The Dink Minor League Pickleball launches Nations Cup for global team competition

The Dink Minor League Pickleball sharpened its international ambitions on April 15 with the launch of the Nations Cup, a country-vs-country format that gives serious amateur players a clearer route from local play to global representation.

The new event will sit inside the MiLP team structure, which uses mixed-gender rosters of four players, two women and two men. DUPR said those teams play four 21-point games, with two gendered matches and two mixed matches, and the first year of the Nations Cup is expected to include three to four divisions, with one team per country in each division. Qualification will run through existing domestic and regional MiLP pathways, turning the sport’s growing network of local events into a direct pipeline to national colors.

That matters because the old development ladder was built around clubs, cities, and regional bragging rights before a team ever reached the championship stage. DUPR said the 2025 national pathway used local events, state championships, and regional showdowns to sort teams for nationals, while international regions including Puerto Rico, Mexico, Canada, Australia, China, Southeast Asia, and South America had their own leaderboards and pathways. The Nations Cup pushes that structure one step further, giving ambitious amateurs a reason to plan camps, travel, and tournament schedules around a national route instead of only a local one.

The scale behind the move was already hard to ignore. Caroline Luelf said 26 countries were represented at last year’s national championship, a number that underscored how far the amateur game has spread beyond the United States. DUPR said the 2025 MiLP National Championship, scheduled for Dec. 3-7 in Dallas at Pickler Universe, carried a $100,000 prize purse and drew 1,000 players, 318 teams, players from 23 countries, and players from 35 U.S. states.

The growth was even broader in 2024, when more than 11,000 amateur players competed in more than 135 nationwide and international events to qualify for nationals, and 500 players made the championship field. DUPR said the league grew more than 300% in both 2023 and 2024, a pace that helps explain why the organization is now adding a national-team layer instead of simply expanding another bracket.

Countries already confirmed or expected for the Nations Cup include the United States, Canada, China, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and Puerto Rico, with DUPR’s MiLP pages also showing active international hubs in Spain, Vietnam, Mexico, Italy, the United Kingdom, India, and beyond. The Dink said the MiLP Championships will move to February 2027, and the Nations Cup will feed into that cycle alongside MiLP, MiLP 50+, and MiLP v3.

The timing also lines up with pickleball’s broader international push. In July 2025, the Global Pickleball Federation named DUPR its official rating system, giving the sport a standardized 2.000 to 8.000 scale across member nations. For amateur players chasing the next level, the message is clear: pickleball’s path upward is no longer just domestic, and the next big team targets may carry a country name instead of a club one.