Bright and Smythe dominate WPC England 2026 with all-court golds

Joshua Bright and Millie Smythe turned WPC England 2026 into a gold-medal showcase at the John Charles Centre for Sport in Leeds, with Bright winning men’s singles and men’s doubles and Smythe sweeping women’s singles, women’s doubles and mixed doubles. Bright, who is 22, beat a men’s singles field that included Louis Laville, Alexander Minogue-Stone, William Cheer and Dom Pitchfork, then joined Laville to take the men’s doubles title.

Smythe’s weekend was even cleaner. She won women’s singles over Rachel McCrae and Ellie Tomkinson, then paired with Tomkinson for women’s doubles gold before finishing the sweep with Laville in mixed doubles. McCrae matched the event’s pressure better than almost anyone else in the draw, leaving Leeds with silver medals in women’s singles, women’s doubles and mixed doubles.

WPC England returned to Leeds for the second time and ran from June 19-21. The schedule put singles on Friday, men’s and women’s doubles on Saturday and mixed doubles on Sunday, with round-robin pool play feeding into single-elimination knockout rounds. Every player was guaranteed at least four games, and the 19+ Open divisions carried a £4,000 guaranteed prize-money pool. The tournament listing named Michal Cicvak as organizer and Game Set Match JCCS Leeds as the venue.

The depth did not stop with the headline names. Michal Cicvak and Michal Cicvak Jr both reached the men’s singles quarter-finals before falling to William Cheer and Alexander Minogue-Stone, while Ian Marshall won the 50+ 5.0 men’s singles title. That spread of results gave Leeds a fuller competitive picture than a simple open draw, with age-group winners and family pairings sharing the same weekend stage.

The bigger backdrop matters here, too. Pickleball England passed 16,000 registered members at the end of 2025 after adding 5,748 new players in the year, and Leeds fit that curve perfectly. With Bright and Smythe winning across multiple disciplines instead of living in one lane, WPC England 2026 looked less like another stop on the calendar and more like a snapshot of where English amateur pickleball is heading next.