The Global Scorecard: Measuring Pickleball Without Borders
By Carl Foster • August 26, 2026 • 9 min read
Rating the world
FIVE YEARS AGOO, pickleball was still searching for a consistent way to answer one of the simplest questions in the sport: How good am I?
Today, that question crosses borders.
A player in Florida may be looking for a competitive game in Spain. A club in Vietnam may be trying to organize players by skill. A tournament in India may need to seed an international field. And when thousands of players from more than 80 national delegations arrive in Da Nang for the 2026 Pickleball World Cup, they will bring different languages, cultures, playing styles and levels of experience with them.
The number designed to translate all of it is DUPR.
For the third consecutive year, Dynamic Universal Pickleball Rating (DUPR) will serve as the Official Rating Partner of the Pickleball World Cup, continuing a relationship that has grown alongside both the tournament and the international expansion of the sport.
This year’s World Cup is expected to welcome more than 4,000 athletes. For DUPR CEO Tito Machado, the scale of the event illustrates exactly why a universal rating system matters.
“DUPR is involved because we believe pickleball is becoming a truly global sport, and the sport needs a trusted, universal rating system that allows players to understand their level and compete meaningfully anywhere in the world,” Machado said.
DUPR now has more than 1.8 million registered players, with more than 500,000 monthly active users. Its ratings reach players in more than 190 countries, giving a system born during pickleball’s explosive U.S. growth an increasingly international role. And nowhere will that international growth be more visible than Vietnam.
From Las Vegas to Da Nang
I have watched DUPR’s evolution firsthand. When Tito spoke at our first Las Vegas World Pickleball Conference in 2024, he was preparing to lead a panel on ratings. At the time, he was serving as DUPR’s General Manager. By the time we sat down for an interview ahead of the 2026 World Pickleball Conference, he was CEO, and DUPR had become embedded across professional tours, amateur competition, clubs and international organizations.
One of the things Tito told me then has stayed with me.
“DUPR isn’t becoming the language of pickleball,” he said. “DUPR is the language of pickleball.”
The World Cup may be one of the clearest tests yet of that idea.
Unlike a domestic tournament drawing largely from one established competitive ecosystem, the World Cup brings together national delegations from across the globe. The 2026 event will include Kids, Junior, Pro, Senior and Master divisions, while the accompanying Heineken International Pickleball Tournament – Pickleball World Cup Edition will offer more than 160 categories spanning skill levels from 3.0 through 5.0, professional competition and multiple age groups. Suddenly, whether a 4.0 means the same thing in one country as it does in another becomes much more than a theoretical question.
When I asked Tito that exact question earlier this year, he called it perhaps the most important question facing a global rating system.
“Our goal is simple: a 4.0 should mean the same thing everywhere in the world,” he said.
That means New York and Florida, but increasingly it also means Vietnam, Spain, India, Australia and dozens of other countries where pickleball is building its own communities.
A World Cup Getting Bigger
The Pickleball World Cup itself is changing quickly. Founder and Executive Director Hercilio Cabieses has spent years developing an event built around something larger than individual competition. National delegations arrive not simply as collections of players but representing their countries in an environment intended to combine competition with cultural exchange.
For 2026, that concept moves to Asia for the first time on this scale.
“Our mission has always been to create a truly global event that brings countries together through pickleball,” Cabieses said. “Partnering with DUPR aligns perfectly with that vision. DUPR is without a doubt the global standard for measuring player performance, and their support will help us continue elevating the competitive experience while welcoming more players and nations than ever before.”
Competition will take place across multiple venues in Da Nang, including Tien Son Sport Center and Tuyen Son Sport Complex, with additional satellite venues throughout the city.
But the significance of Vietnam goes beyond its ability to host thousands of players. According to DUPR, Vietnam is now among its top three countries worldwide by number of users.
Think about that for a moment. A sport whose modern growth has been overwhelmingly associated with the U.S. is arriving for one of its largest international competitions in a country that has already become one of the biggest markets on the world’s largest pickleball rating platform.
For Machado, it is a glimpse of where the sport may be heading.
“Vietnam is a great example of the international opportunity,” he said. “The passion, energy, and speed of growth there are remarkable.”
And Vietnam is not alone.
“We see the same excitement across Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and other emerging pickleball markets,” Machado said. “The opportunity is to help those communities grow with a consistent rating standard and a platform that connects local participation to the larger global game.”
The Problem with Going Global
International growth creates an interesting problem. Pickleball can spread quickly without necessarily developing uniformly.
One country may have a sophisticated tournament structure and thousands of rated players. Another may have only recently begun forming clubs and federations. Players may compete frequently within their own communities but have relatively little experience against players from outside their region.
Then put them all in the same tournament. How do you know where everyone stands? That challenge is central to DUPR’s ambitions.
The rating system analyzes match results to place players on a scale from 2.000 to 8.000, regardless of age, gender or location. The goal is not merely to tell a player whether he or she is a 3.5, 4.0 or 5.0. At international scale, the harder task is making those numbers portable.
Machado sees the World Cup as an opportunity to put that idea into practice.
“The Pickleball World Cup is exactly the type of moment that helps bring the global pickleball community together,” he said. “It gives countries, players, clubs, and federations a shared platform for competition, while helping create more visibility for the sport in markets that are growing quickly.”
For DUPR, the objective is to make the experience “more connected, more credible, and easier to understand across borders.” That last part matters. A global sport cannot have a rating that changes meaning when a player gets on an airplane.
Building the Network
When Tito and I last spoke, he emphasized that the strength of DUPR was not simply its algorithm. It was the network surrounding it.
The company has built relationships throughout professional and amateur pickleball, and its rating system is used by organizations including USA Pickleball, the PPA Tour, MLP, and clubs and tournaments around the world. DUPR also owns and operates Minor League Pickleball and Collegiate Pickleball. Each additional player, club, league and tournament adds data to the network.
“We weren’t just building a rating system,” Machado told me in our earlier interview. “We were helping build the infrastructure of an emerging global sport.”
That infrastructure becomes increasingly important as participation expands into markets that do not share the same competitive history.
It is one thing to create an accurate rating among players who routinely compete against one another. It is another to connect separate playing populations across cities, regions and countries into a system in which the ratings remain meaningful. The World Cup creates precisely that kind of intersection.
More Than a Number
There is an irony in all of this. Pickleball has become obsessed with ratings. Ask players their DUPR and you may learn the number before you learn their last name. But the ultimate purpose of a rating should be to make the experience of playing better.
A fair rating helps a recreational player find an enjoyable game. It helps a tournament director create competitive brackets. It helps a coach understand a player’s development. At the highest level, it can help organizers make sense of an increasingly interconnected international player pool.
“Every player deserves to know where they stand, every club deserves a fair competitive environment, and pickleball deserves one global standard,” Machado said.
The World Cup takes that philosophy and puts it on an international stage. More than 4,000 athletes are expected to arrive in Da Nang carrying the names and flags of more than 80 national delegations. Some will be professionals. Others will compete in age and skill divisions. Some will come from countries where pickleball is already well established, while others will represent communities still building their first generation of serious competitive players.
They will not all speak the same language. They will not all have learned pickleball the same way. They will not arrive with the same competitive infrastructure behind them.
But if DUPR’s global vision works, a number earned on a court in one corner of the world should still mean something when that player steps onto a court thousands of miles away. For a sport trying to become truly global, that may be one of the most important numbers of all.
About Carl Foster
Carl Foster is the Chairman of the World Pickleball Conference and the CEO of Foster Events Group, LLC, where he specializes in the production and management of high-profile sports and entertainment events. With over 50 years of experience in broadcasting, fundraising, and event leadership, he produces Inside WORLD Pickleball and serves as a lead moderator for industry summits. He is a central figure in the professionalization of pickleball, connecting technology experts, organizational leadership, and the player community to elevate the sport’s presence on a global scale.
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