Professional Pickleball Association Australia Tour Ends Successful First Season

Roos van Reek dominated the PPA Australia tour circuit this year.

MLP Australia

Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with the world of pickleball. It is especially hard to keep up with the US-domestic pro pickleball scene, which often features multiple events per weekend, multiple leagues, and even more senior leagues. However, one thing I’ve not really done any coverage of so far is the burgeoning professional pickleball scene down under, based in Australia but which branches out to its sister country New Zealand and which featured 10 events this year.

The final event of the Professional Pickleball Association of Australia (or called PPA Tour Australia or just PPA Australia) 2025 season finished up last weekend, that being the Melbourne Pickleball Cup, so here’s a quick review of the season and an introduction to some of the top players on the circuit.

First off, here’s the 10 events of the season with links to PickleballTournaments.com’s page for each one (all these events are included on my running Master Pickleball Calendar, which I hope you’re book marking as an essential resource online):

• 2/2/2025: Melbourne, Australia 2025 Australia Pickleball Open
• 3/2/2025: Queensland, AUS 2025 Brisbane Pickleball Open
• 4/6/2025: Tweed Heads, AUS 2025 Tweed Heads Pickleball Cup
• 4/27/2025: Auckland, NZ 2025 New Zealand Cup
• 5/11/2025: Perth, AUS 2025 PPA Perth Pickleball Open
• 6/8/2025: Auckland, NZ 2025 Gold Coast Pickleball Slam
• 7/27/2025: Redcliffe, AUS 2025 Brisbane Open
• 8/31/2025: Redcliffe, AUS 2025 New South Wales Pickleball Open
• 9/14/2025: Tennyson, AUS 2025 Queensland Pickleball Slam
• 11/16/2025: Melbourne, AUS 2025 Melbourne Pickleball Cup

PPA Australia (like PPA) hosts Opens, Cups, and Slams, with similar point structures to the domestic PPA events. However, points earned in PPA Australia (or PPA Asia) don’t correlate one-to-one with points earned in the domestic PPA league. You do see some of the top PPA Australia (and PPA Asia) players in the PPA’s main ranking tables (most notably, Australian Sahra Dennehy sits 14th in Women’s Singles and Vietnam’s Phuc Huynh sits 17th in Men’s Singles), but we’re a ways away from a true PPA world ranking system. Also interestingly, PPA Australia maintains “Overall” rankings for its players, where they combine the points earned in all three disciplines to create an overall ranking system, something that the domestic PPA has considered but has yet to implement.

It is also notable that Australia has a ton more going on than just these PPA tournaments. MLP Australia is well established 12-team league that played earlier this year. There were two MILP events in June and July hosted in conjunction with the Dink. There’s a competing team-based league structure called National Pickleball League (not to be mistaken for the 50+ team league by the same name in the US) that is finishing up its 4th season this month. Pickleball Australia maintains its own player rankings across a slew of Australia-based events, which look a bit different from the PPA rankings. Pickleball Australia also runs the Australian Masters Cup Series for 50+ pros and has a tie-in with the Australian Open in January, where 24 of the best players in the country are invited to compete on Margaret Court in an event called the Australian Open Pickleball Slam.

Australian Pickleball is hopping.

Now that the 2025 season is done, here’s a quick review of the leading medal winners on the Australian tour. I’ll also cross reference the player’s rankings as appropriate. First, the notable Australian tour ladies:

• Roos van Reek hails from the Netherlands and played college tennis at the University of Nevada, but she’s now Australia’s top female pickleball player, sitting #1 by a fair margin in the PPA Australia rankings. She’s also played professionally across Asia (she took two golds at the Hong Kong Open in August) and even back in Europe, where she and APP pro Richard Livornese shocked the top APP mixed pair Fudge & Munro to take the Mixed gold at the 2025 English Open. This year in Australia she took 7 golds but 19 medals overall in the 10 events, the leader on tour, which has helped power her to the #1 combined ranking.
• Somer Dalla-Bona was the leading gold-medal winner on tour with 8 gold medals in 2025, and 12 medals overall. Dalla-Bona took silver to Kaitlyn Christian back in the US-pro heavy Australia Pickleball Open to open the season, and did not look back. She took 3 Doubles, 2 Singles, and 2 Mixed golds. Despite being the leading gold medal winner, she finished the season ranked #2 in overall. Dalla-Bona played her college tennis at Coastal Carolina, then one year as a grad student at Colorado State before heading back home and finding Pro Pickleball.
• Andie Dikosavljevic is a native Australian who decamped for the US to play her collegiate tennis at Auburn before returning back home. She’s becoming a force in Singles specifically, winning gold in half the PPA Australia events this year. She’s no one trick pony though, coming in second in total medals for the season with 15, which has powered her to a #3 combined ranking on tour.
• Danni-Elle Townsend won 7 gold medals on tour in 2025 to finish tied for 2nd overall and currently sits #4 in the tour’s overall rankings for ladies. Townsend has also spent a decent amount of time traveling, making the doubles final of the APP Newport Beach major in July and getting a Mixed doubles win at the big Vietnam Open in September. Townsend came to pickleball from Table Tennis, where she was on the Australian National Table Tennis team until her conversion to pickleball in 2024.
• Kaitlynn Hart pivoted to pickleball after a top junior tennis career in Australia, and now is considered a veteran leader in MLP Australia and the India leagues. She finished the season with 8 medals (3 of them golds) and a #5 combined ranking on tour.

Other notables this year include Katie Morris, Sahra Dennehy, Nicola Schoeman, and Selina Turulja.

Here’s an overview of the top performing Men on tour in 2025:

• George Wall just pipped his frequent doubles partner Joseph Wild for the #1 combined ranking on tour, done on the back of his 7 golds and 14 overall medals on tour. Australia native Wall went to Dartmouth, where he played tennis all four years before heading back home and finding pickleball. Wall and Wild are favorites to medal in nearly every Men’s Doubles event they play and together have 10 Men’s doubles medals across Australia and Asia this year. He holds the #1 combined spot despite zero singles medals.
• Joseph Wild sits at #2 in the combined rankings, just behind Wall. The pair have the same number of golds and overall medals this season and are both doubles specialists. Wild discovered pickleball while attending the University of Texas, which is fitting since Austin is one of the biggest hotbeds of pickleball in the world. From his time in Austin, Wild has connections to key members of the Austin pickleball scene, and partnered with Zane Navratil at the Australia Pickleball Open in January.
• Hong kit Wong is one of the regions first true dominant forces, competing regularly in both Australia and Asian tour events. He’s currently ranked #3 in combined Australia rankings and is #1 in PPA tour Asia’s singles rankings. He has 3 singles golds and 3 doubles golds with partner Eunggwon Kim in Australia this year.
• Mitchell Hargreaves sits #4 in combined Male rankings in Australia, and is one of the most recognizable names in Australian pickleball. The US-born Hargreaves won a triple crown in mid 2024 in one of the early Australian events, and is a frequent presence on podiums (he won 14 medals last season, tied for 3rd on tour).

Other notables this year include Harrison Brown, Andrew Horridge, and Louis Laville.

Look for these top Australian and Asian stars to continue to travel to the US, and look for these names to continue to get big wins over PPA traveling pros who cross the Pacific to test out the rising tide of Australian pickleball.