Pickleball has by no means had one clear reply to its most simple query: who’s really the most effective participant on this planet? The Carvana PPA Tour simply constructed one.
The Tour introduced the launch of the World Pickleball Rankings on Wednesday in Dallas, a first-of-its-kind system meant to fold each PPA occasion on the planet right into a single world leaderboard. Debuting with the 2026-2027 season, the rankings substitute the previous discipline-by-discipline image with one composite quantity, giving gamers, followers, and media a definitive approach to settle an argument that’s adopted the game for years.
How the World Pickleball Rankings Really Work
Slightly than crowning separate champions throughout codecs, the brand new system measures a participant’s efficiency throughout all three disciplines without delay—gender doubles, combined doubles, and singles—weighted at 50, 35, and 15 p.c respectively to mirror how the trendy skilled recreation is definitely performed. The rating attracts from every participant’s 14 finest outcomes over a trailing 52-week window, rewarding the athletes who present up and compete throughout each format slightly than specializing in only one.
Each occasion feeds the identical leaderboard too, from PPA Challengers up by way of worldwide stops and the game’s greatest Majors, together with the Pickleball World Championships, with factors scaled in line with every occasion’s measurement. One tour, one level system, one path to the highest regardless of the place on this planet a end result will get earned.
The rankings gained’t simply settle bragging rights, both. They’ll instantly form the aggressive calendar, figuring out occasion entries and byes for top-ranked gamers and groups, and deciding qualification for the season-ending PPA Finals, the place the highest eight males and high eight girls battle throughout all three disciplines for the PPA Finals Championship.
Carvana PPA Tour founder and CEO Connor Pardoe framed the brand new system as a matter of credibility as a lot as readability, arguing that greatness in pickleball was by no means one-dimensional and that the game’s athletes deserved a rating formidable sufficient to match the sport’s world development, one which rewards excellence throughout each self-discipline, wherever it’s earned.
A New Rallying Cry to Go With It
The World Pickleball Rankings launch comes paired with a broader identification push. The Tour is introducing “BE THE BEST.” as its new rallying cry, a phrase constructed to seize each the elite professional chasing a world title and the hundreds of thousands of amateurs who play the game purely for love of the sport. The intent, by design, is aspirational slightly than unique—everybody, at no matter stage they play, has their very own model of “finest” to chase. Anticipate the message to indicate up throughout PPA occasions, on each skilled and novice touchpoints, and ultimately by way of the Tour’s advertising and marketing and merchandise.
Jeff Watson, the Tour’s SVP of selling and communications, described the tagline as extra invitation than slogan, framing it as a shared problem that applies simply as a lot to somebody stepping onto a courtroom for the primary time because it does to a participant chasing a world championship — a message that, paired with the brand new rankings, offers each participant locally one thing concrete to chase.
The total breakdown of how the rankings work—together with the weighting system, the 52-week window, and the way a participant’s Present Seed differs from their total world rank—is out there HERE.
