New Jersey Fives Cruise To Major League Pickleball Austin Title To Keep Pressure On Rivals
Todd Boss·2026-06-15·via Forbes - SportsMoney
The Pickle Ranch in Austin remains one of the best venues in the MLP rotation.
Major League Pickleball
Major League Pickleball (MLP), presented by DoorDash, headed to Austin last weekend for the 4th event of its 2026 season. It has been a torrid start to the season, and after just three events we’re starting to see the standings form into the expected shape, with the five expected title contenders (NJ, LA, STL, Columbus, and Brooklyn) bunched up at the top of the standings, and the known rebuilding teams (Bay Area, California, SoCal, Phoenix, Carolina, and Miami) at the bottom of the standings, already well behind the leaders.
After its first three events were held indoors, Austin was held outdoors at the Austin Pickle Ranch during what can only be described as a massive heat wave. Record highs were seen throughout the Midwest ahead of the event, and the players were playing in mid 90s heat and 60-70% relative humidity. These factors wore on the players, slowed down the ball, and made play much more conservative.
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.
Ahead of the weekend, the following transactions were announced:
Columbus’ No. 1 female Parris Todd has opted out of the event due to illness. This will put Danni-Elle Townsend back in the driver’s seat for the Sliders, and will bring newly acquired Judit Castillo to the forefront. Luckily, Columbus has perhaps the easiest possible group that can be constructed in Austin, and still should have no problems advancing.
Atlanta’s Kaitlyn Christian suffered an ankle injury playing last weekend in St. Louis and is sitting out; she’ll be replaced by Atlanta’s bench female Keilly Ullery, a singles specialist with a slew of singles medals on the PPA Challenger circuit. Will this impact Atlanta’s weekend? Doubtful; they are still going to be favored over the two weakest teams in their group and should advance to Sunday’s 7th place match.
We got late word that Dallas’ No. 1 female Hurricane Tyra Black is sitting the event out. In her place will be Dallas’ bench female Albie Huang, who has a doubles DUPR more than a point less than Black’s. This may significantly impact the event; Dallas was the favorite to finish 2nd in the group, but now may struggle to beat both Texas and Atlanta.
Premier League Group Stage Match Recap
Day 1 Observations
Both Miami and California debuted new look lineups, with interesting results. California for a moment had this tie under control, having split gender doubles and with Delgado & Kunimoto holding a 10-3 lead in Mixed No. 1 then Miami’s Powell & Widdershoven ran off 9 points unanswered to win Mixed 12-10 and shockingly take control of the match. In Mixed No. 2 California’s Aussie acquisition Joey Wild debuted alongside another Aussie in Sahra Dennehy, but couldn't overcome Miami's newest acquisition Dylan Frazier, who led the team to a 3-1 win.
Florida started out with a dominant Women’s doubles win over the seemingly over-matched Albie Huang, sending up red flags for Dallas’ chances this weekend. After JW & Ge held serve, JW and Brooke Buckner fell easily to Christopher Crouch & Paula Rivas, leading to another easy loss by Huang and a shocking 3-1 win for Florida. Dallas is in serious trouble.
Atlanta’s underpowered Women’s team had little chance against Texas’ Jansen & Sleeth, and then the fireworks started in the Men’s doubles tie. Texas’ new acquisition Nico Acevedo played on the right but showed off the athleticism he’s known for, while Jay Devilliers reminded everyone that, even at his “advanced age” of 31, he’s still a top player, constantly winning hands battles and putting balls away. They evened up the match to send it to the Mixed ties. In mixed one, Devilliers bagged Acevedo high after Nico hit him multiple times earlier in the game, leading to beef with Jansen as Atlanta ground out a 12-10 win. Oncins and Sleeth blasted Vich & Ulery 11-1 to put it to a DreamBreaker, fittingly. In the DreamBreaker, Vich owned Oncins 6-2 and Irvine blanked Sleeth 4-0 to give Atlanta an unassailable lead as they cruised to a 21-11 win.
Day 2 Observations
Bay Area opened up Match day two on fire, sweeping gender doubles and looking to flip the script against Atlanta, who they lost to 3-1 just a week ago in STL. After yesterday’s body bagging controversy, Jay Devilliers is absent (load management) which puts Atlanta in a major hole, already playing their female bench player to start this event. Bay Area's Bui and Tells ground out a 13-11 mixed 1 win over Irvine & Vich, securing the tie, before their bench players Erokhin and Pham blew out Atlanta's two bench players for a shocking 4-0 sweep.
With Parris Todd out, Columbus immediately felt the heat, losing both of bench player Castillo’s matches against the new-look California team (playing two new players this week in Joey Wild and James Delgado), forcing the DreamBreaker. In the DB, Columbus just ran away with it opening up a 10-2 lead and never really letting California get into it to preserve the win somehow.
Day 3 Observations
Devilliers was back in action for Atlanta, but its Jaume Martinez Vich that wins both his doubles ties before Atlanta blasts Dallas in the DreamBreaker 21-9. Dallas is in trouble.
Anna Leigh Waters suffered a very rare mixed loss, and chirped at Eric Oncins repeatedly, but New Jersey ground out a 3-1 win over Texas to secure the group.
Townsend and Judit continue to struggle to mesh, but Columbus’ Mixed partnerships are unbeatable as Columbus secures 1st place in the group with a 3-1 win over Miami.
New Jersey was pushed by the struggling Dallas team, who nearly eked out a DreamBreaker win before NJ advanced. Dallas inexplicably finishes dead last in the group.
SoCal blasted the hapless Carolina team, getting the sweep and securing 2nd place in the group. SoCal is now in line to earn more points just this weekend than they may earn the rest of the league combined, thanks to the lopsided groups.
In a pretty shocking result, after Atlanta beats former champion Dallas earlier in the day, they get dominated in gender doubles and then can’t finish off the DreamBreaker to somehow lose to Florida.
Group Stage Results
At the end of the group stages, here were the standings, which drive the final day’s competition.
Group A: Columbus, SoCal, Miami, California, Carolina
Group B: New Jersey, Texas, Bay Area, Florida, Atlanta, Dallas
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: New Jersey's men continue to struggle, but ALW and Jorja Johnson finished the weekend in style, going undefeated to lead New Jersey to the weekend title.
Event 3rd Place match: After losing Women's doubles, Texas blasted SoCal the rest of the way, giving up just 2 points in the final three doubles ties to secure 3rd place for the weekend.
Event 5th Place match: Miami waxed Bay Area 3-0, including a 11-0 pickle in men's doubles, to finish off a weird weekend for the Breakers.
Event 7th Place match: Florida swept gender doubles for a 2-0 lead, but California came roaring back, winning both Mixed ties and then the DreamBreaker to claim 7th place.
9th & 10th place goes to Atlanta and Carolina, who earn 1 point a piece. 11th place goes to Dallas, 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.
Post Austin Standings ranked by points-per-event with yellow highlighted movement.
Todd Boss
New Jersey jumped ahead of St. Louis for 2nd place.
Texas jumped up from 10th to 6th with their 3rd place finish on home soil.
Dallas with the expected tumble, from 7th place to 12th.
SoCal is the big mover, jumping from 17th place to 10th place, in playoff position for the moment. However, five teams are all within that 5.0-6.5 range and could move up or down with one bad event.
Miami also made a big move up; they were dead last before the weekend, and are now in the mix for that last playoff spot.
Player Stats Analysis for the Weekend
Here’s a quick look at the players who played best (and worst) this weekend.
To little surprise, the two New Jersey women Jorja Johnson and Anna Leigh Waters finished top, going 12-1 and 11-1 respectively. Jorja’s points won percentage for the weekend was 76%, even better than ALW’s 69%.
Props to Layne Sleeth for Texas; she went 9-2 this weekend with a 69% points won percentage that matched ALWs.
Miami’s Clayton Powell impressed, going 7-3 for the weekend. Same with Megan Dizon, who’s 7-2 mark led SoCal to their great result.
Carolina’s Aiko Yoshitomi struggled this weekend, going winless (0-5) and winning just 13% of her points (8-55). She managed to score just 8 points in her five doubles matches.
It was a tough weekend in general for bench players, especially bench female players, showing a glaring lack of depth in that particular category.
What did we learn this weekend?
What were our top three Takeaways from the competition this weekend?
Dallas is in serious trouble. They’ve gone from a sure-fire playoff contender heading into last off-season, to a second tier playoff contender when they failed to win back Jorja Johnson, to an edge-case playoff contender with a serious of questionable trades, to a last place team this weekend when they were forced to play a bench player instead of Hurricane. They need to seriously think about starting over … and as we’re publishing this, they’ve announced a massive trade, flipping Black to Columbus for Townsend. We’ll analyze that trade in more detail in next week’s recap post.
The groups in Austin were badly unbalanced, and should have been formulated better. Columbus had a cakewalk with four teams who are barely trying, while the New Jersey group had four teams with playoff aspirations. This ended up leading to Carolina, who went just 1-15 in games for the weekend, actually earning a standing point thanks to being in the smaller group, while Dallas (who had a match win), finished in 6th place in their larger, harder group, and walked away with no standing points. This may seem like a negligible issue now, but
Atlanta is a weird team: they beat Texas with a fantastic performance and took a game off of title contenders New Jersey, but then get swept 4-0 against Bay Area while sitting their best player, then lose a DreamBreaker to the 2nd lowest payroll team in the league in Florida? Something seems amiss here.
Media Pick’ Em Contest Update
We have a slew of influencers and members of the traditional pickleball media participating in a season-long pick’em contest. Here’s the link to track the competition online, and I’ll be tweeting out the pick matrix and updates, so follow me on Twitter if interested.
MLP Media Pick’em Competition Weekly Summary:
Pick'em Contest final week 4 standings.
Todd Boss
TL/DR: I finished dead last this week, and am now in last place for the season. HeyShay, Chris Cali, Matt Spencer, and the Dink’s Thomas Shields dominated the week.
Next up on the Pickleball Calendar? According to my Master Pickleball Schedule, there’s no rest for the weary as MLP heads right to St. Petersburg this coming weekend for Week 5 of the 2026 season.
MLP-specific stats mentioned herein come from PickleKey.com, which has done a great job collecting detailed MLP player data for the league and went through an off-season re-design that includes a slew of new ways to slice and dice the data.
My colleague Erik Tice at the Dink (who does double duty as the GM for the California Black Bears) is back to maintaining his Public MLP Data sheet, which has all sorts of awesome data.
Any Tour-level match stats quoted in this article are courtesy of PickleWave. Visit picklewave.com for the premier source of Pro Pickleball data, including match replays, highlights, stats, and discussion. PickleWave has more than 31,000 matches in its database across all the pro tours.
