DUPR and PickleHub Vietnam partner to grow pickleball ecosystem

Vietnam’s pickleball boom just gained a clearer scoreboard. DUPR and PickleHub Vietnam announced a strategic partnership on May 26 that will put DUPR ratings across PickleHub’s ecosystem, giving clubs, organizers and players a single framework for skill-based play, seeding and matchmaking.

That matters in a country where the sport has expanded faster than the systems built around it. PickleHub Vietnam has become one of the country’s fastest-growing pickleball communities and event platforms, with an active social-media and Facebook presence that already serves as a meeting point for players and organizers. By folding DUPR into its events and player experiences, PickleHub is moving beyond loose community play and toward a structure that can rank results, sort divisions more credibly and help tournament fields reflect actual ability.

The partnership also includes rating-based competition and matchmaking tools, joint content collaborations across social and digital channels, and media partnership opportunities designed to spotlight pickleball’s growth in Vietnam and across Asia. DUPR says the move fits a bigger push in the region. In late April, the company said its new Asia regional hub would be based in Vietnam, and it placed Vietnam among its top five countries globally by user count, while calling it the fastest-growing market month over month on its platform.

The numbers help explain why Vietnam has become such an important test case. DUPR says it has more than 1 million rated players, and its Asia report said Vietnam led the region in awareness and participation, with 88% awareness and 37% regular play among respondents in a survey of more than 14,000 people across 12 Asian markets. Earlier Vietnamese media reporting put the country’s pickleball player base at about 30,000 in March 2025, a figure that already looked modest against the sport’s current pace of expansion.

The competitive stakes are rising, too. Da Nang is slated to host the Pickleball World Cup 2026, and local reporting said the city became Vietnam’s first locality to establish a city-level pickleball federation in March 2025. Against that backdrop, the DUPR-PickleHub Vietnam deal looks less like a simple branding exercise and more like infrastructure for a sport trying to mature quickly. Standardized ratings can make seeding cleaner, talent easier to identify and Vietnamese results easier to compare with events elsewhere in Asia. DUPR vice-president of commercial Mortada Stitou said partnerships like this are essential to building a more connected and competitive global ecosystem, and Vietnam now looks increasingly central to that effort.