From Craze to Culture: How Pickleball changed Vietnam

Written by Ben Le

3 years prior, Pickleball started growing exponentially, capturing the eyes of KOLs, celebrities, journalists and athletes from other sports. Fast forward to today, it is the fastest growing sport in Vietnam with a 110% increase in the player base from 2025 to 2026 and now locating a staggering 16 million frequent players. Vietnam is now considered as the “Pickleball Hub of Asia”, hosting a total of 4 PPA Tour Asia events and being home to the Pickleball World Cup earlier this year. And that begs the question, how has this game engraved itself into modern Vietnamese culture?

The Inception

Firstly, let's explore what Pickleball was like during the early stages of development. During  2021-2022, it was at its absolute inception and was considered a highly niche sport. Being unknown to the Vietnamese public and first introduced within this time stamp as an attempt to bring the game back to Vietnam by Vietnamese expats returning from the USA. The sport was geographically isolated, only being played exclusively within the region of Ho Chi Minh City; early players had to play on improvised setups, often painting on new lines on existing badminton and tennis courts to alter it for Pickleball. The population of Vietnam viewed it as a “post-pandemic-fad”, expecting it to go extinct within the next few years, but no one expected what would happen next.

The “Pop”

Within the years of 2023-25, the Pickleball movement exploded in Vietnam, going from a niche hobby into an economic and cultural phenomenon. It experienced an explosion in infrastructure growth: abandoned warehouses, old factory spaces, open land and aging sports facilities were revamped into modern pickleball complexes nation-wide. It also earned corporate recognition from the Vietnam Sport Administration which stepped in to officialize rules, host refereeing and coaching courses, structuring tournaments, promoting it from a social media trend into a recognised competitive sport. Some notable faces that helped to aid this growth are Nguyễn Anh Thắng, a famous Vietnamese pro and social media influencer that brought the sport onto the mainstream while also being a pioneer winning Gold at the 2024 Asian Championships; we also have Trịnh Linh Giang, one of Vietnam’s most famous Tennis players and his shocking transition to Pickleball along with his rapid adaptation to the sport showed and encouraged other athletes how serious competitive pickleball can be.

The Perfect Match

Now we know how pickleball developed within this “boom” period. However, why is Pickleball such a good fit to Vietnamese culture? Pickleball aligns with Vietnam’s “Coffee Culture,” creating a low pressure environment where communities can gather and hit the court to specifically build new relationships; along with this, it is highly accessible to the Vietnamese population: being highly space efficient, allowing court builders to fit 3-4 pickleball courts into one singular tennis court making it more affordable and profitable to develop complexes; it also has a low of barrier entry, as even though there are high-end rackets, recreational players are able to buy rackets, balls, and rent courts for easily less than 750,000 VND making it both an opportunity for entrepreneurs to make profit and for communities to either compete professionally or to build new relationships. Finally, it is a hybrid of all racket sports that are played in Vietnam. It combines the basic fundamentals of Tennis, the technical aspects of Badminton and the fast hands and reactions of Table Tennis all together, this allows proficient players in these sports to experience an incredibly fast learning curve and creates a very competitive environment for this new sport that is constantly evolving skill-wise.

Reaching the Summit

To wrap up, let's talk about the state of Pickleball currently, in 2026. Vietnam is widely considered the “Pickleball Hub of Asia,” hosting dozens of tournaments from the recreational to the professional level; especially PPA Tour Asia events where they stop at Vietnam twice, the most noticeable being the PPA Asia 1000 - MB Hanoi Cup, which saw the inclusion of top USA pros like Hayden Patriquin, Ben Johns, Anna Leigh Waters and also saw Lý Hoàng Nam, one of Vietnam’s very own top ranked pros, standing on the top step of the podium in front of the home crowd in the Men’s Singles event. We don’t just see individual success in international tournaments, but we also see success as a nation; earlier in September, Vietnam brought 10 of their best players to compete in the Pickleball World Cup and placed second out of 64 nations that competed, a very impressive achievement for a nation that only knew about Pickleball 4 years ago. Finally, we can’t discuss the growth of Pickleball in Vietnam without mentioning the future generation; Vietnam is also home to some of the top prestigious academies and junior teams in the world; to list out some of them we have: CLB CAND (CLB Công An Nhân Dân), Sypik Next Gen, S.Era Junior Team, D-Joy Academy and many more, as well as there being so many opportunities for these juniors to compete both nationally and internationally at a high level to earn experience. 

Overall, Pickleball is showing no signs of slowing down within the Vietnamese market and is beneficial both socially and economically, and is also a way for us as a nation to put Vietnam onto the global stage.