Dallas' men (Auggie Ge on the Left and JW Johnson on the right) cruised through this weekend and made a statement with their win over Columbus.

MLP

Major League Pickleball (MLP), presented by DoorDash, was back in action this past weekend at the Barnes center in San Diego, and we saw some big upsets and major surprises throughout the weekend as the MLP standings start to take shape ahead of the playoffs.

Key links for tracking the event this weekend, which feature livestreams from the primary courts at the facility on MLP’s YouTube channel and on PickleballTV.com. I also have data-centric links at the bottom of this recap.

Transaction Recap \& Player News

Ahead of the San Diego Event, we had a handful of trades and the final waiver wire period. The official trade deadline is 7/20/26, but we went ahead and covered the transactions in a separate post earlier this week.

  • Click here for all the Trade Window #2 moves, dating back to March 1st
  • Click Here for the July Waiver Period deals that just went down on 7/15/26.
  • Orlando’s Lacy Schneemann is still out with an ankle issue; she was seen on the sidelines wearing a brace of some sort. She also missed the BCO mid-season tournament. Bench player Alex Walker filled in.
  • Dylan Frazier, newly acquired by California, had a previously scheduled trip that he couldn’t get out of, meaning California was playing this weekend short staffed.

As I’m writing this, more trades are being announced; we’ll cover them in next week’s posts.

Premier League Group Stage Match Recap

Day 1 Observations

  • The opening match of the weekend saw Orlando hampered by Schneemann’s absence, losing women’s doubles 11-2 to start against group favorite Columbus. In gender, Columbus' men avenged an earlier season loss and cruised to an 11-6 win to sweep gender doubles. In the first Mixed match (which was actually "Mixed-2"), Walker again struggled and Orlando lost 11-1 to seal the win for Columbus. In the last meaningless game, Columbus' top mixed pair ground out an 11-6 win to essentially seal the group in the first match of the weekend.
  • Phoenix put down a stake in the pecking order of the second division of MLP with a dominant 3-1 win over Florida. They dominated gender doubles with Walczak and Schull winning 11-1 to make a statement and continue their winning streak; the pair is now 5-1 together, with 5 straight wins including multiple wins over veteran women's teams.

Day 2 Observations

  • Dallas came out firing this weekend, crushing the Atlanta team in a 4-0 sweep where really only one of the four games was competitive. The new-look females on Dallas are really coming together.
  • Utah sat their top player Garnett in gender doubles to give the regular team of Tama/Yuta a go; they still lose to put Utah in a huge hole against the Bay Area Breakers. They battled back by taking both Mixed, but then Bay Area took the DreamBreaker for a big upset.
  • Atlanta stunned the LA Mad Drops, putting yet another loss on CP/Jade and then seeing Johns/Kawamoto absolutely blasted 11-2 in mixed. Huge upset, with Los Angeles facing some serious makeup questions.

Day 3 Observations

  • California opened up Saturday's action with a huge win, beating playoff-contender SoCal in a DreamBreaker. California's moves have paid off and they're now well-positioned to get into the 3rd place match, amazingly.
  • Utah continued to mix up their rotation, and this time took out an Atlanta team that was on a serious roll this weekend. This win sets up all sorts of tie-breaker issues for the Group, with three teams finishing 3-2 and heading to tie-breakers.
  • Columbus finished off an undefeated group and the top seed with a 4-0 drubbing of SoCal, where none of the games was particularly close. This is also the first time where a team completed the group stage w/o dropping a game (closest was NJ’s 19-1 group stage in Columbus in Week 2).
  • Dallas’s new look lineup delivered a marquee win, and the group #1 seed, as Ben Johns' effort in his two doubles matches raises serious questions.

Group Stage Results

At the end of the group stages, here were the standings, which drive the final day’s competition.

  • Group A: Dallas, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Bay Area, Utah
  • Group B: Columbus, SoCal, California, Orlando, Phoenix, Florida

Event Standings Results

For 2026, the final day features the Event Standings matches, where the winner of Group A players the Winner of Group B, the 2nd place teams play for 3rd, the 3rd place teams play for 5th, and so on. Here’s a review of those final matches.

  • Event 1st Place match: Columbus' women's team started off strong, with the two ladies traded for each other a few weeks back facing off for the first time. From there, Dallas completely took over, winning Men's with ease, then sweeping both Mixed matches without too much trouble for a 3-1 win and a surprising event title. Dallas is back.
  • Event 3rd Place match: Atlanta finished off their best event of the season with a sweep of SoCal for 3th place.
  • Event 5th Place match: LA won the 5th place game with a workingman’s sweep of California to finish off a brutally disappointing weekend.
  • Event 7th Place match: Bay Area recovered from an 0-2 start to force the DreamBreaker, where Orlando eked out a win 21-19 to secure 7th place.
  • 9th \& 10th place goes to Utah and Phoenix, who earn 1 point a piece. 11th place goes to Florida, who finished last in the group with 6 teams. They receive 0 event standing points.

2026 League Team Standings Update post Event

Here’s the teams who made notable moves up or down the season Standings in this event. Because of imbalanced schedules, we’ll use Points per Match to determine the “standings” in this analysis.

MLP Standings (pts/per event) post San Diego Week 7. The Teams highlighted in yellow were active this weekend, while the rankings in yellow represent significant standings changes after this event.

Todd Boss

  • Dallas’ big win moves them up from 8th to 6th; they likely cannot get much further but would seem to like their chances against Los Angeles in a 3-6 quarter final playoff. I say this now before LA makes any trades, so hopefully this doesn’t age poorly.
  • Atlanta’s big weekend jumps them from 14th to 11th, with a bit of a cushion ahead of their edge-case playoff rivals.
  • California is making its push: they’re now tied for 13th with Chicago (who is waiving the white flag) and have Orlando in their sights.
  • Phoenix’s single standings point is enough to get them out of dead last.

Player Stats Analysis for the Weekend

Here’s a quick look at the players who played best (and worst) this weekend.

  • Unsurprisingly, the undefeated Columbus team’s players dominated the top of the player standings, with Hurricane Tyra Black leading the way with an 11-1 record and a gaudy 77% points won rate.
  • Brooke Buckner is making the most of her mixed-only role with Dallas, going 4-1 and sitting 3rd overall in points won percentage for the weekend.
  • It was a tough weekend for Florida’s Chris Crouch: 0-10 and a 39% points won percentage. Luckily, Florida’s regular season is over, so the team can regroup for next year.

What did we learn this weekend?

What were our top three Takeaways from the competition this weekend?

  1. Dallas, who many of us had written off after they seemed to just “give up” in the draft after losing Jorja Johnson, and who made some interesting trades earlier this season, certainly put their name back in the hat for this season. I’m not sure I’d want to face them in a playoff right now. The addition of Townsend’s energy and Alix Truong’s versatility has made them major playoff contenders all of a sudden.
  2. California, as discussed in last week’s trade piece, suddenly seems like they’re a contender for the final playoff spot.
  3. Los Angeles has some issues to address. How does Ben Johns lose a game 11-1 or 11-2? I’m not sure. How does Parenteau \& Kawamoto have a losing record in MLP together? I’m not sure either.