JILL BRAVERMAN "JILLY B" · PRO PLAYER, COACH & FOUNDER OF JILLY B CAMPS · 2026

Childhood in Newport Beach: A Junior Tennis Grind

Long before "Jilly B" became a fixture at APP and MLP stops, Jillian Braverman was a Newport Beach kid logging junior tournament hours on Southern California's hard courts. Tennis wasn't a casual after-school activity for her — it was a career track from an early age. By her final years as a junior player, recruiting services had her ranked as high as No. 28 nationally, No. 9 in the talent-dense Southwest section, and No. 9 in California, with a TennisRPI ranking that peaked at No. 14 in the country.

Her junior match record included wins over both blue-chip and 5-star ranked opponents — the kind of results that get a teenager recruited, not just noticed. That track record earned her a Division I scholarship commitment to Pepperdine University, where she went on to play No. 1 singles and No. 1 doubles for the Waves, the top spot in the lineup reserved for a program's best competitor.

Tennis wasn't her only pre-pickleball chapter, either. During and after college, Braverman worked as a professional fitness and print model for outdoor and athletic brands including Patagonia, Athleta, Nike, Adidas and Dick's Sporting Goods, and interned at an advertising agency serving national homebuilders — early exposure to the marketing and brand side of sports that would later shape how she built her own coaching business.

The Boardroom Before the Baseline

What separates Braverman from most tour pros is that she didn't discover pickleball as a hobby that turned into a career — she was already running pickleball's business side before she was ranked in it. She served as Head of Commercial at Universal Tennis (UTR), overseeing revenue across the company's club, event, and college/high-school verticals, then moved to Major League Pickleball as Chief of Staff.

From there she became CEO of DUPR (Dynamic Universal Pickleball Ratings), the rating system now used across professional tours and recreational clubs worldwide to rank players on one global 2.0–8.0 scale regardless of age, gender, or location. As a Silicon Valley-based startup builder, she has said she's helped more than 1,000 founders — many of them non-technical or female — take app concepts from idea to prototype to funding.

"My mission has always been to spread the joy of pickleball" — on choosing a paddle partner that matched her values as much as her game. Jill Braverman, The Dink Pickleball

Walking Away From the Corner Office

In March 2023, Braverman stepped back from her executive track to chase professional pickleball full-time — a decision that looked risky for a sitting startup CEO and looks, in hindsight, like one of the shrewdest career pivots in the sport's short pro history. She's been ranked as high as #3 in singles and inside the top 20 in doubles, but it's her doubles and mixed results that built her resume: a 2023 Major League Pickleball Challenger Championship, a captaincy, and the event's Most Valuable Player award.

By 2025 she had climbed to #1 in the world among women on the APP World Tour, added a second USA Pickleball (USAP) National Championship, and took home a silver medal at the US Open Pickleball Championships — pushing her career total past 40 professional medals.

Championship Resume

The Real Business: Jilly B Camps

Titles get Braverman the headlines, but coaching is the business she's actually built — and by her own telling, the part of the job she loves most. Jilly B Camps runs multi-day destination instruction camps at four locations for the 2026 season: a home-turf SoCal camp in Newport Beach, a Maui camp at the newly opened Ohana Pickleball Club in Lahaina, a Baja camp at the Palmas Pickleball Resort in Los Barriles, and the brand's first-ever Cayman Islands camp at the 24-court Pickleball Cayman facility in George Town — plus a dedicated Juniors program.

Every camp runs on what her team calls the "Carousel Method": a skill-matched, dynamically rotating pairing system designed so campers spend the day playing with and against partners at their actual level, instead of being stuck in a mismatched group. Braverman has built out a small full-time and guest coaching staff to run it — including camp business lead Kelly, Maui-based coach and former Maui Fire Department member Jeff, Ritz-Carlton head coach Mark, PPA junior national champion Jack Sahid, and senior pro Scott Fliegelman — but she teaches every session personally.

"I love teaching so much — even more than winning medals!" Jill Braverman, Jilly B Camps (Baja)

Her coaching philosophy is deliberately egalitarian: campers ranging from 3.0 to 5.2 DUPR get the same strategic instruction, not a watered-down version of it. "Delete the unnecessary, make things simple, find what makes you great and then double down on that" is how she describes her teaching method — a direct extension of the same "pickleball is joy" motto that drives her playing career. Camper reviews back it up: one Baja attendee called the experience "transformational," and a Newport Beach camper credited it with "light bulb moments" that YouTube lessons alone couldn't deliver.

The coaching résumé extends beyond her own brand, too. Braverman is a coach with Nike Sports Camps / US Sports Camps, a senior contributor and instructor for SportsEdTV, and — fittingly for someone nicknamed "Jill the Thrill" for her entertaining, tweener-happy style of play — a coach known for teaching the same creative shot-making she's famous for on tour.

• Camps & Clinics, 2026: Newport Beach (SoCal), Maui HI, Baja MX, Grand Cayman, plus a Juniors program
• Signature Method: The "Carousel Method" — skill-matched, dynamically rotating partner pairing
• Coaching Staff: A dedicated year-round team (Kelly, Jeff, Mark, Jack Sahid, Scott Fliegelman) supporting Braverman's personal instruction
• Other Coaching Roles: Nike Sports Camps / US Sports Camps coach; senior contributor, SportsEdTV
• Format: 2–3 day destination camps combining daytime instruction, afternoon seminars and evening open play

Advocate & Industry Voice

Braverman's business background didn't disappear when she went pro — it turned her into one of pickleball's most active behind-the-scenes advocates. She's a frequent guest analyst on pickleball media covering the sport's messier business fights: the JOOLA vs. USA Pickleball paddle-certification lawsuit ("Paddlegate"), the UPA's tour-merger growing pains, and the rise of international rankings body PWR.

Her stance, informed by years running a ratings company, tends to be pragmatic. She has argued publicly that pickleball's real growth engine isn't sponsorship money or celebrity team owners, but the local organizers who run free beginner nights in their own communities — and she's called for the sport's fractured governing bodies to find some form of unification before it repeats tennis's alphabet-soup of competing organizations.

• Brand Ambassador: Incrediwear (recovery); GAMMA Sports (paddle/ball, multi-year exclusive)
• Industry Commentary: Regular guest on The Dink's PicklePod and other pickleball media, discussing paddle certification disputes, pro tour finances, and international expansion

Life Off the Court

Braverman is married to golf professional Kristin "K-Dubs" Walla, and the two co-host This Pickleball Life, a twice-weekly podcast blending tour news, strategy, advice, and the kind of banter that comes from touring together as a couple. She also co-hosts The Pickleball Breakdown with coach Scott Crandall, a more X's-and-O's-focused show built around drills and shot selection.

Off the court, she describes herself as a novelist, a scratch golfer, multilingual, and someone who can — with, in her own words, "a little help" — finish a Wednesday New York Times crossword. Tournament weekends run on ritual: a protein smoothie with banana, cashews and blueberries before matches, meditation most mornings before she'll let herself have coffee, and on Championship Sunday nights, home-cooked ground sirloin tacos and an early bedtime once the adrenaline wears off.

Facts & Funny Moments

Between the titles, Braverman has built a reputation as one of the tour's funnier, more candid personalities — equal parts competitor and comedian.

• Gambler at heart: her own bio jokes that she'll "will gamble for money in pickleball, ping pong or downhill ski racing" — your pick of poison.
• The bag said it all: at one tournament, a fellow player handed her a tote reading "crazy Pickleball lady." Her take: guilty as charged.
• Crossword flex, with an asterisk: she claims she can finish a Wednesday NYT crossword unassisted — then immediately admits she might need "a little help."
• Career whiplash: she went from CEO of a pickleball ratings company to a national champion inside two years, a turnaround even she jokes shouldn't really be possible.
• Podcast confessional: "This Pickleball Life" runs a recurring "Dear Jilly B" advice segment where fans submit real tour dilemmas for her (and K-Dubs) to roast and solve.
• Pickleball's answer to the Olympics: only half-joking on-air, she's noted that while pickleball may not be Olympic yet, it's already on the program at the Jewish Olympics (the Maccabiah Games).
• Match-day fuel: tacos and Pedialyte, in that order, are her official post-Championship-Sunday recovery stack.

Career Timeline