2026 MLP Weekly Roundup – Tyra for Townsend, Austin Takeaways and St. Pete Preview

It was a scorcher of a weekend in Austin for the second consecutive year. Apparently, mid-June can get hot sometimes in Texas. Who knew? What is also heating up for MLP is the hot stove. Erik Tice is predicting at least 7 trades to occur before the trade deadline in a couple of weeks. The Columbus Sliders already made a blockbuster move. And there is pickleball happening pretty much every week. Continuity in MLP may simply be an elusive concept, at this point. 

1. Pressure Makes Diamonds (aka the 2026 MLP Arms Race) – The condensed summer MLP schedule has created a new world somewhat similar to the new era version of Survivor (this will only make sense for anyone who actually watches Survivor lol…). With less days and more action, teams in MLP are forced to make decisions quickly with the fear of getting left behind more pronounced than ever. The 2026 season is the biggest arms race that the 3-year season-long format has provided. 

The Shock and 5’s paid for Anna Bright and Jorja Johnson respectively, the Texas Ranchers found a creative way to pay more than the maximum allotted amount of $200K for Nico Acevedo, and now the Columbus Sliders have shipped out their big Aussie draft acquisition, Danni-Elle Townsend, for Hurricane Tyra Black. 

The former champs are in full win-now mode and take advantage of the saddest sad sack team in 2026, the Dallas Flash. Tyra missed the Austin event for Dallas with an illness, but the Sliders clearly are not concerned enough as they put together the best women’s team in MLP to rival Anna Leigh Waters and Jorja Johnson. Parris and Tyra have had good success on the PPA Tour, and it slots Parris back into her more natural right side in women’s doubles. 

The move for Tyra was made on the heels of a tough Sliders weekend where they made the Super Sunday final without an ailing Parris Todd. A healthy Tyra is a top 5 female in the game and she gets to slot into her more natural left side in mixed doubles with CJ Klinger, whose mixed game has not developed the way his men’s game has over the past couple of years. 

The trade is a win win for both teams, given how their respective seasons are going, but it also represents a shift to a full on arms race for MLP teams wanting to win right now.

If you want to win a championship in 2026, it is obvious that you are going to have to pull out all the stops. Without any salary restrictions, MLP is a pure arms race as teams flush with cash do whatever they can to stay in the mixed. It’s something that inevitably happens in professional sports, but it’s kind of the worst iteration of pro sports team building, in our view. 

Soccer is the most popular sport in the world and it is very much an accepted practice that the big spending teams essentially use the lesser teams as farm teams / development hubs. You pay enough money and you can get whoever you want.

While it reflects an inevitability of pro sports, it really takes away the creativity and fun of team building, which is the most fascinating aspect of MLP for us. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Tyra Black is going to work well with Parris Todd or that it would be helpful for the 5’s to add JW Johnson to their roster, which somehow feels like a foregone conclusion.

Danni-Elle Townsend, on the other hand, represented the type of creative team building that has excited us about MLP in the past. The Sliders choosing not to run back their championship squad and banking on the potential of an unproven, non-American was arguably the most fascinating storyline of the 2026 season. 

That is all for not, though. Townsend goes to Dallas where she’ll have a chance to grow away from the pressure chamber of having to win a title. One user on X responded to our post lamenting the shifting dynamic of MLP saying ”100, PPA but with teams”. 

And that really cuts to the heart of why this feels like less fun to us. Part of the allure of MLP has been that it removes the monotony of somewhat predetermined outcomes in tour style events and provides an infrastructure that requires savvy team building to win. Not just buying all the best players that are available and guaranteeing a certain level of success. 

This may very well be the natural evolution of the team aspect of pickleball as we shift to more of this franchise, season long model with one division. We’re not here to create the fix for it as that is by no means an easy task, although some kind of salary cap and floor system would probably help to some degree. Rather, it’s a commentary on the changing dynamics of the league. The haves of the league are becoming more scarce and we’ll be interested to see whether MLP views this as a problem that needs to be solved. 

The issue that we see is not that there are haves and have nots. That will always be the case. It’s the how the haves and have nots are being constructed. There is no parity when the haves are based primarily on how much money a team spends. It offers little hope for franchises unwilling or unable to spend the money needed to build a contender.

The give everyone a chance model is very much a North American pro sports ideology and it is unclear to us whether we land with the majority or minority on this – clearly, soccer fans have no issue with this and will happily pour their hearts into teams with no shot at ever winning a championship, absent a change in owner. 

From a bigger picture perspective, we do think this is e a problem that needs to be addressed because this is a North American based league. The idea of having location based teams is that fan affiliation and identity leads to diehard fandom. Diehard fandom in North America is less likely to be created if 80% of the teams are out of the mix every year before the season starts, with limited promise for any meaningful change in the future. 

The pressure of winning an MLP title is leading a few select teams to go for the gusto and do everything in their power to win. It has created a dynamic in the league where we are simply waiting and watching to see what the best teams are able to do against one another. 

We will be watching closely to see how the Sliders put the pieces together and how they stack up against the other top teams in the league. We’ll undoubtedly be watching to see how the rest of the league responds before the trade deadline. 

Yet we will remain concerned about whether this shift in dynamic is a net negative for the long-term growth of MLP. 

2. Flash in the Pan – It has been a calamity of a 2026 season that is hard to comprehend for the Dallas Flash. A severe keeper deadline and draft miscalculation resulted in the loss of their emotional leader, Jorja Johnson. They tried to salvage the season by paying a significant sum of real money for Brooke Buckner. News flash, it did not work. 

Tyra Black was missing in action in Austin due a lingering health issue that she posted on social media about and it meant that Dallas had to run out Albie Huang for the entire event. It led to a deflating performance in Austin, where the team failed to secure any standings points despite a soft field. 

Dallas is officially a seller now that they have moved Tyra Black. You need 4 strong players to win MLP, but you’re cooked from a basic competitive standpoint if you don’t have 2 strong women. Somehow, the people behind the decision-making of the Dallas team failed to understand this. 

In a desperate attempt to stay competitive, they seemed to believe that Brooke Buckner was the upgrade they needed over Callie Smith to maintain relevance. When the results proved that theory to be dubious, they shifted into sell mode.

The benefit for the Dallas Flash is that they are starting off their rebuild on the right path, assuming they actually want to rebuild into a contender one day. It was a rocky weekend in Austin for Townsend, but that does not change our staunch belief that she is a future star. What will be interesting to see is whether there is anything else Dallas can do to really help them create a foundation for the future. 

The obvious trade that we noted earlier in the article is JW Johnson to the 5’s for Noe Khlif (Will Howells has to be dropped at the end of the year). Khlif would be a viable option as he continues to improve and is in that second-ish tier of men for the purposes of MLP. You don’t want to be building your team around Noe as your #1 left-side guy, but he’s a more than capable #2 under the right circumstances. 

One question that you need to ask in this new MLP landscape is whether you can see someone as a player on a championship winning team. It’s why upside is so often king, even if the results haven’t been borne out. 

There is no reason for Dallas to sit on JW Johnson, only to drop him at the end of the year and get nothing. An interesting landing spot that doesn’t really help Dallas beyond money is whether Brooklyn would part ways with Riley Newman to bring on JW.  The 5’s can offer a future piece of Khlif and money, which may be more enticing than Newman and money.* However, Brooklyn could see about going the Nico Acevedo route and throw in Hannah Blatt to make it a cool $400K in extra money that Dallas could use in the future – sometime Ryan Harwood in the 5’s could presumably match with Lina Padegimaite. 

There are limited options for a Dallas team that has gone from peak of MLP to rock bottom in about a year and a half. We’ll see if this 180 degree turn of events changes owner Mark Molthan’s perspective on building a a championship calibre team.

3. Under Pressure – The Super Sunday format for MLP has been a positive for fans, even if there is a lot of uninteresting pickleball being played at these events. The unintended consequence of this more pressurized event winning environment is that it is adding stress on the players each week. 

It was a very tentative Super Sunday in Austin as teams fought for valuable standings points in an effort to make the playoffs. We may not care a great deal as to whether the SoCal Hard Eights make the playoffs, or whether the California Black Bears or the Florida Smash get the extra standings points. But you know who does care? The players on those teams. 

The random matchups of a long regular season of 2025 with so many teams didn’t organically produce the event based pressure that we are starting to see in 2026. The Texas Ranchers and SoCal Hard Eights matchup ended up being a bit of a laugher, but the first women’s match did not disappoint from a tension and nervousness standpoint. The Ranchers were heavily targeting Cailyn Campbell, and both sides, particularly Cailyn Campbell, were playing a nervy brand of pickleball. 

It wasn’t the best pickleball in the world, but it was pickleball that mattered to the players on the court. And that’s another big part of what makes MLP fun. When players and teams care because they feel something is on the line, it leads to emotional investment from the fans watching. 

Maybe part of it was trade related chatter, but Danni-Elle Townsend appeared to be battling some serious nerves for the first time in her short MLP career on Super Sunday. The Sliders’ kitchen arrival rate was an abysmal 33% (6 for 18) in Townsend and Klinger’s mixed match against Howells and Johnson on Sunday as the 5’s sent nearly every return the way of Townsend. 

It may not be the most fun for the players battling the nerves that accompany having to shoulder the weight of an entire franchise on every popped up dink or missed third, but it is a welcome change this year that there is more at stake every time teams are stepping on the court. 

4. MLP St. Pete Preview – It sounds like Columbus will be full steam ahead with Tyra and Parris both back in action and, if that turns out to be true, the number 1 storyline is how the Sliders look in their first week of action. There shouldn’t be a super difficult adjustment period as even CJ and Tyra have played together before, but that will be the one pairing that needs time to sort itself out. The other question for the Sliders is how healthy Tyra is. We’re surprised she’d be ready to come back to play so soon after saying she needed time to get better, but we also have no idea what exactly she is dealing with. 

Columbus finds itself in the same group as St. Louis and they now will be favored on paper in women’s doubles against the Shock women, which drastically changes the matchup. We’ll still have the Shock ahead of the Sliders until we see how their squad looks in real life with Tyra. 

Overall, it will be a much more competitive event indoors in St. Pete as we have 4 of the top 5 teams in action along with Orlando, Palm Beach, Texas, Utah and Chicago. Poor Florida has been playing well but faces a much tougher battle on their home court than they did in Austin.

The Palm Beach Royals official account posted the Strength of Schedule based on what they say is “the difficulty of every team’s schedule based on a weighted analysis of opponent quality and schedule depth”.  Taking the numbers at face value, notably for this coming week, Florida, Texas and Miami are 16th, 17th and 19th out of 20th in their respective strengths of schedule, and they are all going to have a much tougher road in Austin, assuming their opponents are fully healthy. 

They better hope that Etta Tuionetoa isn’t healthy or else they will be overmatched against their entire group of LA, Brooklyn, Chicago and Utah.

One thing we’ll be monitoring in this third event of the season is how motivated Ben Johns is. He didn’t appear to have issues at the indoor venues of Dallas and St. Louis, but we’ll have to see what his motivation is like in the third event of the season as other contenders are bolstering their existing rosters.

Finally, there is so much trade chatter and we wonder how that might be affecting the players. We know how quickly information spreads in such a small world and leaks are abound in so many organizations. You have to expect that Danni-Elle Townsend was going into Sunday aware of what had already happened or what was likely to happen, and we’re curious if this affects the dynamic on court.

Max Freeman is a clear trade candidate as the other top teams look to bulk up for a championship run. We don’t know if Riley Newman is a trade candidate given Brooklyn’s love for him and his health status, but he is another person who should be a trade candidate. These teams want standing points to ensure better seeding to pick the matchups they want in the playoffs, but it may be hard to focus if you’re thinking about whether you might not have the same jersey on next week. 

This is a fun field so strap in for a quick turnaround Wednesday MLP start. 

*this article has been edited to correct that Riley Newman is keeper eligible for 2027.

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