, and they exit the weekend last.

Player Standings/Stats Analysis for the Weekend:

In Premier

• Dallas’ ladies Johnson and Black finished 1-2 atop the player performance rankings, going 7-1 in games and winning more than 2/3rds of their points for the weekend (an astounding stat).
• Three other players finished with a points won percentage north of 60%: Will Howells, Anna Leigh Waters, and Christian Alshon.
• Two Miami players, unsurprisingly, finished last in player performance for the weekend. Jay Devilliers failed to win a game this weekend, while Mya Bui won just 35% of her points. The competition was tough on Miami for sure.

In Challenger

• Las Vegas’ ladies Wang and Bucker both went 8-2 in Texas and finished atop the player stats. Both players won more than 60% of their points and both should be on Premier league team radars asap.
• If you want to know why Nashville surprised, look no further than the performance of Marshall Brown. 8-2 on the weekend and the only other player in the 60% points won range.
• At the other end of the spectrum, Rafa Hewett went just 1-9 in games for the weekend, and Martina Frantova finished last in percentage of points won at 40.45%.

Next up on the Pickleball Calendar? According to my Master Pickleball Schedule, the MLP heads to Phoenix for the second of its three-straight weekend series. We’ll be back with this same coverage in a week’s time.

All match stats quoted in this article are courtesy of PickleWave. Visit picklewave.com for the premier source of Pro Pickleball data, including match replays, highlights, stats, and discussion. PickleWave has more than 22,000 matches in its database across all the pro tours.

Also, a great thanks to The Dink’s Erik Tice, who maintains a fantastic MLP detailed data breakdown and makes it publicly available at this Google XLS link. Tice’s data has proved invaluable this year as MLP does not make match data available at this detailed level at present.