Partners Pickleball Documentary Review - Episodes 1-3 (Spoilers)

This project was enabled due to the production team’s strong relationship with Carvana, which also serves as the title sponsor of the PPA tour itself. According to Show Runner Dan Bradley, this was a key connection that enabled this project to move forward. “We built a relationship with Carvana over 4-5 years" from their prior work with Jimmie Johnson on their 2022 documentary “Reinventing the Wheel." This opened the door for the pair to consider pro pickleball, and the pair ran with it.

Click here for Episode 1:

Episode One starts with, fittingly, Anna Leigh Waters, in July 2025 as she prepares for her appearance on the ESPYs. Waters has plenty of coverage of her back story at this point, and the documentary delves into it a bit, including some very, very old footage showing the Waters mother-daughter combo competing as far back as 2019 (when ALW was just 12 years old). The Waters introduction weaves into Anna Bright, who comes across as serious, whimsical, and almost maniacal throughout the series as we watch her transform from the leading Waters adversary in January 2025 to being her partner by April. We are guided through the entire Waters/Parenteau split and then the decision Bright faced when approached to be ALW’s new partner, with interviews of all four women involved. The episode one cliff-hanger is Bright hesitating when asked if she and Rachel are still friends after their agonizing breakup.

Coincidentally, it is exactly this dynamic that led to the title of the series; the drama behind pro players and their constant shifting between doubles partners on tour. And, not for nothing, two of the biggest storylines on tour in 2025 involved the sport’s two top players (Waters and Ben Johns) terminating their long-time doubles partnerships in search of more success and more titles. We got a lot less of the Johns brothers break-up, mostly because Collin Johns is absent from this film (per the executive producers, he chose not to participate), and the Johns brothers likely had nothing to gain from a deep introspection into their months-long drawn-out split in late 2024.

Connor Pardoe gives viewers a glimpse behind the scenes of both his personal and professional life in this series.

PPA

The business side of the sport is introduced in Episode One, with a deep-dive into the life of Connor Pardoe and an introduction to the issues the tour faced in mid-2025 related to its desire to pivot to prize-money based contracts sooner than later. We see a series of meetings the UPA leadership (including Pardoe, Connor Ogden, Samin Odhwani, and others) where they pitch the contract modification proposals to a slew of their top-ranked players. It is in this section where yours truly makes his documentary debut, talking about the salary over-commitments the organization faced and the sheer number of players signed (150 or so from the August 2023 Tour Wars signing spree).

Click here for Episode 2:

Episode Two introduces us to Quang Duong, his father Duc Duong, and the complex relationship that the Duong family has with Connor Pardoe and the tour. Pardoe alludes to “issues” he has with the father early on, and at the end of episode two we get the bombshell of the PPA terminating Duong’s contract. The film takes us to Vietnam, the home of the Duong clan, to get some footage of Quang training and playing, an experience that Bradley listed as the most memorable of this experience. “Going to Vietnam was incredible, and it was amazing to us just how big of a star Quang was in his home country.”

Yours truly is heavily involved in this contract termination disclosure. By happenchance, I was in the middle of my interview for this film when the news broke on the Saturday morning of the MLP 2025 mid-season tournament. The producers monitoring our live interview interrupted our conversation and had me, live on film, open my phone to pickleball.com and do a live reaction to the news. This ended up being the Episode 2 ending cliffhanger and the opening of the third episode.

I’ve had several people already ask me if this was staged. Absolutely not: my reactions are real, captured live on film as I first learned of the news. My interview with the Shutterstock staff ran from 8:30-10am that morning, and the story literally dropped at 8:35am, just a few minutes after I began. You can see me fumble around to grab my phone and open the webpage and react in real-time.

Quang Duong's journey on and off the PPA tour is featured heavily in episodes 2 and 3.

PPA

Click here for Episode 3:

Episode three captures much of the Duong fallout, and includes some pretty incredible quotes from Duc about Quang’s development. I won’t spoil them word for word here, but when I saw the footage I texted the executive producer in disbelief. Most of the rest of Episode 3 is a deep-dive into one of the more high-profile couples the tour had seen (Hunter Johnson and Parris Todd), leading to one of the more notorious breakups the sport has seen (alluding to an episode of infidelity and a possible love triangle with their good friend Jaume Martinez Vich, something long-rumored and tacitly discussed). The episode ends with a pivot away from Parris and to Hunter, as he gets a career singles win, one that eventually catapulted him to the No. 1 spot on tour. We get a fade to black on Hunter to head into the second half of the season.

Hunter Johnson and Parris Todd are featured prominently in the first three episodes of Partners, both for their on-court accomplishments and their off-the-court relationship.

PPA/Pickleball.com

Overall, my impression of these episodes is incredibly positive as a fan of sports documentaries and of pickleball. I felt that the production quality was better than what we get week-in and week-out on PickleballTV, and was on a par with the Netflix-style high-end video production. I felt that the interviews were intelligent and the clips were well-woven into the story telling. We’ve never really seen a deep-dive into some of the player relations or the tour operations in this capacity, and what we got was fascinating to me as a fan.

We’ll review Episodes 4-6 next, posting after a couple of days to give fans a chance to work through the batch-dropped episodes.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com