Size matters — at the kitchen line

Pickleball auctions are now a thing. The quiet paddle revolution.

April 14, 2025

Pickleball injuries are part of the deal. It’s a legit sport with real wear and tear. So when you pull a hammy or jack up your elbow, the instinct is to get back on court fast.

Enter the visionaries at Cedars-Sinai in LA. They’re using Generative AI to make medical charts smarter—and guess what sport they’re using to prove it works? Yep. Pickleball.

More on this below.

But first, while we’re on the topic, we want to hear from you:

Where do you feel the most aches or pain when playing pickleball?

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In This Issue:

  • UT Austin wins Collegiate Title

  • Used pro gear hits the auction block

  • Leveraging AI to decode pickleball injuries

Game on.

Our Picks ☝️

🥇 Champs: UT Austin Claims College Title

Congrats to APP pro and UT Austin captain Jack Munro—his team (the 2024 Nike Dink Awards winner for College Team of the Year) took home its first DUPR Collegiate National Championship over the weekend. Full recap here.

🤐 Shhh: The Quiet Paddle Revolution

First, it was rec courts in Denver, now it’s LA: More and more, public, outdoor pickleball facilities are mandating “quiet paddles” to squash noise complaints.

💰 Better: MLP ‘Steals’ Aren’t Free

MLP made waves when it announced teams could “steal” certain players from other squads during waivers. New news: Now, at least, they’ll need to pay up. 

🤥 Gasp: Say It Ain’t So

New pickleball origin stories are coming out of the woodwork—a mysterious new book poses an uncomfortable question: Have we been lied to all along? 

Short King or Queen? Choose Your Doubles Partner Wisely

When choosing a doubles partner, you probably zero in on mental and physical fortitude—solid game, tough mental focus, energetic and encouraging attitude.

If you’re playing for more than fun, you might want to consider something else: height. Or, more specifically, reach.

The PPA’s stat guru, Jim Ramsey, dug into men’s doubles winners from the past year. His findings are pretty decisive—height matters.

  • Since August 2024, 17 of 19 gold medal teams have had one or both players over six feet tall.

  • The last six PPA tournaments have been claimed by teams with one or more players over six feet.

  • The most recent PPA event, the North Carolina Open, featured the tallest singles final ever: 6’ 2” Gabe Tardio vs. 6’ 5” Roscoe Bellamy.

Why You Should Care

While the stats here focus on height, the real difference-maker is reach.

Imposing teams like Christian Alshon and Andrei Daescu are dominating because it’s just so hard to get a ball past them—they can get to anything at the baseline, and once they get to the kitchen, forget it: their combined reach nearly extends to the net and covers sideline to sideline.

You may not be blessed with vertical superiority, but these stats don’t lie…if you’re teaming up for competitive play, find someone who is.

Or at the very least, play bigger than you are by extending to your max and taking balls out of the air whenever possible.

It’s not the inches, it’s how you use them—but also, it’s the inches.

Have You Met David Yet?

David isn’t your average protein bar—he’s the one your other bars warned you about.

28g of protein. 150 calories. Zero sugar. No fillers, no fluff, just fuel.

It’s protein, idealized. And yeah, when you buy 4, you get the 5th free. Because David's also generous like that.

Whether you're grinding on the pickleball courts or stuck in traffic with no real food in sight, David’s got your back.

🤔 Newsletter getting clipped? Click ‘view entire message’ or click here to read online

Up for Auction: Andrei Daescu’s Sweaty Shirt

If you’re looking for a way to get that much closer to your favorite pickleball pros, you may be in luck.

A new site launching today gives fans the chance to bid for game-used, autographed gear from players like Andrei Daescu, Zane Navratil, Kaitlyn Christian, Augie Ge, and others.

“Our mission is to preserve the integrity of pickleball memorabilia,” Pickleball Auctions Founder John Reichel tells The Dink.

Some standout items include Kaitlyn Christian's match-used signed paddle from her very first PPA Singles Gold Medal win in Daytona, and Andrei Daescu's match-used signed shirt from his MLP Championship.

Check back daily—today it’s Andrei’s shirt, tomorrow it might be Tyson’s socks (okay, probably not, but you get it).

The Dink MiLP is Going Global (And Bringing $100K With It)

Puerto Rico just got a taste of The Dink Minor League Pickleball—and that’s just the start.

We’re taking The Dink MiLP worldwide: Mexico, Italy, Australia, Canada, China... and that list? Still growing.

And yeah, all these squads will be bringing their A-game to the 2025 The Dink MiLP U.S. National Championships—where they’ll be battling for a $100,000 prize purse (yep, double last year’s).

So International Dink fam, want in on the fun? Rally your crew and sign up here.

Tracking Pickleball Injuries with the Power of AI

The principal data intelligence analyst at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Kathy Bailey, is using AI for good.

Bailey and her team recognized the power of generative AI—artificial intelligence that creates new content based on provided context—to help sift through the hospital’s vast troves of medical charts to quickly distill information that would normally take many hours to gather and analyze.

Her use case: pickleball-related injuries.

Old-school data tools see the word “pickleball” in a patient’s chart and automatically flag it—whether it’s relevant or not.

So if someone writes, “Patient sprained wrist. Enjoys pickleball on weekends,” traditional systems might assume the injury happened while playing. But that’s not always true.

Generative AI can tell the difference. It understands that in this case, pickleball is just a hobby, not the cause of the injury. That kind of smart reading helps hospitals focus on real injury data, not just keywords.

And the trial run seemed to work—in a controlled study, Generative AI was able to identify pickleball-related injuries from patients’ chart notes with 80% accuracy. 

New UPA-A Paddle Test Mimics Months of Play in Minutes

Professional pickleball has a paddle testing problem.

The current model tests brand-new paddles to ensure they’re within acceptable ranges of power and spin. But it’s a proven fact that paddles change—or “heat up”—over time.

In an attempt to test for this change, the UPA-A just rolled out a new “Artificial Break In Standard”—a series of lab-controlled tests involving a vice and some strips of leather in a process “that physically breaks down the structure of a paddle in a controlled and systematic manner.”

There are a lot of factors involved in getting this right—50 shades of grey, anyone?—but it’s an attempt to mimic months of gameplay in a lab, within minutes.

This, the UPA-A says, creates a standardized benchmark for manufacturers, players, and the sport at large.

“We hope this new standard encourages other brands to move away from paddles with a meaningful break-in period and helps move the sport we all love forward,” one brand told The Dink.

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