Melissa McCurley

Background

Veteran, Pickleball Tournament Consultant, Software Entrepreneur, Broadcaster.

Melissa McCurley is often referred to as “the hardest working person in pickleball.” This is very likely true, but it tells an incomplete story of Melissa and her contributions to our society, and to pickleball in particular.

Following her Naval Hospital Corpsman career, Melissa continued to serve the country going to work for Ross Perot’s Information Technology Services Company (EDS), where she led the installation and technology build out of the Navy and Marine Corps first ever common infrastructure and common office environment (NMCI). Melissa’s leadership led to the highest customer satisfaction results across all Echelon ll Commands in which she was in charge. She was responsible for setting up and supporting the technology for the Navy’s Crisis Response Center on-site at the Washington Navy Yard, which took care of families impacted by the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Pentagon. She also set up and led the Navy’s Emergency Response Team responsible for restoring Naval communications that were wiped out along the Florida panhandle and coast of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

EDS promoted Melissa to Global Service Delivery Executive and put her in charge of a very high-profile client, American Express. In this role, she was responsible for ensuring the mission-critical data and voice communications were available to call centers, merchants, and customers worldwide.

Melissa’s involvement in pickleball started in 2014 when she took over the ownership and operation of PickleballTournaments.com and transformed it into the global powerhouse delivering technology, operational consulting, and data services to the sport of pickleball. Her savvy leadership, calm, capable stewardship, and honesty enable the emerging pickleball industry to grow and adapt to the needs of events operated for both amateurs and professionals. Stated simply, the “sport” of pickleball wouldn’t have evolved into its incredible heights without Melissa’s work.

When people ask Melissa how she remains so calm under pressure running these large premier events, her response is “when you’ve been on the front lines responsible for restoring communications that saves lives, running tournament desk operations where life and death isn’t on the line, it’s not pressure”.

In her spare time, she enjoys playing pickleball, boating, walking on the beach, and catching blue crab and shrimp.

Melissa continues to serve the pickleball community today in her role as Executive Vice President, Competition for the APP Tour.

Major Contributions

Melissa’s leadership and professionalism helped EVERY tournament operator thrive in the often chaotic, politically charged, and rapidly evolving industry of pickleball. In 2014, PickleballTournaments.com provided services to 93 tournaments, serving a bit more than 10,000 players around the country. In 2023, she led the support of over 1,200 events serving over 200,000 amateur and professional players. An entire industry has grown up around the platform and services provided by Melissa and her team.

Organizations as diverse as USA Pickleball, US Open of Pickleball, PPA, and APP would not have been able to support the fantastic growth of pickleball without her ethical “pickleball first” approach. Her reputation for fairness in supporting all the constituencies in pickleball is well known and universally accepted. Melissa has introduced some of the biggest innovations to the pickleball tournament industry including:

• Creation of an online bracketing and seeding system supporting the various formats of tournaments desired by governing bodies and commercial tournament operators (including single elimination, double elimination, round-robin, and other formats).
• Development of an online tournament operations platform enabling tournaments to increase in size from events with several hundred people to events with 3,000 participants or more operating on as many as 58 courts simultaneously.
• Design and deployment of a best-practices operations methodology that has enabled the world’s largest tournaments to continue operations despite weather problems, power outages, internet disruptions, and more. This included moving to text-based technology retiring the need to announce every match improving the player experience and player satisfaction.
• In conjunction with USA Pickleball, Co-creation and launch of the Universal Tournament Pickleball Rating (UTPR) system, the sport’s first algorithmic data-driven rating system. This revolutionized the tournament rating system, enabling the tournament industry to fairly grow as the number of players grew almost 20-fold in less than a decade.

Melissa’s impact on pickleball tournament industry is not restricted to just the technological and operational aspects of the sport for it to grow. Her contributions are felt every day by industry professionals, amateur players, and casual observers still growing or observing the game today.

Some of Melissa’s tangible contributions:

• First woman to be a broadcaster of pickleball events on CBS Sports.
• First Co-Host of the syndicated Pickleball Show
• Key Advisor and Business Partner to every major tournament operating entity, both commercial and non-profit.
• Developer of certified educational programs for facilities pros and owners to obtain critically needed continuing education about event operations best practices.

Depending on which organization’s numbers you rely upon, a soon to be billion-dollar industry appears to have been built on the foundation of Melissa’s hard work in the tournament space. But the interesting thing is this: Melissa didn’t chase the billion-dollar prize, her focus was on the people that serve the active 200,000+ tournament player pickleball community. Her goal was to help those who want to help pickleball grow."\

COMPETITION AND AWARDS RECOGNITION: