Tennis Coach on Pro Pickleball Tour (Submitted By Laura Gomez, Athletics Admin Assistant)

Her women’s doubles silver included a convincing 11-4,11-2 win over the bronze medalists, Regina Franco and Parris Todd. Her mixed bronze included wins over Julian Arnold and Laurent Stratman, and Andrei Daescu and Regina Franco. And her singles run included a loser’s bracket victory of Rachel James, after losing to her on the winners side. Those are some strong wins for Lina, and I suspect that this is just the start for her. She is showing great potential to be a high end women’s pro player. One will have to suspect that the partnership opportunities will also pour in for her pretty soon, if not already.

You can add Lina’s name to the now, relatively long list of breakout pro women’s players in pickleball this year, which has probably been the best story in the sport so far, considering the desperate need of more higher level female players and stars. I am not sure that they are a 100% correlated but this has also probably been the biggest positive to come out of there being relatively two separate tours, with the vast majority of the top female players signing with PPA it created a great opportunity for some new players to start making some money in the sport relatively quickly and it seems to have helped encourage some more ladies to jump into pro pickleball.