Usha CII-IWN Pickleball Invitational brings corporate teams to New Delhi

Pickleball’s next growth test in India is not a club ladder or a weekend social game. It is a corporate invitational with a title sponsor, a women’s leadership network attached to it, and enough brand weight to pull the sport further into mainstream workplace fitness.

The Usha CII-IWN Pickleball Invitational will take place on April 26 at REPPP in Mehrauli, New Delhi, with 12 corporate teams and about 70 participants set for a mixed-team, Davis Cup-style format. The field already includes Usha, Lovak Capital and Bajaj Capital Insurance, a sign that the event is drawing the kind of business-network mix that gives pickleball a wider lane than most new racket sports ever get.

That matters because the sport’s rise in India has increasingly come from places beyond traditional competition. This invitational is being framed as both a fundraising sporting initiative and a platform for women’s leadership and cross-industry collaboration, which puts pickleball in the same room as executive networking, workplace wellness and brand activation. For a sport still building its base, that is a meaningful shift: sponsorship is no longer just paying for a court banner, it is underwriting a format and a social ecosystem.

CII Indian Women Network, in association with Usha, is putting the event together under the CII Centre for Women Leadership banner. The centre says its mission is to address barriers to women’s entry, retention and growth in the economy, and the invitational is being tied directly to that agenda. The announcement also points to a sharper problem in the market: women hold only around 18% to 20% of leadership roles across corporate India, and less than 30% of women in urban India are actively engaging in sports or fitness activities.

That is where the appeal of pickleball becomes obvious. It is low-barrier, social and easy to scale across mixed teams, which makes it a better fit for workplace participation than many more intimidating sports. If the event lands, it could become a repeatable template for city-based corporate tournaments that blend leadership programming, networking and access to sport in one package.

Usha International’s sports initiatives head, Komal Mehra, said the company sees the collaboration as part of its effort to enable communities to adopt active and healthy lifestyles. Ruchika Jain, chairperson of CII-IWN, is fronting the effort from the women’s network side, giving the event both corporate and institutional backing.

The venue itself fits the direction of travel. REPPP, near Qutub Minar in South Delhi, positions itself as a premium padel and pickleball park with event-hosting facilities, and its place in a busier Delhi pickleball calendar shows how quickly the infrastructure is maturing. The Indian Pickleball Association, which describes itself as the government-recognized national governing body for the sport in India, has also been building out a fuller tournament slate around venues like REPPP.

Put together, the invitational is more than a one-off corporate outing. It is another marker that pickleball in India is moving from hobby circles into a branded, organized and increasingly premium sports market.