MLP Playoffs Hit Newport Beach as the Road to Central Park Narrows

If you like your pickleball with playoff stakes, this was your weekend. Major League Pickleball’s quarterfinal round set up shop August 14–16 at The Tennis and Pickleball Club at Newport Beach, with the league’s top eight seeds fighting for just four spots in the semifinals. Those semis — and the final — head back to a now-familiar stage in two weeks: City Pickle at Wollman Rink in the middle of Central Park, New York City, for the second year running.

The bracket is loaded. The No. 1 New Jersey Fives, who wrapped up the regular-season title at the start of the month, drew the No. 7 Palm Beach Royals, leaning on the star power of Anna Leigh Waters alongside Federico Staksrud and Jorja Johnson. The No. 2 St. Louis Shock, powered by the red-hot pairing of Anna Bright and Kate Fahey, met the No. 8 Texas Ranchers. On the other side, the No. 3 LA Mad Drops — with Ben Johns and Catherine Parenteau — faced a dangerous No. 6 Dallas Flash squad that rolled into the weekend riding a lengthy unbeaten streak behind the standout play of JW Johnson and Brooke Buckner. Rounding it out, the No. 4 Columbus Sliders and No. 5 Brooklyn met in what looked, on paper, like the tightest matchup of the round.

A quick refresher on MLP’s quirks, because they matter here. The playoffs use a best-two-of-three-matches series, and rather than a strict high-versus-low seeding, the top seed gets to choose its opponent from the bottom four, then the next seed chooses, and so on. Home-team status — earned by the better seed in the first two matches — is a real advantage, since it lets a team react to the other side’s lineups, including the sudden-death Dreambreaker. It’s a format that rewards depth and strategy as much as raw talent, which is part of why MLP has become such fun viewing for recreational players trying to pick up doubles tactics.

Because the Newport Beach matches were still being decided as this roundup published, we’re holding off on naming winners rather than guessing. If you want to see who punched a ticket to Central Park, the finishes are worth catching on replay.

Zooming out, the biggest structural news in the U.S. game this month remains the Carvana PPA Tour’s new World Pickleball Rankings, the unified global leaderboard the Tour rolled out under its “Be the Best” banner. It’s already changing how fans read results, and it will get a serious workout at the end of the month when the Veolia Pickleball National Championships in Cary, North Carolina — one of the season’s biggest events, worth 2,000 ranking points — runs August 31 through September 6.

For now, though, the story is the postseason. Eight teams came to Newport Beach; four are moving on to New York. We’ll be back next week with the semifinal picture and a look ahead to Nationals.

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