Pickleballers Season 3, Episode 8: How Alix Truong became the No. 1 Vietnamese pickleball player
Alix Truong is the number one Vietnamese pickleball player in the world and currently ranked eighth on the PPA Tour. She’s one of the sport’s most compelling rising voices — a player who came up through every level of the game and is now helping grow pickleball across an entire continent.
In this episode of Pickleballers, Alix sits down with Roscoe and Jared to talk about her journey from a hyper-competitive Vietnamese-American household in Northern Virginia to the PPA Tour. They get into what it’s like being a trailblazer for Asian representation in pickleball, the realities of grinding for points without a consistent partner, and why she sees herself playing well into her senior pro years.
Alix breaks down what it was actually like going to Vietnam for the first time — working 13-hour days with no time to explore — and how returning on her own terms completely changed her relationship with her heritage. She describes being treated like a princess at tournaments, playing in front of a world-record crowd of 7,900 people in Đà Nẵng, and why she believes the Asian pickleball scene will eventually surpass the US in sheer scale.
Alix also opens up about the burnout she hit during MLP last season, getting traded down to Challenger right after one of her best runs with Eric Johnson, and the heartbreak of losing her committed partner Lane to hip surgery just as they’d committed to building something real together. She’s candid about what it means to be the only top-10 player without a consistent doubles partner — and what it’s going to take to break through.
