MINI owners and friends to play branded pickleball event in Kuala Lumpur

The MINI Owners + Friends Pickleball Open Play was set for Saturday, July 11, 2026, from 9:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. at First Shot Pickleball @ Factory 19, with registration closing on July 4 or when slots filled. MINI Malaysia built the Kuala Lumpur stop as a branded doubles event, not a mass-market open, and every team had to include one MINI owner and one non-owner friend.

Men’s doubles and women’s doubles each capped at 40 teams, split into eight pools, then moved through group play, the round of 16, quarterfinals, semifinals and finals. Rally scoring used 15-point games in the group stage and early knockout rounds before best-of-three sets from the quarterfinals onward. Benjamin Lim and Kay Yam were listed as tournament directors.

MINI put a RM7,000 cash prize pool behind the event, with RM2,000 for each champion team, RM1,000 for each runner-up team and RM500 for each second runner-up team in both divisions. The draw was built for MINI owners and their guests, while BMW Malaysia Sdn. Bhd. employees, authorized dealership network employees and their immediate family members were barred from entry.

The Malaysia Pickleball Association counts more than 400,000 players, 73 tournaments, 472-plus venues and more than 500 coaches. The Malaysia Pickleball Association dates Malaysia’s pickleball rise to 2019 and its own founding to 2021, even as governance tensions surfaced this year after the Sports Commissioner’s Office suspended the body in late February and the association filed a 162-page appeal on March 30.

Malaysia hosted the first-ever WPC Grand Slam in Asia in July 2025 at The Pickle Grounds in Petaling Jaya, with more than 1,500 players from more than 20 countries and MYR 13 million tourism impact. The APP Asia Tour is also launching with Malaysia as its first stop in 2026.