The Material Behind the Game
Toray’s carbon fiber helps power many pickleball paddles, while its MLP partnership is bringing the global materials company into the spotlight
By Adriana Falco • September 16, 2026 • 13 min read
The company behind a paddle’s strength, stiffness, and pop
WALK INTO A MLP event and the Toray name is difficult to miss. It appears across the courts and throughout the tournament environment, putting a century-old Japanese company alongside one of America’s fastest-growing sports.
For many pickleball fans, however, the name raises an obvious question. What exactly is Toray, and what does it have to do with pickleball?
The answer may be sitting in a player’s hand.
Toray does not manufacture pickleball paddles. It develops and supplies advanced materials, including the carbon fiber used by paddle manufacturers to build them. Carbon fiber has become a standard material in modern performance paddles, following an evolution Toray has already watched unfold in bicycles, hockey sticks, golf clubs and tennis racquets as manufacturers moved from traditional materials toward lighter, stronger and more sophisticated composites.
For Toray, pickleball represents something larger than another application for carbon fiber. It is a meeting point between material science, sporting-goods innovation and one of the fastest-evolving equipment categories in the sport. Through its partnership with Major League Pickleball, Toray is connecting the advanced materials it has developed for industries ranging from aerospace to sporting goods with the players, manufacturers and fans driving pickleball forward.
“Carbon fiber has become the standard material used for pickleball paddles.” — Steve Mead
The Company You May Already Know Without Knowing It
Toray recently marked its 100th anniversary. Over that century, the company has grown into a global materials business spanning textiles, chemicals, composites, water treatment, pharmaceuticals and other technologies. Its materials can be found in products and industries ranging from clothing and automobiles to electronics and commercial aviation.
Yet unlike the consumer brands whose names appear prominently on finished products, Toray often remains invisible.
Steve Mead, Global Chief Commercial Officer of Toray Advanced Composites, describes Toray as “the largest company that touches your life every day that you’ve never heard of.”
The description gets to the heart of Toray’s unusual position. A consumer may recognize the car, airplane, bicycle or paddle without recognizing the materials company whose technology is inside it.
Toray’s reach extends far beyond sports. According to Mead, Toray materials are used in every satellite produced in the United States, while the fuselage and wings of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner are made using Toray materials. The company’s carbon fiber business represents roughly 15 percent of Toray overall and has become particularly associated with applications where engineers are trying to make something lighter, stiffer, stronger or tougher.
The connection to a pickleball paddle may initially seem improbable. From Toray’s perspective, it is not.
The underlying challenge is remarkably familiar: use material science to improve performance.
From Aerospace to the Paddle
Carbon fiber’s value comes from the performance engineers can extract from a material that is both lightweight and exceptionally strong.
Toray has spent decades developing carbon fiber for demanding applications. The company can alter material characteristics depending on what an application requires, including stiffness, weight and tensile properties.
Sporting goods have long provided another home for that technology. Carbon fiber is used in bicycles, golf clubs, tennis racquets and other equipment where reducing weight while increasing stiffness or strength can affect performance.
Pickleball is following a similar path.
As paddle construction has evolved, manufacturers have increasingly experimented with advanced materials and construction methods, with carbon fiber becoming a prominent part of that progression.
“Just like with tennis, the racquets start with kind of basic technology, and then as the sport progresses, the gear and the equipment progresses,” Mead said. “In essence, carbon fiber has become the standard material used for pickleball paddles.”
Toray has been supplying carbon fiber into the pickleball paddle market for several years. Today, Toray carbon fiber is a staple in leading high-performance paddles, with brands frequently launching new models that use the material in increasingly innovative ways.
A paddle may prominently display the name of the company that designed and sells it, while one of the materials helping determine how that paddle performs comes from a company whose name may never appear on its face.
Toray is part of the product without necessarily being the product consumers see.
“The ability to tailor it is almost infinite.” — Steve Mead
A Paddle Is a Material System
The carbon fiber story also reveals how much room remains for paddle development.
A modern paddle is not simply a piece of carbon fiber attached to a core. Manufacturers can vary the fiber, foam, layering, composite structure, surface coating and other components, creating an enormous number of possible combinations.
Mead sees substantial opportunity for the industry to become more sophisticated in how those materials are engineered together.
He compares the potential to aerospace, where engineers may spend years optimizing carbon fiber, resin systems and layup patterns to solve highly specific problems involving aerodynamics, stiffness, strength and durability.
Pickleball has not yet reached that level of materials engineering.
“I think we have yet to see any of the brands really engage at the level of engineering optimization that is possible,” Mead said.
Some paddle companies perform meaningful testing around stiffness, strength and flexibility, he explained, while others rely more heavily on configurations offered by manufacturing partners. The result is an industry still learning how far it can take composite engineering.
The possibilities are extensive.
Different foams can be layered together. Different carbon fibers can be combined to take advantage of different properties. Surface coatings can be changed. Materials can be arranged differently throughout the paddle.
“The ability to tailor it is almost infinite,” Mead said. “I think we’re still seeing a lot of opportunity to innovate at that sort of recipe of what makes the optimum paddle.”
For a sport in which paddle technology continues to move quickly, that may be one of Toray’s most intriguing long-term connections to pickleball. The company is not simply supplying a familiar material. It brings experience from industries where materials are engineered at an extraordinarily precise level.
The paddle may still have considerable room to evolve.
What the Toray Name Means
As carbon fiber has become increasingly prominent in pickleball paddles, the Toray name has gained recognition within the equipment market. For Toray, that recognition also makes material authenticity increasingly important.
Paddle manufacturing often involves a complex supply chain, with brands working through factories and manufacturing partners that source materials from multiple suppliers. Toray is working to better trace that supply chain, connecting paddle brands with the factories producing their equipment and verifying whether those manufacturers are actually purchasing Toray carbon fiber.
The process can be difficult because Toray does not necessarily have access to a factory’s purchasing records. Still, the company can work to protect how its name and material brands are represented in the marketplace.
The issue highlights an important distinction as paddle technology becomes more sophisticated. Carbon fiber is not a single, interchangeable material, and identifying a material by its manufacturer or grade can carry meaning for brands and players interested in how a paddle is constructed.
For Toray, protecting the integrity of its name is therefore about more than branding. As players become increasingly knowledgeable about paddle construction and the materials beneath the surface, knowing what is actually inside the paddle becomes part of understanding how that paddle was built.
“The largest company that touches your life every day that you’ve never heard of.” — Steve Mead
Why Pickleball?
Toray’s relationship with pickleball extends beyond supplying materials.
The company is also a Platinum Partner of Major League Pickleball and the league’s first Asia-based corporate partner. Its branding gives Toray a visible presence across MLP events while creating a direct connection between the company’s material technology and the sport in which that technology is already being used.
The partnership also gives Toray an opportunity to introduce a much broader audience to a company whose materials have traditionally operated behind the scenes. Pickleball provides something unusual: a highly engaged sports audience combined with an authentic connection to Toray’s core technology through the carbon fiber used in paddle manufacturing.
For a global materials company with deep roots in aerospace, automotive and sporting goods, pickleball offers another arena in which advanced materials can influence performance. The amount of carbon fiber used in paddles may be small compared with Toray’s massive aerospace applications, but the sport provides a highly visible platform for demonstrating how the same expertise in lightweight, high-performance materials can extend from some of the world’s most technologically demanding industries all the way to the pickleball court.
The United States is an important market for Toray across aerospace, automotive, sporting goods and other industries. The paddle provides an authentic connection to the game, while the sport provides a much larger platform for explaining what Toray does.
More Than a Logo on the Court
The MLP partnership also gives Toray something conventional advertising cannot easily replicate: an environment where people are already engaged.
Mead remembers expecting his first MLP experience to resemble a tennis tournament, with spectators quietly watching a rally before applauding.
Instead, he found something entirely different.
He described an atmosphere combining elements of tennis, hockey and basketball, with music, energy and competition creating an experience unlike what he had expected.
“The energy is just really, really cool,” he said.
For Toray, the character of the sport matters as much as its reach. Mead pointed to pickleball’s social and inclusive nature as characteristics that align with Toray’s emphasis on people, respect and diversity.
The sponsorship therefore operates on two levels.
The Toray name becomes familiar through repeated exposure at MLP events, while event activations give spectators an opportunity to discover what sits behind the name. At a Toray booth, the conversation can begin with a pickleball paddle and expand into aerospace, automotive manufacturing, water treatment or any number of technologies most visitors would never have associated with the logo they had been seeing on the court.
For a company accustomed to existing inside other companies’ products, that interaction matters.
“I think we’re still seeing a lot of opportunity to innovate at that sort of recipe of what makes the optimum paddle.” — Steve Mead
The Brand Behind the Brand
Toray’s challenge is not unique to pickleball. It is the challenge of being indispensable without being visible.
Consumers often know the finished product but not the technology company behind it. Mead pointed to Toray’s own Torayca carbon fiber brand as an example. Within certain industries, particularly cycling and advanced composites, the name is familiar. Outside those circles, recognition drops considerably.
Pickleball changes the equation because Toray has both a direct technical connection to the equipment and a public-facing sponsorship platform.
Mead compared the idea to an earlier BASF advertising campaign built around a simple concept: the company did not necessarily make the finished products consumers recognized, but its materials made those products perform better.
Applied to pickleball, the concept becomes easy to understand. Toray does not make the paddle. It helps make possible some of what the paddle can do.
Asked to finish that thought, Mead offered several possibilities: “stronger, lighter, faster” and “more reactive.”
The distinction is important. Toray is not attempting to become another paddle brand competing for space on a sporting-goods shelf. Its role sits farther upstream, in the science and materials that manufacturers use to create the equipment players eventually carry onto the court.
Where the Next Paddle Could Begin
Pickleball equipment has changed dramatically in a relatively short period, but Toray’s experience in aerospace suggests the material engineering inside a paddle may still be relatively young.
The company has the capability to customize carbon fiber for specific performance requirements. Paddle construction, meanwhile, offers a wide range of variables that can be manipulated and combined. Bringing those two worlds closer together could open another stage in paddle development.
Mead does not suggest that pickleball is about to adopt aerospace-level engineering overnight. In fact, he sees the industry as still being in the early stages of understanding how fully materials can be optimized for the application, but the potential is there.
As paddle companies become more sophisticated, the conversation may increasingly move beyond whether a paddle contains carbon fiber and toward which fiber it contains, how that fiber is engineered, how it interacts with the core and surface, and how the entire material system is tuned for a particular performance objective.
For Toray, that is familiar territory.
Hiding in Plain Sight
Toray’s entrance into the public side of pickleball creates an interesting reversal. For decades, the company has built its business by making materials that disappear into other products. Its carbon fiber becomes part of an airplane, bicycle, tennis racquet or pickleball paddle. Its textiles become clothing. Its technologies become components of larger systems.
The material does its job while somebody else’s name appears on the outside. Pickleball is giving Toray an opportunity to step out from behind those products. The logo on an MLP court may introduce the name. The carbon fiber inside a paddle explains why it belongs there.
And as paddle technology continues to evolve, the company that many players may never have heard of could become increasingly important to what they feel every time the ball meets the face of the paddle.
Toray does not need to make the paddle to help shape where the paddle goes next.
Paddle Brands & Models Using Toray Carbon Fiber
- 11SIX24: Hurache-X, Hurache-X Power, Monarch, and Jellybean
- Bnb: Pro Line Energy
- Bread & Butter: The Filth, The Loco, and The Shogun
- CRBN: CRBN 1X Power Series, CRBN 2X Power Series, and CRBN 3X Power Series
- Electrum: Electrum Pro, Electrum Model E, Electrum Model E Elite
- Engage: Pursuit Pro MX 6.0, Pursuit Pro EX, Pursuit Pro1/ Pro1 6.0
- HeAD: HEAD Radical Tour RAW, HEAD Radical Tour Grit, HEAD Radical Tour EX Grit, HEAD Radical Nite RAW
- Helios: Helios Apollo & Astraeus, F2 Sports Pro Series Raw T700, The Gaia
- Joola: Ben Johns Perseus, Collin Johns Scorpeus
- ProKennex: Black Ace Pro, Black Ace Ovation
- Ronbus: Ronbus R1.16, R3.16, Pulsar series, and Ripple
- Selkirk: Early Vanguard Power Lines, Selkirk Labs Project 007
- Six Zero: Double Black Diamond (DBD), Black Diamond, and Ruby
- Spartus: Ballista and Gladiator models
- Vatic Pro: Vatic Pro Prism Flash, Prism V-7, Alchemy, and Pro Flash
- Volair: Mach 1, Mach 1 Force, and Mach 2 Series
- OTHER Paddle Brands
About Adriana Falco
Adriana Falco is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Pickleball Weekly, a global digital magazine reaching readers in over 100 countries across six continents. A pickleball player since 2012, she combines more than 30 years of executive leadership with a passion for storytelling that captures every facet of the sport. With a career from international technology companies to major news organizations, Falco covers the people, businesses, innovations, and global trends shaping pickleball’s future, with a mission to connect and inspire the worldwide pickleball community through credible journalism and compelling stories.
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