Pickleball has never had one clean answer to its most basic question: who’s actually the best player in the world? The Carvana PPA Tour just built one.
The Tour announced the launch of the World Pickleball Rankings on Wednesday in Dallas, a first-of-its-kind system meant to fold every PPA event on the planet into a single global leaderboard. Debuting with the 2026-2027 season, the rankings replace the old discipline-by-discipline picture with one composite number, giving players, fans, and media a definitive way to settle an argument that’s followed the sport for years.
How the World Pickleball Rankings Actually Work
Rather than crowning separate champions across formats, the new system measures a player’s performance across all three disciplines at once—gender doubles, mixed doubles, and singles—weighted at 50, 35, and 15 percent respectively to reflect how the modern professional game is actually played. The ranking draws from each player’s 14 best results over a trailing 52-week window, rewarding the athletes who show up and compete across every format rather than specializing in just one.
Every event feeds the same leaderboard too, from PPA Challengers up through international stops and the sport’s biggest Majors, including the Pickleball World Championships, with points scaled according to each event’s size. One tour, one point system, one path to the top no matter where in the world a result gets earned.
The rankings won’t just settle bragging rights, either. They’ll directly shape the competitive calendar, determining event entries and byes for top-ranked players and teams, and deciding qualification for the season-ending PPA Finals, where the top eight men and top eight women battle across all three disciplines for the PPA Finals Championship.
Carvana PPA Tour founder and CEO Connor Pardoe framed the new system as a matter of credibility as much as clarity, arguing that greatness in pickleball was never one-dimensional and that the sport’s athletes deserved a ranking ambitious enough to match the game’s global growth, one that rewards excellence across every discipline, wherever it’s earned.
A New Rallying Cry to Go With It
The World Pickleball Rankings launch comes paired with a broader identity push. The Tour is introducing “BE THE BEST.” as its new rallying cry, a phrase built to capture both the elite pro chasing a world title and the millions of amateurs who play the sport purely for love of the game. The intent, by design, is aspirational rather than exclusive—everyone, at whatever level they play, has their own version of “best” to chase. Expect the message to show up across PPA events, on both professional and amateur touchpoints, and eventually through the Tour’s marketing and merchandise.
Jeff Watson, the Tour’s SVP of marketing and communications, described the tagline as more invitation than slogan, framing it as a shared challenge that applies just as much to someone stepping onto a court for the first time as it does to a player chasing a world championship — a message that, paired with the new rankings, gives every player in the community something concrete to chase.
The full breakdown of how the rankings work—including the weighting system, the 52-week window, and how a player’s Current Seed differs from their overall world rank—is available HERE.
