India’s Times Network Launches 13-City Pickleball Grand Prix That Offers Pathway to IPL
India’s pickleball pipeline just got a significant upgrade.
Times Network has launched the second edition of the Pickleball Now Grand Prix 2026, a 13-city nationwide tournament that offers aspiring players not just prize money but a direct route into the Indian Pickleball League’s professional ecosystem. The circuit opens in Mumbai on 23 July and carries a prize pool of up to Rs 50 lakh alongside valuable Pickleball World Rankings points—making it one of the most substantial domestic pickleball competitions the country has seen.
After Mumbai, the tour heads to Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Gurugram, and Lucknow—with the Lucknow leg played in Noida—and additional city stops expected to be confirmed as the season progresses.
The Direct Pathway to the IPL
The headline addition for 2026 is the formal partnership with the Indian Pickleball League. Winners at each stop earn entry into the league’s player auction—a direct line from grassroots tournament victory to professional competition that gives every participant something to play for beyond trophies and prize money. IPL franchises are expected to track the 13-city circuit as a scouting platform, monitoring emerging talent throughout the season as they build squads for future league editions.
Defending league champions Mumbai Smashers will attend the Mumbai leg, adding a professional dimension to the opening event and giving participants the rare opportunity to put their game on display in front of franchise representatives at the very start of the circuit.
The Mumbai tournament runs on a round-robin format and covers multiple categories for players aged 19 and above—men’s doubles, women’s doubles, mixed doubles, gender-neutral doubles, and men’s singles—across advanced and intermediate levels. Registrations for the Mumbai edition are now open.
Pickleball Now Grand Prix 2026 and Its Impact
For a sport that has been growing rapidly across the subcontinent, the structure the Grand Prix provides matters as much as the scale of it. A 13-city footprint ensures the talent identification process is genuinely national rather than concentrated in a handful of metropolitan courts. The IPL auction pathway means the competition has consequences that extend well beyond a single weekend. And the Rs 50 lakh prize pool gives the whole enterprise the kind of commercial weight that attracts serious players rather than casual participants.
India has already shown what its pickleball talent can do on the world stage—the country sent its largest contingent to the US Open earlier this year and returned with multiple medals, including gold for the Arjun-Aditya Singh pairing. The Grand Prix exists to find the next wave of those players before they find the circuit themselves.
The tour starts in Mumbai on 23 July. Thirteen cities. Fifty lakh rupees. One shot at the professional league.
