Starting a new professional sports team is hard. Making the playoffs in your very first season is even harder. The Palm Beach Royals have done exactly that.
Palm Beach Royals are new to Major League Pickleball this year, and they finished the regular season as the 7th seed and are now set to face Chicago Slice in the playoffs. That is a strong result for any team, let alone a first-year expansion side still figuring out its lineup and chemistry. The team had to deal with many injuries. They even had to sign new players quickly in the middle of the year to survive.
Much of Palm Beach Royals’ success has come from their women’s doubles pairing of Tina Pisnik and Sofia Sewing. The duo put up steady performance throughout the season and gave the Royals a reliable source of points, even in matches where other parts of the lineup struggled to find rhythm.
In the first round, Palm Beach faces No. 12 Chicago Slice. On paper, the Royals are favored. But Chicago Slice has been playing well lately, powered by young talent, so this matchup is not as simple as the seeding suggests.
What makes Palm Beach Royals’ story compelling is the contrast with older, more established MLP franchises. Teams like Dallas Flash or New Jersey 5s have had years to build rosters, develop chemistry, and learn what works in this format. Palm Beach Royals had to do all of that in a matter of months.
Expansion success stories are rare in most sports. A first-year team usually needs time to find its footing before it can compete for anything meaningful. The Royals appear to be moving faster than that timeline.
If Palm Beach Royals can win their first-round series and advance to Newport Beach, it will be one of the better debut-season stories in recent MLP history, proof that a well-built roster can compete right away, even without years of history behind it.
Written by Aradhya Mohan