Wika Pickleball has teamed up with athlete Nguyễn Đắc Tiến to launch the Next-X, a paddle built with a fairly ambitious brief: give players enough control to dictate the pace of a rally, then enough raw power to actually finish the point once the opening arrives. It’s now officially available, and the engineering behind it suggests this wasn’t a rushed collaboration.
At the centre of the paddle sits the brand’s exclusive NEXT-CORE, a monolithic PP honeycomb structure paired with silicon. The pairing is aimed squarely at durability without sacrificing feel. It is the sort of balance that’s genuinely tricky to pull off, since paddles built for a soft, controlled touch often lack the pop needed on drives and volleys, and vice versa. Wika’s pitch here is that the Next-X manages both at once, rather than forcing players to choose.
What’s Actually Built Into It
The details underneath that headline pitch are where the paddle earns its keep. The face uses what Wika calls a W-S|GRIT surface, infused with glass particles specifically to hold onto its texture over time—the kind of grit that typically wears smooth on lesser paddles within a season, but here is built to keep generating spin north of 2,400 RPM well into a paddle’s working life.
Weight distribution gets its own attention too, with four strategic lead sheet positions adding a touch of head weight while expanding the sweet spot in the process. This may seem like a small adjustment, but it is one that tends to matter far more in practice than it sounds on paper, particularly for players who don’t always make perfect contact.
Around the edges, a TPE edge guard is doing quiet but important work, absorbing vibration and cutting down on the impact stress that eventually shows up as wrist or elbow fatigue over a long session. A shield-foam perimeter adds further stability specifically for blocks and resets, the kind of shots where confidence in the paddle’s response matters just as much as the player’s own technique.
And then there’s the sound—deliberately explosive on contact, which sounds like a minor detail until you’ve actually stood on a court and heard the difference between a paddle that sounds sharp and one that sounds dull. For a lot of players, that feedback is part of how they judge a clean strike in the first place.
Between the durability focus, the sweet-spot engineering, and the vibration control, the Next-X reads less like a single specialist’s paddle and rather more like an attempt to cover every base at once—fitting, given the all-court billing it’s launching under.
