St. Louis Shock Finally Win An Elusive Major League Pickleball Title At 2025 MLP Cup

St. Louis is crowned Premier League MLP Cup champions for 2025. Clockwise from the upper left: Gabe Tardio, Anna Bright, Kate Fahey, and Hayden Patriquin.

MLP

To kick off this year’s UPA Worlds festivities, Major League Pickleball (MLP) presented by DoorDash returns into action for the last time in 2025 with the 2025 MLP Cup. The last time we heard from MLP was in late August, when the Columbus Sliders made a huge run to the title, beating the top three seeded teams along the way. That event seems like an eternity ago, even though it was just 2 months prior, thanks to the never-ending news cycle for Pickleball.

The Cup is a throwback to the old days of MLP, and a nod to the mid-season Tournament, and is being held for the first time this year as the league continues to evolve and experiment with new features. Unfortunately, the stakes seemed “off” for the tournament, with marquee players missing, teams understaffed, and effort levels for some stars in question for what is essentially an exhibition event.

All 22 teams (well, 21 teams, as we’ll note in the News and Noteworthy section below) were in Dallas for this event, which was held the weekend prior to 2025 Worlds kicking off. To balance out the Challenger schedule, MLP brought in some up-and-coming players to form two All Star Teams.

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

For various reasons, there were a slew of players missing/not playing the MLP Cup. By my rough count at least 12-13 starters were not playing in this event, including the sport’s top draw Anna Leigh Waters. Premier teams resorted to their benches, but challenger teams had to scramble to fill the spots with PPA-signed players above and beyond the handful of contracted “onsite substitution” players. This (as we’ll discuss below) led to some very lopsided group play matches, but ultimately did not impact the group stages in a large way .

News and Noteworthy

Ahead of the event, here’s some news and noteworthy items for MLP. It’s been a couple months since the MLP final wrapped up a great come-back season for the league, and despite things being relatively quiet we have had a few news nuggets pop up:

• There may be 22 MLP teams, but one didn’t play: the Nashville Chefs. Two different reports (one from Jim Kloss on twitter, one from Jimmy Miller’s KOTC podcast) alluded to some sort of financial issues with the team, either having cash flow issues or outright refusing to pay league fees. Perhaps the issues are related to the next bullet item.
• The Nashville MLP team was put up for sale officially on 9/15/25, but had yet to announce any progress on a sale by the MLP cup starting on 11/1/25.
• The PPA announced its new 2025-26 schedule, pivoting to a fall-to-spring touring schedule and clearly paving the way for a MLP “season” uninterrupted by tour events starting in 2026.
• Just after the MLP Finals aired on CBS, the league announces that its Major League Pickleball Finals was the 2nd highest watched pro pickleball match of all time with 433,000 viewers.
• In Late August, MLP’s LA Mad Drops sold a controlling stake at a franchise valuation of $13 million to Mad Drippin SPV, LLC.

Let’s recap the weekend’s action. The teams were divided up into pools first: four pools of four teams each in Premier plus an overloaded pool to allow Las Vegas to compete, while the 4 Challenger teams were joined by two All-Star teams to have two pools of three. The winners of each pool in Premier moved onto a single elimination bracket on Sunday, while Challenger sent the top two teams from each pool to a single elimination bracket for their title.

Premier League Recap

Day 1 Observations

• The First match of the Cup was a blow out as expected as Texas crushed SoCal 3-0. Even without star player Alshon (Wyatt Stone playing instead) but with Pisnik in the lineup despite possible contract disputes, they cruise to an opening win.
• In one of the two best matchups of the opening day, Dallas and Texas played two close gender doubles matches, each going Dallas’ way, before the Johnson siblings blew out their Mixed match to win 3-0 and take a commanding lead in their group. Texas’ Pisnik took a paddle to the hand and had to take a medical time out, but finished her match with her hand taped. It’s unfortunate that the first match of the group was the match that would determine the winner.
• In one of the closest matches of the day, Utah shocked Orlando by sweeping mixed doubles. Loong was back in the lineup after missing the opener due to illness/travel issues, but Utah’s home-grown lineup continues to gel at the right times, while Orlando’s performances continue to be questioned.
• In the match of the day, Brooklyn’s Men’s doubles team of Newman/Bar fought back from a huge deficit to shock Daescu/Klinger, and the group held on by splitting Mixed to shock the 2025 league champions and essentially win the group on day one.

Day 2 Observations

• LA squeaks out a match 21-19 in the DB to beat Chicago in a match they should have won a bit more comfortably. There’s certainly some questions about the lineup here going into the off-season; can this team win with the sport’s top Male player as constructed?
• In the match of the day 2, the New Jersey 5’s somehow found a way to win and secure the semifinal spot despite being without its two top females, destroying the Mad Drops in a DreamBreaker despite LA having three top singles players.
• In perhaps the biggest statement win of the event, even though it was meaningless in the purposes of the group play, newly promoted Las Vegas beat Orlando in a DreamBreaker. Orlando, who finished 8th in the regular season and who “traded up” to acquire Millie Rane mid-season, was beaten by the Challenger Champions.

Playoffs Recap

• Semis #1: without their star player, New Jersey was really no match for the full strength Dallas squad, who cruised to a 3-1 win and a spot in the final.
• Semis #2: St Louis put an exclamation point on this sweep of Brooklyn, taking the last match 11-1 to cruise into the final and setup a rematch of the mid-season tournament with Dallas.
• Finals: Black & Jorja ground out a great win to open the tie and throw a shot across STL’s bow, but Gabe/Hayden won a solid 11-7 men’s doubles match to even the score. In Mixed #1, AB and Hayden blasted the Johnsons 11-3 and Dallas couldn’t shake off the onslaught, with Tardio dominating Mixed #2 and Fahey playing solid defense, they ran away with the game and the match. Dallas had a mini run at 10-1 down facing match point to make the last game more respectable, but STL showed the grit it was missing in the playoffs to take the Cup.

Challenger League Recap

Day 1 Observations

• Bay Area destroyed a DC team missing 3 of its regulars, giving up just 8 points in three game sweep.
• Florida pulled out a 3-2 DreamBreaker win after sweeping gender doubles but dropping both Mixed ties, shocking the top seed
• Somehow, the Bay Area Breakers struggled to beat a bunch of 14 and 15 yr olds, squeaking by the “Junior All-Stars” 21-16 in the DreamBreaker. Nonetheless, they secure the semifinals spot.

Day 2 Observations

• DC drops a game to a team of kids so young that two of them don’t have last names listed at MLP’s site, but wins to move into the semis.
• California wasn’t terribly troubled by the Utah Tech all-stars, sweeping them to move into the playoffs as expected

Playoffs Recap

• Semis #1: DC swept the matches, but each was a nailbiter 2 point win, to move into the final.
• Semis #2: California destroyed Bay Area, winning both gender matches 11-1 to move into the final
• Finals: California finished off a dominant MLP Cup win by destroying the undermanned DC team in the final. Jimmy Miller will be a proud man today.

What did we learn this weekend?

What were our top Takeaways from the competition this weekend?

1. The overall vibe of the event was just “missing” something. As the LT Open learned, these pro events need the top players playing and having ALW skip the event for “load management” heading into Worlds is just a bad look. I understand that the league is still “trying stuff,” and they in arguably rescued the league in 2025 from where it stood after months of PPA-MLP squabbling over the merger, but this event just didn’t seem to work this year.
2. Columbus’ passion and energy displayed at the MLP playoffs were just missing here, perhaps related to the above, or perhaps because the stakes weren’t nearly as high as in NY in August.
3. The LA Mad Drops probably are shopping for another male partner for Ben Johns, after Hunter struggled once again alongside the GOAT.
4. St. Louis finally put it all together, cruising to a title that they’ve sought for two full years now.
5. Las Vegas certainly showed it was far too good for Challenger, as many of us thought, and I wonder how close they would have been to a Premier league playoff spot in 2025 as constructed.

Next up on the Pickleball Calendar? According to my Master Pickleball Schedule, we pivot right into 2025 Worlds, with more than 3,500 players registered, a new record attendance for any pickleball tournament.

Next up for the MLP? We haven’t heard anything related to off-season planning or transaction dates, but we do have some MLP content planned here in this space. I have an interview with AJ Koller and with MLP commissioner Samin Odwani done, just needing to be typed up and put into a story format.

MLP-specific stats mentioned herein come from PickleKey.com, which has done a great job collecting detailed MLP player data for the league.

Any Tour-level 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.