Hi friends!

This week I went down a rabbit hole I didn't expect to come back from.

I glued a table tennis rubber to a pickleball paddle (Babolat STRKR), ran it through the ball cannon, and the spin numbers weren't even in the same zip code as anything we've ever tested. The high-speed footage is unreal.

And we sat down with the brand new UPA-A rulebook. It drops May 22nd at the start of the 2026 MLP season and it's a real document. Card systems, paddle challenges mid-match, an explicit ban on blowing the ball over the net, and ongoing paddle compliance with five-figure fines for grit drift. We went through the whole thing.

Let's dive in!

In this week's email:

Read time: 8 mins

PICKLEBALL NEWS

Connor Pardoe posted a short note this week that read like a peace treaty. Proton is cleared with the UPA and the PBA, they paid off their debts, and Connor closed it with "I love Proton, I hope they sell a ton of paddles." Charles followed up on Instagram with a video of him peeking out from under a desk asking if it was safe to come out yet. Good move. The whole situation needed some humor.

The next question is the pro roster. The Proton lineup scattered when the suspension hit. DSQ went to Carbon. Andre Mercado and a few of the younger pros are floating. The website is still listing Megan Diz and Jeannie Bouchard, but I'd be surprised if they don't end up in conversations with other brands too. Megan was already looking around in St. George. The rebuild from here is going to be just as interesting as the comeback.

And for my prediction for their next paddle name? Feels almost too on-the-nose—but with Proton’s bird naming theme, the next paddle practically has to be the Phoenix. I know Chorus already went there, but this is too perfect. After getting reinstated by the PPA following the ban for non-payment, it’s the quintessential “rising from the ashes” moment—and honestly, anything else would feel like a missed opportunity.

Quick context if you're new here. Pickleball has two rules bodies. USAP is the long-running grassroots one that covers amateur and community play. UPA-A is the newer one that sits over the pro tour, meaning the PPA tournaments you watch on TV and the MLP team league. Up until now, USAP has been the de facto rulebook for almost everybody.

That's changing. UPA-A just became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and released a fully updated rulebook to go with it. The new rules take effect on May 22nd at the start of the 2026 MLP season, and they apply to both pros AND amateurs playing in PPA brackets. So if you've ever entered an amateur draw at a PPA tournament, these rules will affect you too.

Below is the rapid-fire version, kept tight on purpose. If you want the deep dive on any of these, watch the full episode or grab the official rulebook (both linked at the end of this section).

Not just the pros. Core rules 1 through 13 apply to amateurs in PPA brackets too, whether or not a referee is on court. The document only has authority at PPA and MLP events for now, but the framing is broader than I expected. Eddie's read: a foundation of regulations with a pro layer bolted on top.

Paddles now get retested at tournaments. The biggest shift. UPA-A will keep testing certified paddles after they hit the market. If a paddle drifts more than 10% on power, deflection, swing weight, spin, or grit level from what it was certified at, it fails. This is huge because under the current USAP system, manufacturers self-police, and we've all seen paddles ship grittier than the version that got approved.

Fines for grit drift (for paddle companies):

Blowing the ball over the net is now a fault. Same with fanning the ball or using any body or apparel motion to alter its flight. This closes the loop on the Eric Oncins moment from last week, where he leaned in and blew a dribbler back over for a winner. I'll miss the creativity but it's the right call for national broadcasts.

A small wording issue. The rulebook uses "delamination" but really means disbonding (the face layers separating from the core) and core crushing (the honeycomb collapsing under your thumb). True delamination almost never actually happens on a real paddle. Hopefully UPA-A tightens the language.

Clip-on weight systems are banned. Slyce Sliders, Pickle Clips, anything you clamp onto the paddle to add weight: not allowed at UPA events. Only flat lead tape or weights securely fixed inside the handle or on the buttcap are legal. I spoke with Jason Aspes (who helped draft this) to confirm. Practical advice: use the sliders at home to find your perfect setup, then lock that exact weight placement in with tape before tournament day.

Pros can now challenge an opponent's paddle mid-match. Including in the gold medal match. The match result doesn't change either way, but penalties land afterward. Wrong call? The challenger gets fined. Right call? The user gets fined and possibly sanctioned. The 10% similarity threshold applies, so you'd better be sure before you challenge.

Distraction calls just got harder to make. Loud, visible, emotionally expressive actions are now considered "normal or incidental" by default. To call distraction, the action has to clearly impact the opponent's ability to play. A real philosophical shift toward "let them play."

A new card system, like soccer. Four-stage escalation: verbal warning, blue card (formal warning), orange card (gives the opponent a free point), and four total awarded points equals match forfeit. Egregious behavior (paddle thrown into the crowd, physical altercation, racial conduct) skips up the ladder at referee discretion. USAP doesn't have anything comparable, and I think this puts real structure around player behavior at the pro level.

Line call rules just got stricter. A ball can only be called out if you clearly see space between the ball and the line. Standing directly over the ball doesn't give you the angle, even if part of the ball technically hangs over. And questionable calls now resolve in favor of the opponent. Big adjustment for amateur play.

Serve rules tightened up too. No drop serves at the pro level anymore (volley serve only). And the marginal-serve tiebreaker is clean: if any element of the motion is "close" enough that legality can't be visually confirmed, it's a fault. The burden is now on the server to be obviously legal. Amateurs can still drop serve.

Video challenges and miscellaneous edge cases. Each pro team gets one free video review per game. After that, lose a challenge and you eat a mark plus a free point to your opponent. PPA is also rumored to roll out an Owl AI line-call system in June 2026. Quick edge case roundup: damaged balls only stop play if cracked between two holes or split in half, missed end changes carry no penalty, and talking to your opponent or the ref during a rally is a fault (talking to your partner, including saying "out," is fine).

Enforcement style. UPA-A keeps testing paddles continuously and uses a structured card system. USAP certifies once, puts the burden on the manufacturer to ‘self-regulate’, and relies on verbal warnings. Both can coexist for now, but eventually the average player benefits from one unified rulebook. Nobody wants to remember which one bans Pickleclips on which Saturday.

Want the full deep dive? Watch KewCast 105 for the unabridged Eddie + me breakdown, or read the 2026 UPA-A Rulebook straight from the source.

PADDLES OF THE WEEK

This might be my new main… at least until the J6CR Blue Grit drops.

Honolulu sent over the long-handle J2CR with their Blue Endurance Grit, and I've spent enough time with it now to say it's class-leading for a durable grit surface. The spin is elite, and it gets really good spin in places where my older paddles just don't. Kitchen dinks with topspin. Slices off-center. Glancing contact at the baseline. All of it.

The reason I'm switching to it isn't just performance. I want to put hundreds of games on this surface to verify the ball cannon results in the real world. So part of this is scientific curiosity. Part of it is just that it's a really good paddle.

Specs (with 3-gram weights up high near 10 and 2):

The 115/7.3 swing-to-twist ratio is a really nice combination. You get a wide sweet spot without a heavy paddle in motion.

Eddie's Setup vs Mine

Eddie went a different direction. He took my 3 gram tungsten pods off and put Pickleclips on three and nine. The long handle plus shorter face on this shape gets really whippy when you snap through, and both of our modification setups dialed up the whip.

(Heads up: under the new UPA-A rules in the rule changes section above, those Pickleclips won't be legal at sanctioned events. Get your weight where you want it with sliders, then lock it in with flat tape before the tournament.)

A Quick Note on Grit Consistency

A few people on Discord noted that some early units have visible "highways" where the grit isn't perfectly even across the face. Mine has them too. Honestly I haven't noticed any performance difference where the grit reads a little less aggressive, but I get the aesthetic concern. Worth flagging because the unit you're holding might look different than mine in product photos.

Why I Want This Surface on the J6CR

The J6CR is technically not quite elongated (16.4 inches long, slightly wider than typical), so it plays as a long hybrid with a real two-hand-friendly handle. It's also light enough at stock to add weight and pump up the sweet spot. That's why Eddie prefers the J6 over the J2 even though he typically goes hybrid or widebody. It's not the shape preference, it's the tunability.

Honolulu J2CR Blue Endurance Grit (10% off with code JOHNKEW)

Honolulu J6CR Blue Endurance Grit (10% off with code JOHNKEW)

TALES FROM THE BALL CANNON

This is the segment that got me out of my chair this week.

Shoutout to Jeff, a viewer who replied to last week's newsletter and sent me a 2023 Tennis Warehouse study by Crawford Lindsey called "Pickleball Spin: Why Is A Rubber Hitting Surface Illegal?" I had been sent this study a year ago and dismissed it. Now that I've spent a year deep in spin testing, it hit completely different.

I cut a table tennis rubber off a real ping pong paddle, glued it to a Babolat STRKR, clamped it at 30 degrees, and shot it with the ball cannon at 60 MPH. The same setup I use for every paddle.

Results, 10-shot average:

Almost double. The rubber paddle wasn't just a little spinnier. It wasn't even close. And during the high-speed footage, the rubber actually ripped from the friction load. I caught the shockwave at 8,000 frames per second.

Here's the headline. There is a hard physical ceiling on how much spin a friction-based paddle can impart on a pickleball. And I think it's right around 2,400 RPM at my testing parameters.

Friction works like this: roughness helps the ball grip. Once the ball grips (no-slip contact), spin is transferred. But once you've achieved no-slip, more roughness doesn't get you any more spin. You're done. The ball can't be redirected harder than physics already allows.

So if two paddles both fully grip the ball at the same inbound speed and contact angle, they produce the exact same spin. The grippier surface is more forgiving (it grips on more shots, more angles, more positions on the face), but the peak ceiling is the same.

That actually explains something that's been bugging me for months. Look at my paddle database. The elite tier all clusters between 2,200 and 2,400 RPM. Not because they're identical paddles. Because they're all bumping up against the same ceiling.

Friction redirects momentum. Rubber adds energy.

When the ball hits the rubber, the surface stretches like a loaded rubber band. Then it snaps back, transferring that stored elastic energy directly into the ball's rotation. There's no slip, the stretch loads, the snapback launches. It's called tangential snapback. You can see it on the high-speed footage as a literal shockwave traveling across the rubber.

This is also why the launch angle is wildly different. Normal paddles release the ball at 14 to 20 degrees off the face. The rubber paddle launched at 33 degrees. That's a huge difference.

For context, an amateur table tennis player puts 3,000 to 5,000 RPM on a ping pong ball. An elite table tennis player gets 10,000 to 12,000. All energy return, no slippage.

This is the part the headline misses, and it took me a minute to land on. The ceiling is the ceiling. But not every shot reaches the ceiling.

Low speed swings, flatter angles, off-center hits. These don't fully grip. The ball slides a bit. That's where rougher textures buy you something. They broaden the conditions under which you can reach the ceiling. So in real play, a Honolulu J2CR Blue Grit feels noticeably spinnier than the original peel-ply J2CR even though the peak ceiling is the same. The difference shows up at the kitchen, on slices, on glancing hits, on anything that isn't a perfect baseline topspin.

It's a sweet spot conversation in disguise. A poppy paddle with a quarter-sized hot spot is the most powerful paddle on the market until you hit it half an inch off center. Same idea here. The ceiling is the same. The forgiveness is everything.

If the friction-based ceiling is fixed, the next frontier is durability and consistency. Three paddles already lost zero spin in my durability test (Honolulu Blue Grit, 11Six24 Vapor Power 2 Hex Grit, Spartus P1 Permagrit). Those are the paddles that hold the ceiling longest. That matters more than chasing a higher peak number that physically cannot be broken with friction alone.

The only path past the ceiling is elasticity. And that's already illegal under deflection, coefficient of friction, and direct spin testing. The risk is a paddle with a slightly compliant elastic substrate underneath the grit (basically a "Permagrit NanoTac" stack) that finds a way to pass all three tests while still adding tangential snapback. I don't know if it's possible. But it's the gray area to watch.

One more thing: longer dwell time and ball pocketing do not raise the ceiling. They just help you reach it more often. Foam cores, floating cores, soft cores: all of it gets you to the ceiling more easily on a wider range of shots. None of it pushes the ceiling itself. We used to think more dwell time meant more spin. Confirmed wrong, again.

Spartus P1 (10% off with code JOHNKEW)

11Six24 Vapor Power 2 (10% off with code JOHNKEW)

KEW & A

Q: Why do you prefer the J6CR over the J2CR despite typically liking hybrid widebody paddles?

(This one was for Eddie.) It comes down to tunability. Eddie likes a big sweet spot and a maxed-out twist weight, and the J6CR ships at a low-teens swing weight with plenty of room to add weight and beef it up to spec. A lot of elongated paddles ship heavy and don't leave room to tune. The Gherkin Draco (hybrid) feels similar to Eddie. Both are unusually light at stock, which gives Eddie the ability to build a huge sweet spot without exceeding the 10 oz cap.

It's not "I prefer hybrid shapes." It's "I prefer a paddle I can tune into the shape I want."

Q: Will pros start opting for durable grit, or is it mostly for non-pros?

The 11Six24 Power 2 series is generating real buzz in the pro scene now that it's UPA-certified, and Dekel Bar is out playing with it. From what I'm hearing, what's drawing pros isn't the durability. It's the spin accessibility. The Power 2 grit makes elite spin easy to achieve on a wide range of swing speeds and angles, and that's gold for a pro who can't waste energy on perfect contact every single ball.

That said, durability isn't nothing for pros either. If a paddle only lasts a day before you have to weight up and re-grip a fresh one, that's annoying. There's still appeal in playing the same paddle across a few tournaments. I think durable grit shows up at the pro level for both reasons, just weighted toward the spin accessibility.

Q: As far as unsportsmanlike behavior goes, how about yelling when your opponent makes an error? That seems far worse than blowing the ball over the net.

100% agreed. This is one of Eddie’s biggest pet peeves. When the other team serves into the net and someone screams "yes, let's go!" Like, what did you actually do? You stood there. Same with the disproportionate emotional explosion on a routine third-shot drop. Not mad about big-moment celebrations. Mad about the over-the-top theater on points that don't merit it.

Q: Does the RPM gap between your arm and the cannon correlate with paddle swing weight or any other parameter?

Great question. This has been driving me crazy. Three of my paddles match my arm RPM almost exactly on the cannon (Honolulu J2CR Blue Grit, Spartus P1, 11Six24 Vapor Power 2). The rest are 600 RPM lower on the cannon than they are with my arm.

I tested whether 60 mph was simply too fast for 30 degrees and causing extra slippage on the less aggressive textures. The answer at 40 mph was the same delta, so it's not a speed problem.

My current theory: I'm making micro-adjustments unconsciously when I swing. If a paddle gets crap spin at one angle, my hand subtly opens or closes the face to find that paddle's no-slip contact point, and I don't notice I'm doing it. The cannon can't do that. It holds every paddle at 30 degrees and expects the same input to work for everyone. It probably doesn't.

What I want to do next: take two paddles and deliberately tweak the angle a degree or two on each, see if the gap closes. Worth an experiment.

A few things I'm chasing in the next couple of weeks:

One last update from last week: I got clarification on why Kaitlyn Christian goes by “KK”. KK is for Kaitlyn Kimberly (her middle name). It's a family nickname from her childhood. Big shoutout to Jason Chandler for sending that in.

Eddie and I both feel the audience growing. The questions in the comments are getting deeper, the data discussions in Discord are sharper, and the rubber paddle experiment is going to be one of the wildest things we've ever published. That's because of you. Means a lot.

See you in the next one. Cheers!

—John

Read the Tennis Warehouse spin study by Crawford Lindsey

Read the new UPA-A 2026 rulebook

Save with code JOHNKEW on every paddle mentioned this week: