After Record Season, MLP’s Commissioner Prepares His Next Move

Samin Odhwani is set to join Apollo Sports Capital, which led a $225 million investment in Pickleball Inc., to help shape pro pickleball’s next chapter

Samin Odhwani is preparing to move from running Major League Pickleball to helping shape the broader business of professional pickleball.

Following a season capped by record attendance and television viewership at the MLP Finals, Odhwani is set to join Apollo Sports Capital and SC Holdings in a role overseeing their investment in Pickleball Inc., the parent company of MLP and the PPA Tour.

The transition includes a seat on Pickleball Inc.’s board and a focus on major growth opportunities across the business, including a long-term media rights agreement.

“The past two years have been the best in MLP history and I couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish," Odhwani told The Dink.

The changing of the guard is not yet complete. Odhwani remains MLP commissioner while the search for his successor proceeds, and the move is contingent on an agreed-upon replacement.

The search is focused on a leader who can build MLP’s business: expanding into larger venues, growing sponsorships and managing the league’s day-to-day operations.

For Odhwani, it would mark the next step in a rapid rise from Brooklyn Aces general manager to MLP commissioner — and now, a broader role with the investor backing professional pickleball’s next chapter.

The Early Years

In March 2023, Samin Odhwani had a problem.

The newly minted general manager of the Brooklyn Aces had just experienced Major League Pickleball from inside the building, and he could see something special happening. The atmosphere was loud. The players were emotional. The team format created drama that traditional pickleball tournaments struggled to replicate.

But Odhwani also noticed something else: the experience wasn’t translating nearly as well to television.

In a Boardroom article in 2023, Odhwani had the following quote:

It was the type of observation you might expect from someone working in a league office. Odhwani, however, was only a few months into his first job in professional pickleball.

Three and a half years later, the league he now oversees as commissioner drew an average audience of 773,000 viewers for the 2026 MLP Finals on CBS — the largest television audience in league history.

Odhwani’s path from the Brooklyn Aces to the commissioner’s office has been unusually fast, but it also mirrors the evolution of MLP itself. He has experienced the league as an investor, team executive, roster builder, league strategist and, ultimately, its top executive.

“When I first witnessed MLP, I never could have imagined this trajectory for myself," he said.

Before MLP

Unlike many of the people who helped build professional pickleball, Odhwani did not come to the sport through a lifelong playing background.

His expertise was in the business of sports.

Odhwani previously worked in Global Strategy & Innovation for the NBA and later joined Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman’s Thirty Five Ventures, where his responsibilities included evaluating emerging sports and media opportunities.

That is where pickleball entered the picture.

Odhwani first became familiar with Major League Pickleball while working at the NBA and later helped Thirty Five Ventures evaluate an opportunity to invest in the league.

In October 2022, MLP announced that 35V had purchased an expansion franchise. Odhwani was named general manager of the team that would eventually become the Brooklyn Aces.

Kevin Durant (L) and Rich Kleiman (R) were minority owners of the then Brooklyn Aces when Odhwani was named GM of the team. Courtesy Boardroom.

He went to work quickly.

Odhwani attended MLP’s season-ending event in Columbus to scout players, study how the league operated and talk with experienced general managers about roster construction.

His first Brooklyn roster featured Cierra Gaytan-Leach, Rob Nunnery, Corrine Carr and Greg Dow.

The Aces reached the knockout round at their first event in Mesa, but perhaps more notable than the result was the way Odhwani approached the job. Brooklyn tried to create a more traditional professional-team environment for its players, housing them together, providing meals and emphasizing team chemistry in a sport historically built around individual tournament schedules and doubles partnerships.

Odhwani was already thinking beyond simply winning matches – he was thinking about what MLP needed to become.

Building a Contender

When MLP reset its rosters for the second half of the unusual 2023 season, Brooklyn moved into Premier and Odhwani assembled a significantly more talented roster.

The Aces selected Catherine Parenteau fourth overall, followed by Andrea Koop, Hayden Patriquin and Tyler Loong.

Brooklyn’s ownership group was expanding as well. Drake, Michael B. Jordan and Steve Stoute were among the names added to a group already headlined by Durant and Kleiman. The franchise also launched community initiatives in New York, helping establish the Aces as something more than simply another entry on the MLP schedule.

But Odhwani’s strongest accomplishment as a general manager would come one year later. Brooklyn competed in Challenger during the 2024 season and originally drafted Lina Padegimaite, Daniel De La Rosa, Martin Emmrich and Layne Sleeth.

Then Odhwani made a move. In June, Brooklyn traded Emmrich and cash to the Texas Ranchers for Pablo Tellez, who was moving from Premier to Challenger. Less than a month later, the Aces won the Challenger title at the MLP Mid-Season Tournament in Grand Rapids. Tellez was the standout player for Brooklyn, which defeated the previously unbeaten Las Vegas Night Owls in the championship match.

The trade remains one of the clearest examples that Odhwani’s time as an MLP general manager wasn’t simply a stepping stone into league management.

He built a team that won.

From Team Executive to League Executive

By early 2025, Odhwani’s role in professional pickleball had changed dramatically.

He left Thirty Five Ventures and became Chief Strategy Officer of the United Pickleball Association, putting him in a position to work on strategic issues affecting both Major League Pickleball and the PPA Tour.

Then, on April 24, 2025, MLP named him commissioner. Odhwani became the second commissioner in league history, following Brooks Wiley, but his responsibilities were broader than the title had previously carried.

Odhwani was named Commissioner on April 24, 2025. Courtesy MLP/PPA.

His role included competition, team governance, MLP’s business model, brand strategy and media distribution. In other words, the former Aces GM was no longer worrying about the success of one franchise.

He was now responsible for helping determine what the entire league should become. And one of his biggest priorities sounded remarkably similar to the concern he expressed back in 2023.

How could MLP turn the excitement surrounding pickleball into an audience for professional pickleball?

Turning Pickleball Players Into Pickleball Fans

Participation has never been pickleball’s problem.

Tens of millions of Americans play the sport.

The challenge for professional pickleball has always been converting those participants into fans who will buy tickets, follow teams and players, and watch professional matches on television.

Odhwani has repeatedly identified that conversion as one of MLP’s largest opportunities. His argument is relatively simple: unlike an emerging sport that must first convince Americans to care about the game itself, pickleball already has an enormous audience of people who understand the rules and play regularly.

MLP’s job is to convince those people to care about professional pickleball.

MLP Commissioner Samin Odhwani at MLP Mesa in 2025. Courtesy AZFamily. 

That philosophy has influenced everything from scoring to distribution.

When Christian Alshon publicly questioned MLP’s decision to move doubles matches back to traditional side-out scoring, Odhwani explained that the league had to consider more than its most dedicated existing fans.

Millions of recreational players already understood side-out scoring. Making the professional product familiar to those players could lower the barrier to becoming an MLP viewer. Alshon later said the explanation changed his perspective.

The Business Starts Growing

Odhwani’s first full season in the commissioner’s chair produced some of MLP’s strongest business numbers to date.

By the end of 2025, MLP reported that ticket revenue had increased 94 percent year over year and overall attendance had grown 52 percent.

Sponsorship revenue more than doubled. Digital consumption increased significantly as well, while the MLP Finals on CBS averaged nearly 500,000 viewers. Franchise valuations were moving upward at the same time.

Those figures represented meaningful jumps for a league whose teams had been selling for fractions of those numbers only a few years earlier.

Odhwani also began talking publicly about the next stage of player compensation — maintaining enough guaranteed money to make professional pickleball sustainable while introducing greater performance-based upside for the sport’s biggest stars.

The $225 Million Moment

The largest business development of Odhwani’s tenure arrived in May 2026. Apollo Sports Capital led a $225 million investment into Pickleball Inc., the parent company housing Major League Pickleball, the PPA Tour and other professional pickleball assets.

The size of the investment immediately changed the financial scale surrounding the sport. More importantly for Odhwani’s own resume, Sports Business Journal reported that he and Connor Pardoe initiated the fundraising process earlier that year.

More than 30 firms were approached, seven became serious candidates and Apollo ultimately emerged as the winner.

The deal gave professional pickleball significant additional capital to invest in media, infrastructure, international expansion and other growth initiatives.

As Al Tylis, CEO of Apollo Sports Capital, told The Dink:

For Odhwani, it represented the clearest evidence yet of how far his role had evolved.

Four years earlier, he was helping Thirty Five Ventures decide whether to buy an MLP franchise. Now he was helping raise hundreds of millions of dollars for the company overseeing the league.

Simplifying MLP

The on-court product has changed considerably under Odhwani as well. MLP eliminated the old Premier and Challenger structure ahead of the 2026 season, creating a unified 20-team league.

Rosters expanded to six players. The regular season was redesigned around team-market events. The postseason expanded. Minor League Pickleball and Junior MLP programming became increasingly connected to professional events.

MLP also experimented with a broader vision of team pickleball.

The 2026 Mid-Season Tournament included Team Australia, Team Canada, Team Europe and a Collegiate All-Star team alongside traditional MLP franchises.

The league partnered with Champions Series Pickleball to incorporate professional 50-plus competition under the broader MLP umbrella.

Not every structural change will necessarily prove permanent, and MLP’s history suggests nothing should ever be considered untouchable. But there has been a clear effort during Odhwani’s tenure to make the league easier to understand, more consistent and more connected to the broader pickleball ecosystem.

Odhwani’s Tenure as Commissioner

There were plenty of positives during Samin Odhwani’s tenure as commissioner of Major League Pickleball.

When Odhwani took over in April 2025, MLP was still trying to establish a clearer identity alongside the PPA Tour. By 2026, the league has developed a distinct season, stronger event structure and a more recognizable place within the professional pickleball calendar.

The business grew with it.

MLP reported significant increases in sponsorship revenue, ticket sales, attendance and social-media engagement during Odhwani’s tenure. Franchise valuations also continued to climb, highlighted by a majority stake in the Los Angeles Mad Drops being sold at a $13 million valuation and the expansion Palm Beach Royals entering at a league-record $16 million valuation.

And perhaps most importantly, the league made real progress with television and media distribution.

In August, the New Jersey 5s and St. Louis Shock met in the 2026 MLP Finals in New York, where CBS averaged 773,000 viewers for its championship window. It was the largest television audience in MLP history and represented a 55 percent increase over the previous year’s Finals coverage.

More than 10,000 fans also attended the three-day event in person, setting another league record.

That progress brought Odhwani back to one of the first issues he identified when he entered MLP years earlier: how to make the energy inside an MLP venue translate to an audience watching from home.

By the end of his tenure, that was beginning to happen.

But one major objective remains unfinished.

A transformational, long-term media rights agreement remains one of the biggest opportunities in professional pickleball. MLP expanded its distribution and produced record audiences under Odhwani, but it never secured the type of rights-fee deal that could fundamentally change the economics of the league.

That may ultimately be the biggest unfinished piece of his tenure.

Odhwani’s path through MLP mirrored the league’s own evolution. He entered the sport helping Thirty Five Ventures evaluate an investment, became general manager of the Brooklyn Aces, built a championship roster, moved into league strategy and eventually became commissioner.

Now, Odhwani is returning to where his professional pickleball journey began.

MLP moves forward with larger crowds, stronger franchise valuations, greater social reach and its best television numbers yet — but also with one major question hanging in the balance:

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Feature image via Major League Pickleball.