Columbus Sliders Making Moves And Subs Shining At Major League Pickleball San Clemente

Forbes

30-06-2025

CJ Klinger certainly had the hot hand all weekend, leading his team up the charts.
Major League Pickleball (MLP), presented by DoorDash, rolled right into its sixth event of the 10-event season on the heels of last week's PPA Orange County Cup on the grounds of Life Time San Clemente for a critical mid-season match featuring some of the 'middle class' of the Premier League battling for playoff positioning, along with the entire slate of Challenger teams.
Key Links for tracking the event this weekend, which featured livestreams from the two primary courts at the facility on MLP's YouTube channel and on PickleballTV.com.
Transaction Recap
Ahead of the weekend, the following transactions were announced:
- MLP held its second Premier Waiver period (and only Challenger Waiver period) in the weeks leading up to this event, which featured a slew of moves more completely covered in this space earlier this month.
- Just after the Waiver period, we saw three significant trades:
1. St Louis acquired Judit Castillo from SoCal for Cailyn Campbell. Campbell immediately moved into SoCal's starting lineup in San Clemente and went 3-7 in her first MLP Action. Not bad for a 15-yr old.
2. New Jersey gets Mari Humberg back, acquiring her from DC for Gecheva and cash. I'm not sure New Jersey played this player moving gambit well; if their intent was to get Humberg back, they should have just dropped her and re-bid for her in waivers. Instead, they have to go half the season undermanned (so to speak) and are unlikely to regain a playoff-bye spot at this point.
3. Carolina gets Tuiotenoa, Texas gets Christian & cash. This is an interesting move by two teams idle this past weekend, but which may have decent ramifications for Carolina, Ben Johns' performance, and the tail end of the playoff race. Johns and Tuiotenoa were teammates on the strong 2023 Seattle Pioneers team, which won two of the three MLP events and made the Super Premier final before falling. Carolina has a long way to go, being dead last in the standings, but with a dominant weekend could push their way up the rankings.
News and Noteworthy
Ahead of the event, here's some news and noteworthy items for MLP.
- The major organizational news was the general announcement by UPA that they are going to a prize money-based model going forward. MLP will see massive payday increases as detailed in the link here, which include an amazing $250k payday PER PLAYER to the MLP season winning team. I'm presuming we will see some major energy shifts in the league starting in 2026 with so much on the line.
With all that said, let's recap MLP San Clemente:
Premier League Recap
Super subs AJ Koller (L) and Rafa Hewett (R) stepped up big-time for the injury-plagued Brooklyn ... More Team.
Day 1 Observations
Day 2 Observations
LA's Quong Duong rocking the throw-back jerseys with a flying slam against Phoenix.
Day 3 Observations
Utah's Connor Garnett did his best to keep his team in playoff position.Challenger League Recap
Day 1 Observations
Day 2 Observations
Day 3 Observations
Day 4 Observations
Team Standings Update post Event
Here's the teams who made moves up or down the Standings in this event. Reminder, thanks to the unbalanced schedule I refer points per match (PPM) as the standings determiner, not total points earned.
In Premier
In Challenger
Player Standings/Stats Analysis for the Weekend:
Unfortunately, the resource we depend on for individual player analysis hasn't been updated in time for this publication.
What did we learn this weekend?
What were our top three Takeaways from the competition this weekend?
Media Pick' Em Contest Update
MLP Super-Fan Matty Pickles (aka Matt Klitch) runs a season-long Media MLP Pick'em Contest on Twitter, where all the pundits in the sport are participating.
Summary for San Clemente: Klitch has introduced some new rules, which have leveled the playing field for sure. I went 5-3 for the weekend but somehow retain my top spot in the season long pundit competition.
Next up on the Pickleball Calendar? According to my Master Pickleball Schedule, we're going right into MLP Event No. 7 next weekend, as the whole tour has to make a cross-country trip in just a couple of days to hold MLP NYC on the Holman Ice rink in Central Park.
All match stats quoted in this article are courtesy of PickleWave. Visit picklewave.com for the premier source of Pro Pickleball data, including match replays, highlights, stats, and discussion. PickleWave has more than 22,000 matches in its database across all the pro tours.
Also, a great thanks to The Dink's Erik Tice, who maintains a fantastic MLP detailed data breakdown and makes it publicly available at this Google XLS link. Tice's data has proved invaluable this year as MLP does not make match data available at this detailed level at present.