If you watch an MLP lineup closely, you begin to realize something that almost never gets talked about. The same names showing up match after match, format after format, all within a single night. Take, for example, Thursday’s Grand Rapids. Dylan Frazier plays men’s doubles for Miami against New Jersey’s Noe Khlif and Will Howells, and then barely gets a breather before lining up again in mixed doubles 1 alongside Isabella Dunlap. Roscoe Bellamy does the exact same double duty for Las Vegas, going from men’s doubles straight into mixed doubles 1 against Dallas.
And it is not just these two. Connor Garnett pulls off an identical workload for Utah, appearing in both men’s doubles and mixed doubles 1 against Columbus Sliders, adjusting to a completely different partner and playing in about 20 minutes.
And all of this is before anyone even considers a potential DreamBreaker decider, which could mean a fifth appearance on court for some of these athletes in the same night.
It is easy to get caught up in scores and forget what is actually being asked of these players physically. Three, sometimes four, matches, different partners and rhythms to adjust to, different opponents to read, all in the matter of a couple of hours, with barely any recovery time between matches.
In a sport that is growing as fast as pickleball at the moment, with increasingly bigger crowds, the athletes carrying this kind of workload rarely get any credit for it. The scoreline tells us who won. But it doesn’t tell us how many matches it took out of the players to get there. Perhaps it has a lot to do with scheduling, but in a sport that is obsessed with results, we hardly ever talk about workload management. A conversation pickleball might have soon.
Written by Aradhya Mohan
