Ben Johns has a theory about why pickleball’s top tier is getting deeper so quickly. It has less to do with talent and more to do with what is in players’ hands.
The world No. 1 spoke at a media roundtable at Juara Stadium in Bukit Kiara on Tuesday, on the sidelines of the JOOLA Titans Tour 2026 in Kuala Lumpur, making the case that advances in paddle technology are fundamentally reshaping the sport’s competitive landscape and compressing what used to take years into a matter of months.
“If you give a tennis player a wooden paddle—as an extreme example—the learning curve will be more gradual as you have to learn more stuff,” Johns said. “But if you give them something that is in some sense closer to a tennis racquet, the strokes are going to come more naturally to them.”
The implication is significant. Modern paddles have narrowed the technical gap between tennis and pickleball to the point where elite tennis players can now make the transition to top-level professional pickleball within a single year.
“I feel that tennis players can within the first year become top pros in singles by just kind of adopting their tennis strokes with modern-day paddles,” Johns said. “And with a couple more adaptations that are pickleball-esque, they become very good very quickly.”
That acceleration, however, is not without its complications—and Johns is candid about the trade-off.
“I feel like that is both a strength and a weakness for pickleball in that it is maybe a little bit uninteresting at times to see somebody graduate that fast,” he said. “But it also deepens the field much more quickly, whereas before it maybe took more years, more time.”
The net result, he argues, is a more competitive sport—one where the depth of the singles field has grown faster than anyone anticipated.
“That is why I feel personally that we have seen more singles players, in terms of depth of the field, become good so quickly, especially recently.”
It is a nuanced position from the sport’s best player in the men’s side—acknowledging that the very thing accelerating pickleball’s growth at the elite level also risks flattening the drama of watching someone master something genuinely hard. The sport is gaining more top players, faster. Whether that is entirely a good thing depends on what you want pickleball to be.
Ben Johns was joined in Kuala Lumpur by a strong field for the JOOLA Titans Tour, including Andre Agassi, Tyson McGuffin, and Anna Bright.
