Last week in The Dink, I wrote about what quality programming actually looks like. One of the jobs is giving players something worth competing for, and the formats that do it best have a hook: they give players a story to tell and a reason to sign up for the next one.

Here is one of those stories.

On Saturday, October 17, 44 doubles teams entered a tournament where every match was a single rally. Forty-three points later, Mia Yu and Sheridan Kim were holding a $5,000 check eight floors above Times Square. They had signed up that morning.

That was the Paddletek One Point Slam at CityPickle Times Square, and this is the night, hosted by Kaitlyn Kerr:

If you just want the action, here is every point of the night.

How It Works

The idea comes from the Australian Open’s one-point format. The field can be anywhere from 32 to 64 doubles teams, single elimination, drawn into a bracket that runs like the NCAA tournament. At CityPickle it was 44, so the top seeds got a bye through the first round. Your names come up on the court monitor, you walk on, you get sixty seconds to warm up.

Then the paddle count. The team carrying more Paddletek paddles wins the toss outright and chooses to serve, return, or pick a side. If the count is level, a coin decides.

Then one rally. Win it and you advance. Lose it and your night is over.

The early rounds run on every court at once. From the quarterfinals on, everything moves to a single showcase court with the whole room packed around it and the bracket narrowing on the big screen behind. The final is one point for $5,000.

Win every point you play and you win the tournament.

Why It Works

Every point has stakes. In a game to 11, most points don’t matter much, and everyone on the court knows it. Here there are no throwaway points. The quiet before the serve is the quietest moment you will hear in a pickleball club, and the noise after it is the loudest.

It’s built to be watched. Every match has a beginning, a middle, and an end inside thirty seconds. Nobody needs the rules explained twice. People who would never sit through a forty-minute rec match crowded the sideline to watch a team’s night end on a single rally. The format is slightly absurd and everyone in the room knows it, which is exactly why it works.

It writes its own stories. When one point decides everything, everyone in the bracket has a story by the end of the night. One entrant was playing the first tournament of their life. Another played in jeans and Uggs. A wife watched her husband play from the sideline. “I’m so nervous,” she said. And the champions met on a pickleball court, stayed friends for years, and eventually started dating. That morning he asked if she had plans. She signed up on the understanding that it they would play as if it was “a $25 open play” and they were just having fun. Mia and Sheridan play at a high level, and over five rounds the best two teams in the room still found their way to the final. That is the format in one sentence: anybody can win a point, and the best players still have to win all of them.

The sponsor goes home with the players. Paddletek’s name was on the event: the title, the bracket on the big screen, the check. That is still the heart of a title sponsorship. What’s different is where else it goes. Paddletek’s pre-roll played before every replay on the court monitors, and its watermark was on every clip players took home and shared. Most event sponsorship ends when the lights go off. This kind leaves the building on 88 phones and then makes its way to social media feeds. The rule that the team with more Paddletek paddles wins the toss added a fun bit of theater at the net, too.

Why PodPlay Clubs Can Run It

A One Point Slam is close to impossible to run on a clipboard. Up to sixty-three matches in a three-hour window leaves no slack for anyone to walk a score sheet to a desk, re-draw a bracket, or argue about a call.

Four things made it run:

• Tournaments. A 44-team, single-elimination bracket with byes, game to one. Officials entered the result on an iPad, the bracket advances, and the next match is assigned to a court on its own. We wrote about the scoreboard-to-bracket loop when we launched PodPlay Tournaments.
• The bracket on the big screen. The live bracket ran on the biggest screen in the building all night. It is the scoreboard for the room, and it’s what turned a crowd of strangers into people with a rooting interest.
• A replay of every point. The fixed court cameras recorded every rally, and the official saved the replay with the score. That is how I cut the full montage the next morning. It also settled the most contested moment of the night, which you can see in the episode: a match ended, one team started celebrating, the replay on the court monitor showed a foot in the kitchen, and the point went the other way. In a one-point match, replay review is not a nice-to-have. It’s the officiating.
• Branded pre-roll and watermark. The title sponsor’s pre-roll runs before every replay and its mark rides on every clip, configured for the event without anyone touching it on the night. Players share their replays because they’re good, not because anyone asked. That is the same engine behind Go Viral, and PodPlay replay content has now been viewed more than 35 million times across 572 trackable posts.

Every piece of that is standard at PodPlay Pro clubs, which is why the format is portable. The bracket, the screens, the cameras, and the sponsor layer are the same system at every club, so a One Point Slam runs the same way in any city as it did in Times Square.

It also wasn’t perfect, and the first run taught us what to fix. Court assignments were on the screens but too small to read across a crowded room, so CityPickle’s Josh Gartman called courts out loud all night. They’ll be bigger next time.

An Event Ends. A Story Travels.

A sponsored event is over when the room empties. A format with a story leaves things behind. From one night at CityPickle, the content package looks like this:

• The full story of the night as a pilot episode, hosted by Kaitlyn Kerr.
• A trailer for the series, cut from the pilot.
• A montage of every point, and a competition cut that follows the finalists from their first point to their last.
• Short reels for the format, the venue, the technology, and the title sponsor.
• A replay of every point, with the sponsor on it, sitting on the phones of the people who played.

Run the same format at a different club and you get the same package in a new city with new players, new stories, and a new final. That is a series: a full field narrowing to one, the same rules every time, and a different room. It is competitive amateur pickleball shaped for a screen, which most amateur pickleball never is.

CityPickle co-founder Erica Desai put it simply after the final: “Honestly, it was even better than I thought it would be. … People were super excited about it, didn’t exactly know what to expect, and it was just really, really fun.”

We plan to take the One Point Slam on the road in 2027, to PodPlay clubs in more cities. If you run a PodPlay club and want to host one, talk to us.

Thank you to Mary Cannon, Erica Desai, Josh Gartman, Chase Stokes, Anna Garwood and the whole CityPickle team; to Paddletek; to Franklin and Beyond Immerse; to Anna at FWRD Social behind the camera; and to Kaitlyn Kerr on the mic.

Forty-four teams came for $5,000. Everyone left with a story. That’s what the best programming does.