Pro Pickleball Shake-Up: Insights & Implications for New Player Contract Extensions

There are some massive things happening behind the scenes of professional pickleball that you probably didn’t know about, and they’re almost certainly going to lead to some players who are currently household pickleball names fading into obscurity by the end of 2026.

Contract Renegotiations and Flashbacks to 2023

Right now, players are renegotiating their contracts with the league, and these “Signed” graphics flying around social media are giving me flashbacks to the pickleball Tour Wars of 2023.

As of right now, we have some pretty big names that have signed their extensions – like Anna Bright, Tyra Black, Federico Staksrud, and Hayden Patriquin – and some even bigger names that still haven’t – most notably, Ben Johns and Anna Leigh Waters.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, in 2023, MLP and PPA were set to merge, but MLP launched a nuke and started signing players to multi-year deals.

The PPA responded by signing their own players, and chaos ensued. Players were sitting around hitting refresh on Instagram to see who was going to be announced next.

Once the dust settled, the two organizations ended up merging once again and founding the UPA that we know now.

But that was 2023. What the heck is going on now?! Are we in the middle of another Tour Wars type of situation?

From Guaranteed Contracts to Incentive-Based Prizes

The UPA is starting to renegotiate some of these inflated contracts and transition from fully guaranteed contracts to incentive-based prize money contracts. Some players have signed these extensions already and some haven’t.

The SparkNotes summary is this:

• Take your guaranteed contract amount for 2026 – say $150,000
• Spread that over the next three years
• Now your minimum guaranteed salary for 2026, 2027, and 2028 is $50,000 per year

The kicker is access to vastly increased prize money amounts for PPA and MLP, including a $1,000,000 prize for the winning MLP team.

Yes, each player could individually take home $250,000, but they have to sign this extension.

The Decision Deadline and Prize Money Grids

The UPA has given Tour Wars signees (people who signed a MLP or PPA deal during late 2023) until August 15 to make a decision. Sign before then to have access to the “Gold” Prize money grid, where winners can take home up to 45,000 for winning a slam.

Sign by September 23rd to have access to the standard prize money grid, which pales in comparison to the gold grid. Winning the same tournament gets each player just $12,000 each, which is less than a third of the prize money available, but if you don’t sign this, you’re stuck with the futures prize money grid, which is about half of the standard prize money grid.

For winning the same tournament, you’d earn about $6,000 each. If this sounds aggressive, that’s because it kind of is. If you don’t sign anything at all, players will stay on their current contracts which run through the end of 2026.

A Look at Recent Signings

With one day until the deadline, Jimmy Miller reported on X (formerly known as twitter) that several players have signed extensions.

Some marquee names include:

• Tyra Black (4 years)
• Federico Staksrud (4 years)
• Catherine Parenteau (5 years)
• Tyson McGuffin (2 years)
• Jack Sock
• Hayden Patriquin
• Anna Bright

There are still a lot of important names missing, and from what I understand, a certain threshold of players need to sign this extension in order to transition from guaranteed money to prize money.

Avoiding Contractual Chaos

The UPA has to avoid the following situation: Players with huge tour wars contracts staying on their guaranteed amounts while players with minimal guaranteed amounts transition to the huge prize money.

This is complicated, so I’ll take you through a quick example.

Let’s say John Bens signed for $1,000,000 dollars per year during tour wars and Banana Wright signed for zero dollars. If John Bens refuses to sign the extension but Banana Wright does, the UPA could owe John $1,000,000 and Banana a ton of potential prize money, which would increase their liability instead of decreasing it.

The Unknowns and Future Outlook

It’s unknown how many players need to sign the extensions in order to transition to prize money, but right now we have a ton of notable names that haven’t been announced yet including Anna Leigh Waters, Ben Johns, The Johnsons, and more. I fully expect almost all of the top-ranked players to sign these extensions, and I signed mine a little while ago.

It’ll also be very interesting to see what happens to WPPA players. If you recall, the WPPA stands for World Pickleball Players Association and is led by Tina Pisnik, Collin Johns, Dekel Bar, Jessie Irvine, Jay Devilliers, and Gabe Tardio.

It’s unknown how many other players have joined the WPPA, and it’s unknown what joining the WPPA actually means, but my guess is that these players would most likely be the ones that would hold out on the negotiations with the UPA, if anybody decides to do so.

Interestingly, the UPA also just announced two new players: Chris Haworth and Armaan Bhatia. Chris Haworth is the #1 ranked singles player on the APP Tour, and Arman is the top Indian player and has won a couple of APP events as well.

I think that the UPA will get this done, but it’s going to be very interesting to see who signs in time and who walks away from professional pickleball.

You can follow Zane on X, YouTube and Instagram.