Behind the scenes with PPA Tour founder Connor Pardoe on his busiest day of the year
FARMERS BRANCH, TEXAS — It’s Saturday night at the Pickleball World Championships.
Connor Pardoe hasn’t had a moment to pause and take in the scene all day – it’s been a constant stream of meetings with sponsors, pro players and event staff, with several phone calls in between.
“If people ever see me at an event, there’s a good chance I’m on the phone,” he says with a laugh as he sits down on the top floor of the double-decker VIP lounge next to Championship Court.
The stands are packed for a women’s doubles semifinal between Catherine Parenteau/Sofia Sewing and Kate Fahey/Tina Pisnik, while an ABBA cover band plays hit after hit in the background on the “Pickleball Boulevard” stage.
Pardoe, the 31-year-old founder and CEO of the PPA Tour, has a 360-degree view of the venue from this spot, so he can see everything he and his staff have built – and where there’s still room to grow.
Worlds is one of the busiest weeks of the year for Pardoe, and that’s how he likes it. He thrives in the go-go-go atmosphere an event like this creates, with thousands of players and fans descending on Brookhaven Country Club in Farmers Branch, Texas, for 10 days of non-stop pickleball and entertainment.
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Running the event smoothly requires early mornings and late nights every single day for Pardoe and his staff. He handles it all in stride – making sure food and merch vendors have what they need, checking in with the team running the amateur brackets and meeting with the most powerful people in the industry inside the VIP lounge.
“It gets pretty hectic,” he said. “Not only are we trying to make sure this event runs well and everybody has a good time, but we’re also thinking about 3 and 4 months down the road and our goals for the start of next year.”
Creating the world’s biggest pickleball event
Pardoe’s initial vision for the Pickleball World Championships when the PPA Tour started hosting the event four years ago was “entertainment meets pickleball.” Most people are coming to play in the amateur events or watch the pros (or both), but even when they’re not playing or spectating, there’s plenty to do.
Food trucks draw hungry fans and players to one corner of the venue, while paddle companies and other vendors have trailers and booths seemingly everywhere you look, including huge sports brands like Nike and Gatorade. There’s pickleball courts set up in the street for demos and contests, and live entertainment on the stage every day and night.
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“The thing that’s really rewarding for us is seeing people having a great time even when they’re not playing,” Pardoe said. “They’re all here for pickleball, but it’s so much more than that.”
Beyond the entertainment aspect, Worlds has also turned into a convention of sorts.
Everybody who is anybody in the pickleball industry is at the tournament – including representatives from many top paddle brands, social media influencers, Major League Pickleball GMs, media personalities as well as all of the top ranked pro players.
For Pardoe that means there’s a lot of hands to shake and people to meet with.
Earlier in the week he delivered a state-of-the-union type presentation at a private event at the Brookhaven Country Club clubhouse. Those in the audience included representatives from most of the PPA Tour’s main sponsors, as well as PPA Tour and Major League Pickleball staff members.
He talked about the importance of getting all the stakeholders in one room to discuss common goals and ways they can help each other grow.
“If you’re in pickleball, this is the event you come to to network, meet with other people in the industry and figure out where the sport is going next,” Pardoe said. “We have a really impressive group of sponsors, and they get to interact with us regularly, but they don’t really have an opportunity to interact with each other. This is a good time for that, and there’s so much we can all do together.”
Beyond meeting with all the brands the PPA Tour does business with, Pardoe said he uses Worlds as a time for his own staff to come together. For most of the year about 60% of his staff is based in Dallas, while 40% are in Utah, where Pardoe lives. The week of Worlds is one of the few times everybody is in the same place.
“It’s a great opportunity for our team to spend time together and discuss some of the things we’ve been working on,” he said. “Today we spent a lot of time focused on how we can keep expanding this event, and we also worked on solidifying next steps for the junior tour, some of our international events and a lot of the player contract discussions we have coming up. We’re juggling a lot of different things, but we have a great team doing it.”
Making room for family time
Even with everything in overdrive around him, Pardoe still finds time to hang with his wife, Carli, and their four children – two sets of twins, ages 4 and 7.
Worlds is one of the events the kids always attend, and on Thursday night they watched the Celebrity Pickleball Showdown together, which featured actors Mark Wahlberg and Jeremy Piven, tennis star John Isner, UFC fighter “Suga” Sean O’Malley, WNBA player Isabelle Harrison and Gas Monkey Garage founder Richard Rawlings.
“When I started the PPA Tour, my oldest twins were 5 months old,” Pardoe said. “We’ve had a handful of significant milestones with the business since then, and I always think back on those times through the lens of where I was at with my kids. They’re very much a part of my journey in this.”
At other tournaments when his wife and kids aren’t with him, Pardoe will often fly home Friday night, coach his kids’ sports teams on Saturday, then fly back to the tournament for Championship Sunday.
“For me it’s pretty simple: Yes we have a lot going on with the business, but family is first and that’s the most important thing,” he said. “If you have that in order, it makes everything else easier.”
Creating an even bigger Pickleball World Championships
One of the meetings Pardoe had in the VIP lounge on Saturday was with Brookhaven Country Club staff members to discuss plans for 2027 and beyond. They sat around a large table for more than an hour with facility maps and drawings to decide where more infrastructure is needed in order to keep expanding.
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There were more than 4,000 players registered to play in this year’s tournament, and the physical footprint needs to get bigger, Pardoe said.
“We just need more pickleball courts with how many players we have, and we’re working on ways we can make that happen,” Pardoe said. “Having this event here is a huge project, but the people at Brookhaven have been great and they are all on board, which is awesome.”
