St. Louis Stakes Its Claim To The Major League Pickleball Top Spot With A Win In Grand Rapids
Major League Pickleball (MLP), presented by DoorDash, headed to Grand Rapids this past weekend for its annual Mid-Season tournament, held alongside the long-running Beer City Open. Pro touring veteran Andrea Koop is the long-running tournament director of this event, held at the awesome Belknap Park a mile from downtown, which is host to an amazing community of players. This event is well supported, incredibly popular, and the fans were treated to great play all weekend.
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.
Last year, the mid-season tournament was plagued with player absences, to the point where one such absence resulted in a contract termination (well, there was more to the QD situation than that … but it was the nail in the coffin, so to speak). There was definitely a worry for this event, given that only the top 3 teams even get points/prize money, and this event apparently is considered an “optional event” in some player contracts. As the rosters were announced, we saw very little of what we saw last year, with just a couple notable absences.
At the end of the weekend, the league announced that the Trade Deadline has been extended to 7/20/26, which makes sense since it was set to be on 7/12, the end of the tournament, when everyone was on planes going home.
In a league with 20 teams, a knockout competition is a bit difficult to fairly conduct, unless the league added four new teams to give a true “round of 32.” And that’s precisely what they did, borrowing on a 2025 concept to add a couple of teams into the competition to provide some exposure for players not currently signed to existing teams and/or not signed to contracts at all.
The Mid-Season tournament did count towards the season-ending standings, albeit not nearly as much as a regular event. However, the points earned could be crucial at season’s end to determine the top places.
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 (note: wins/losses are not updated in this table for BCO).
Because of the knock-out nature of this competition, we did not hold any pick’ em contest this week. We’ll return for the last three weeks of the regular season and then the playoffs.
Next up on the Pickleball Calendar? According to my Master Pickleball Schedule, the MLP has two key dates this week: another waiver wire pickup date on Tuesday 7/14/26 and then the season trade deadline on 7/20/26. Meanwhile, the regular season of the league resumes this week, with 11 of the 20 teams heading right to San Diego for Week 7.
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.