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The PPA Tour is back. And this year, it’s clear to see that it’s bringing a new and heightened energy. After just one event, we’re already questioning everything we thought we held sacred. Huge upsets, double pickles, and some very weird trash-talking. It’s all unhinged. And it’s all below.

In This Issue:
— Ben’s new doubles partner
— How to hit the screwball serve
— Sneaker culture in pickleball

You ready?

From JW Johnson’s trippy green ensemble to Sofia Sewing’s classy Franklin getup, here’s who wore it best at the first PPA event of the season. We’re back, baby.

Thanks to their partnership with Selkirk, Bread & Butter’s lauded Loco paddle is getting an upgrade. And they want your help with the final design. Get your vote in fast.

A thread on Reddit is rounding up the best tips and tricks users have learned from their coaching sessions. And honestly? It’s a pretty solid how-to for players of all levels. Here’s a freebie: remember to have fun, OK?

Gabe Tardio has taken his talents to Malaysia for a while, which means Ben Johns needed a partner for PPA Arizona. Who’d the GOAT call? None other than Federico Staksrud. Yikes. That spells domination in the desert.

Varying your types of serves during the course of a game matters just as much as hitting a solid serve in the first place.

One good serve is great. But like any shot in pickleball, your opponent will learn to adapt. Every so often, you want to hit them with something a little different.

Enter the screwball, or side-spin, serve.

Start with a continental (handshake) grip and iterate from there. The more aggressive your grip, the more spin you can impart on the ball.

From there, the motion that creates the spin is an inward wrist rotation at contact.

It’s sort of like a bowling motion. You swing the ball forward naturally, except at the moment of release you rotate your hand inward.

Here is what that inward rotation does to the ball:

You can hit the screwball from either side, too. A righty hitting from the left side will naturally spin the ball out wide; the same player hitting a screwball serve from the right will kick the ball into the opponent’s body.

The spin itself is not complicated to generate. An easy swing and wrist snap will generate plenty of spin. A big swing and violent wrist snap will carve the ball aggressively and prove difficult to handle for your opponent.

The key is mixing a serve like this in with your standard, deep serve in order to keep the other team guessing. Translation: free points for you.

➡️ Tanner Tomassi demonstrates.

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On this week’s PicklePod, Zane and Nico recap a wild season-opening PPA event, including a bizarre exchange at the net involving Christian Alshon, Hayden Patriquin and Anna Bright (something about Hayden not playing Dreambreakers in MLP…?).

Other topics you don’t want to miss:

Tune in. Get smarter. Impress your friends with your ball knowledge. It’s as simple as that.

➡️ This week on the PicklePod.

Pickleball has gotten faster, younger and more athletic. Its footwear? For the most part, it still looks like it belongs at a country club. Or the tennis court. Yikes.

Stria Sport is out to change that.

The Chicago-based brand started by taking a shoe already beloved in basketball and reworking it from the ground up to meet the rigors of advanced pickleball.

Then it signed elite pro Gabe Tardio. Just recently, it added fiery pro Danni-Elle Townsend to its roster.

All the while, it’s making the conversation bigger than just one sport or one shoe.

At the recent Stria Crossover event, the guest list told the story.

Tardio was joined on court by fellow pros Danni-Elle, Jessie Irvine, Chris Crouch and Marcela Aguila Ampon, while the other side of Stria's universe showed up too: NBA All-Star Andre Drummond, NFL star Jarvis Landry and even rapper Riff Raff.

The premise was simple: bring people from different corners of sports and culture together on a pickleball court.

“Stria brings a different energy to pickleball,” Tardio said. “They come from basketball and sneaker culture, so they look at the sport differently. It’s not just about making a shoe that performs—it’s about what looks good, what athletes actually want to wear and how we can bring more culture into the sport.”

➡️ So far, so good.

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The kickoff event of the 2026 PPA season wasn’t short on upsets, surprises, and storylines. As always, we break it all down below, but here are a few highlights to take to the water cooler.

🥵 The heat was a problem. That’s putting it mildly. On-court “feels like” temps were reported in the range of 115 degrees, with humidity levels pushing 99%. It was so bad, play was halted for four hours midday each day to avoid the worst of it. Still, it impacted play and claimed more than one victim.

😬 Ben Johns and Anna Leigh lost. Jorja and JW Johnson took down the GOATs in the semifinals. This isn’t unprecedented, per se, but it’s exceedingly rare. Weirder still, the word “passive” was used by many to describe ALW’s performance. Crazy stuff.

🥒 Ben got beat, bad. Ben took a round of 32 singles beating at the hands of youngster John Lucian Goins: 0-11, 11-6, 0-11. That’s two pickles in one match for anyone counting at home.

Otherwise, Anna Leigh extended her singles gold streak to well past two years. Hunter Johnson took down Chris Haworth for men’s singles gold. And Anna Bright and Hayden Patriquin took it home in mixed doubles.

➡️ Much more from pro expert Erik Tice.

A review from the Dink Fam...

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