Three months after the University of Virginia celebrated its victory in the Dynamic Universal Pickleball Rating Collegiate National Championship, it made another landmark achievement last weekend.
The triumph at the Nationals, which we reported on here, was just the precursor to this two-day event called the “University of Virginia Community Tournament.”
More Than 200 Competitors
The event hosted more than 200 competitors, including UVA students, faculty members, and area residents, and was held on campus at The Sheridan Snyder Tennis Center. Club President Conor Burns reported it was the largest pickleball event in club history and had quadrupled in size from last year.
He added, “This event was a great way to engage with the greater Virginia pickleball community and to further our relationships with great players.
“The club was thrilled with the size and success of the event. The competition was extremely high and provided great matches for all players.”
He noted that some participants had traveled from as far away as far as Washington, D.C. The tournament, which ran from early Saturday through to Sunday evening, had several sponsors, including the title sponsor Head Pickleball.
A National Sensation
As The Cavalier Daily reports, the Virginia Pickleball Club is one of the fastest-growing clubs within the university. With over 500 members and a tournament team that is entering the semester on the heels of a National Championship win, the team is a national sensation.
President and third-year Commerce student Conor Burns only began playing pickleball relatively recently, having gotten into the sport during the COVID-19 pandemic. Burns played soccer in high school and, like several others on the team, has a tennis background.
The club’s vice president, second-year College student Braden Ciszek, has been playing the sport for over 10 years. He was born and raised in New York, but his mom is from Seattle — where pickleball was invented — and he learned about the game from her. She has been playing pickleball since the 1980s, and the two still play on their backyard basketball court.
Largely Informal
When Burns first became involved with the club during his second year, it only had about 60 members, and it was largely informal, with few collegiate pickleball teams to compete against. However, this year, the collegiate pickleball landscape has changed dramatically.
“Now tryouts are extremely competitive, especially for the tournament team,” says Burns.
The club’s spike in numbers mirrors pickleball’s ever-growing popularity. One big contributor to the broad appeal, Burns says, is its flexibility: “You can play the sport however you want to play it. “If you want to just play around, if you want to play with friends, if you want to play at the super competitive level, it has all those levels available.”
In common with other collegiate sports, the impact and importance of Name, Image, and Likeness deals are growing. NIL deals are agreements between student-athletes and third parties, such as sporting brands, and Virginia pickleball has struck two of these deals, which Burns said has contributed to the club’s continued growth.
An Exclusive Sponsorship Deal
The first partnership is with ProXR, a major company in the pickleball equipment industry. The club has committed to a sponsorship deal, with the 24-person tournament team now exclusively using ProXR paddles.
Additionally, the club is set to sign a deal with Head Pickleball — and will exclusively wear the company’s shoes.
“I think that’s a big milestone for our teams,” Burns said. “In terms of where the money is in pickleball and for our success.”
Taking Part In A PPA Event!
Most importantly, the team is in negotiations with the Professional Pickleball Association about participating in one of their tournaments in North Carolina. This would be a historic moment as it would be the first time the PPA had a college team at one of its events.
“It’s a very nice wake-up moment for me,” Ciszek said.” To step back and be like, yeah, this is great, playing pickleball with a bunch of people who are here to have a good time. I don’t have to stress about every point.”
Read about the UVA’s amazing victory against all the odds in this article we published back in December.
“I think we played more tournaments than any other college, and so I think that practice, all those weekends we were away, really paid off,” Burns said. “In the end, when we won, I was just like, ‘This was all worth it.’”
Turning Pro
Although Ciszek says that not many of the players on the team have ambitions to become professionals, some pro bodies have been making contact with the club:
“We’ve talked with professional organizations. We’ve actually had people come in and talk to us about what the path looks like for going pro.”
Focusing more on the present, however, Virginia has big plans for the upcoming semester and will be hitting the road even more than they are used to. The Cavaliers are heading to tournaments in North Carolina, Cincinnati, Ohio, and even as far as San Diego. The San Diego tournament, in particular, stands out as a promising opportunity.
“I’m really excited for that one,” says Ciszek. “It’s the first collegiate tournament for a new organization [Association of Pickleball Players] that is trying to set up in the collegiate space, and they’re opening up with this massive San Diego tournament.”
We wish them luck!
