Cambodia Makes Grand Intro to Global Pickleball With STMarket International Cup
Ask most people to name Asia’s rising pickleball nations and Cambodia probably won’t come up. That’s rather the point of what just happened in Phnom Penh because the country quietly just hosted a genuinely professional-standard international tournament, and the calibre of player who turned up for it suggests the silence around Cambodian pickleball won’t last much longer.
The STMarket International Cup, played over Saturday and Sunday, brought competitors from roughly 20 countries to the capital for what organisers are calling the country’s first tournament to actually meet professional standards. It’s a modest-sounding milestone on paper. In practice, it’s the kind of event that tends to put a country on a sport’s radar rather suddenly.
STMarket International Cup Features Real Star Power
The entry list did plenty of the talking. Carlo “Snakebite” Lagrana flew in from the Philippines, joined by South Africa’s Ricardo “Ricky” Brules-Salgueiro and Shane du Bois, Singapore’s Hann Lim, the United States’ Rex Thais, and Mexico’s Aline Morales — a genuinely international spread of talent for a tournament staged in a country most pickleball conversations skip straight past. That’s rather the quiet twist here: Cambodia isn’t on anyone’s list of pickleball hotspots just yet, but it’s already managed to draw a roster with names recognisable well beyond its own borders.
Cambodia Pickleball Federation president Lim Hour Nita didn’t undersell the significance of getting there. “This was the first tournament where we met the professional standard in Cambodia,” he told reporters once the final matches had wrapped up.
For Nita, the appeal runs well beyond the courts themselves. He sees the sport as a genuine draw for visitors, describing it as a rare kind of connector that cuts across age, gender, and nationality without much friction at all. “I think pickleball is one of the sports which could possibly attract tourists to visit and compete in Cambodia. The sport is a well-connected tool between people regardless of their ages, genders and nationalities,” he said.
Building Something Bigger Than One Weekend
The response from participants has apparently been strong enough to convince the federation this shouldn’t be a one-off. Nita said the turnout and enthusiasm have pushed the federation toward hosting further international tournaments, and pointed to the quality of Phnom Penh’s courts as a genuine selling point for attracting future events and players.
The ambitions don’t stop at the capital, either. The federation is already eyeing Siem Reap and Preah Sihanouk as the next places to introduce the sport more widely, spreading pickleball’s reach well beyond Phnom Penh and into communities that haven’t had much exposure to it yet.
Underlying all of it is a longer-term goal: building a proper pool of local talent deep enough to eventually strengthen Cambodia’s own national team. On the evidence of this past weekend, the country isn’t short on ambition. What it’s been missing, until now, is simply the platform—and Phnom Penh just gave it one
