Connor Pardoe Built An Empire On Napkin Math

From Senior Living To The Sideline

Nobody in pickleball's front office looks like they were supposed to end up there, but Connor Pardoe's path is one of the least likely. He wasn't a tennis pro pivoting sports, and he wasn't a private equity kid parachuted in to run a portfolio company. He was managing an active senior-living real estate portfolio called Harmony Hills between 2017 and 2020, fresh out of the University of Utah with a business management degree, when a family hobby rerouted his entire career.^[3]

Pardoe grew up in Salt Lake City playing basketball, with no particular tennis or racquet-sports background. He was introduced to pickleball in 2018 by his aunt, and it stuck immediately — he brought his father into the game next, and the two started driving to regional tournaments around the country together.^[1]

That comment traces back to a specific moment. Pardoe was traveling for work when he stumbled onto a 400-player pickleball tournament in Atlanta. He'd just come from the tennis US Open, but watching Simone Jardim, Lucy Kovalova, Irina Tereschenko, and a 12-year-old Anna Leigh Waters (playing alongside her mother, Leigh) hooked him on the sport at a level he hadn't expected.^[1]

The Napkin Math

What separates Pardoe from the thousands of other people who fell in love with pickleball around the same time is what he did with that feeling. He didn't just start playing more — he started running numbers. By his own account, he began scribbling projections on the back of a napkin, researching who the best players in the world were, and sketching out what a small independent tour might look like.^[1]

The plan that emerged was modest by today's standards: four or five tournaments a year under a name he'd already picked out — the PPA Tour. To make it credible, he needed the sport's actual top players to show up, so he did the only thing a 20-something with no sports-league experience could do: he slid into their Instagrams. Matt Wright, Lucy Kovalova, Ben Johns, and Irina Tereschenko were among the first pros he messaged directly, offering a flat $1,000 appearance fee to commit to all five events — real money in a sport that, at the time, had almost none.^[1]

The pros said yes. In early 2020, the PPA Tour ran its first tournament at the Mesa Tennis Center in Arizona — 650 amateur entrants and a $50,000 prize purse for the professionals, staged by a founder who was 23 years old and had two sets of twins waiting for him at home.^[1][6]

Fact-check note: Pardoe's own bio for the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference dates the PPA Tour's founding to 2018 — the year he conceived it — while the tour's official press materials cite 2019 as its founding year and its first competitive event took place in early 2020. All three data points are accurate; they describe different milestones in the same 24-month runway.^[3][11]

Small And Better, Every Week

Pardoe has been consistent about the operating philosophy that got the PPA Tour off the ground, and it has nothing to do with a five-year master plan.

That incrementalism, paired with aggressive recruiting of top talent, is what let the PPA Tour outrun a crowded field of would-be pro circuits in the early 2020s. Pardoe has also been candid that the road wasn't friction-free — running a startup sports league meant absorbing outside skepticism while trying to keep a small staff focused.^[1]

A Rival Emerges — Then Joins Forces

Pardoe's PPA Tour wasn't the only serious business bet on professional pickleball. In 2021, Austin financier Steve Kuhn founded Major League Pickleball (MLP), a team-based, city-branded format modeled loosely on leagues like the NBA and NFL rather than the PGA-style individual bracket structure Pardoe had built. MLP signed a title sponsorship with Margaritaville in December 2022 and quickly became the PPA Tour's biggest competitor for player contracts and sponsor dollars.^[8]

The competition got expensive. Through 2023, the two leagues effectively bid against each other for the same small pool of elite pros, driving payrolls up in a sport that didn't yet have the broadcast revenue to support them. A merger was first floated in September 2023, then collapsed amid what one MLP player-turned-critic later called "a rocky road" of hostility between the organizations, before the deal was finally completed on February 29, 2024.^[4]

The merger was backed by a $75 million investment from private equity firm SC Holdings, D.C. Pickleball Team owner Al Tylis, Tom Dundon (the billionaire owner of Carvana and the Carolina Hurricanes, who by then held a stake in the PPA Tour), and the Pardoe family itself, alongside existing MLP team owners. The combined entity — later branded the United Pickleball Association (UPA) — kept the PPA Tour and MLP as separate, distinctly formatted brands under one holding company, with more than 150 pros signing multi-year contracts and combined player payouts projected to rise nearly 250% year over year.^[5][4]

Owner, Not Just Commissioner

Pardoe's stake in pickleball isn't limited to running the tours from a league office. The Pardoe family owns the Utah Black Diamonds, a Premier-level MLP franchise, and in 2024 he announced plans for the first purpose-built home facility for a professional pickleball team: a $25 million (later reported at closer to $28 million) center in South Jordan, Utah, developed with GCTM Investments and operated in partnership with The Picklr.^[9][10]

Running both a league and a team invites obvious scrutiny, and Pardoe has faced it directly — including public criticism over the Black Diamonds' trade activity in a rough 2024 season, which he brushed off by pointing to the team's investment in the new facility as proof of long-term commitment rather than short-term point-chasing.^[9]

Building The Billion-Dollar Platform

By January 2025, Pardoe was fielding public accusations that the newly merged UPA was in financial trouble — commentator Jill Braverman claimed the organization needed an emergency $10 million bridge loan. Pardoe didn't let it sit. He responded directly on social media with his own figures: combined PPA Tour and MLP revenue north of $50 million in 2024, on pace to clear $65 million in 2025, with sponsorships nearing $35 million.^[12]

Fifteen months later, the receipts caught up to the rhetoric. On May 1, 2026, Pickleball Inc. — the newly formed parent company uniting the PPA Tour and MLP — announced a $225 million structured investment led by Apollo Sports Capital (the newly launched sports investment arm of Apollo Global Management) alongside Tom Dundon's Dundon Capital Partners. The raise brought total funding in the company to $315 million and valued Pickleball Inc. at roughly $750 million.^[6][7]

What Pickleball Inc. Actually Owns

The deal wasn't just cash — it rolled several previously separate Dundon-owned pickleball assets into one company, alongside the PPA Tour and MLP that Pardoe already ran. The combined entity now spans professional competition, retail, tournament software, and court construction:^[7][13]

Pickleball Inc.'s combined business lines generated more than $140 million in 2025 revenue, with the professional leagues alone bringing in $60 million — including roughly $30 million from sponsorships. Dundon and the Pardoe family retained majority ownership after the raise, and Pardoe sits on the five-person board alongside Al Tylis, Jason Stein, Zubin Mehta, and Brian Levine.^[7][13]

The Personal Side

Pardoe has increasingly let cameras follow him into that world. He's a central figure in Partners, a 2026 documentary series streaming on Amazon Prime Video and the PPA's YouTube channel, which follows storylines including the PPA's contentious 2025 contract termination with rising star Quang Duong — a decision Pardoe discusses on camera alongside its fallout with Duong's family.^[14] Off the tour, he still divides his time between PPA Tour headquarters in Dallas and his hometown of Salt Lake City, where he's raising two sets of twins — Cannon, Grayson, Truman, and Millie — with his wife, Carli.^[3]

Asked in mid-2026 to characterize where professional pickleball stands compared to when he started it, Pardoe pointed to the goal that's been consistent since the Mesa Tennis Center in 2020: turning a backyard amateur pastime into a real, sustainable sports property.^[15]

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