Still riding high from last year’s championship season, the Scorpions began their preparations for the 2026 season by conducting a tryout out the Desert Horizon Country Club on Saturday, Feb 21. Nearly 60 players attended the combine organized by team owner, Kim Jagd, as the team prepares for the upcoming March 31 draft.
The 6-hour tryout was divided into 4 sessions on 11 courts with both gender and mixed play comprising the evaluation format. Additionally in the first two sessions, also included were 15-minute skill evaluations that included serving speed, third shot drop evaluations, third shot drive accuracy and speed, and dinking ability in a competitive format. Evaluators roamed the courts during play, while club volunteers facilitated the movement of players from court to court.
The day began with a welcome by Kim Jagd explaining of how the day would go, and an announcement of the rebranding and expansion of the NPL. The 6-month team series will be known as the Champions Series Pickleball, possibly dovetailing with other team format leagues. The league has also added 4 new franchises in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Detroit, and a fourth team location TBA.
The league plans to again have the Premier Division of 50+ year old players but has added a 40–50-year-old division, and a 60+ division. Plans call for competition in two eight-team divisions and at two sites each month.
So, the goal for the Scorpions was to search not only for players to add to their championship premier (50+) team, but also to add new players to form a “40’s and 60’s” team.
The “skills courts” were a unique addition to the usual combine format. During the first two sessions, serve speed was tracked with a radar gun from both the right and left serving positions. While most players were in the 40-mph range, a few topped out at 51 mph.
The third shot drop was a 10-ball test of placing the ball in the kitchen over the net and under an elastic strap stretched taut above the net at 16 inches. You can imagine there was a wide range of success at this skill.
The same setup was used for the third shot drive, with the addition of the radar gun to track their speed. The overall speed of the drives was slightly lower than their serve speeds, possibly indicating that the players were sacrificing a bit of speed for accuracy.
The final test court was a “dink game” where players were only allowed to be at the kitchen line dinking a required number of times before the game could be accelerated.
Session 3 was another mixed grouping in competitive play and session 4 was a gender grouping that played in a “up and down the river” format where the winners move up and split and the losers moved down and split.
Stay tuned to the Desert Sun’s Pickleball Points section during the summer to see how well the Scorpions did.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Coachella Valley Scorpions hold NFL-style combine ahead of 2026 season
Reporting by Andy Banachowski, Special to The Desert Sun / Palm Springs Desert Sun
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
