SoCal Hard Eights
Finished 10 · 34 pts · Round 1
SoCal Hard Eights finished 10 in the 2026 regular season on 34 standings points and made the 12-team playoff. Here is the roster as the season ended, the draft class that built it, and every trade and waiver move in between — reconciled from the league’s own transaction logs.
How the season ended
Lost in Round 1 to Brooklyn, 2–0.
Roster at season’s end
| Player | Tour ranking | 2026 season |
|---|---|---|
| Meghan Dizon | Women’s doubles #20 · 1942 Mixed #32 · 1846 | 66.0% from 47 matches gender doubles 16-9 · mixed 15-7 |
| Cailyn Campbell | Outside the top 100 | 51.8% from 56 matches gender doubles 8-9 · mixed 11-9 · singles 10-9 |
| Armaan Bhatia | Outside the top 100 | 46.7% from 45 matches gender doubles 12-9 · mixed 4-7 · singles 5-8 |
| Will MacKinnon | Outside the top 100 | 38.2% from 34 matches gender doubles 6-9 · mixed 5-8 · singles 2-4 |
| Naomi Phuong Nguyen | — | — |
| Rafa Lenhard | — | — |
How a matchup is played
Every MLP match is four games in a fixed order — women’s doubles, men’s doubles, then two mixed doubles — each to 11, win by two, and all four are played even when the match is already decided, because point differential decides seeding. New for 2026: there are no starters and subs. A team may use all six players in one match, and may field a different man for men’s doubles than for mixed. Doubles lineups are submitted the night before. At 2–2 it goes to a DreamBreaker — singles, any four from the roster, two men and two women, chosen only after the fourth game, with the home team declaring first.
Pairing-by-pairing records are not published by the league for every team. We would rather leave this blank than guess — the 2026 full-roster rule makes lineups genuinely fluid, and an invented pairing would be obvious to anyone who watched the season.
Where these numbers come from. Rankings and ELO are PickleWave’s per-discipline model, captured 4 September 2026 — an independent rating built from professional match results, not an official tour ranking, and its leaderboards run 100 deep per discipline. Mixed doubles is a single combined pool of men and women, so a rank there is not a rank among men or among women. Season records cover all professional play in 2026 — PPA, APP and MLP combined — not MLP alone. Pairing records, where shown, were published by The Kitchen in August 2026 with statistics credited to PickleKey.com. The roster reconciliation is our own work from the league’s draft results and transaction logs. Pickleball Insiders is not affiliated with Major League Pickleball.
How the roster was built
MLP’s 2026 draft was a live auction — teams bid for each selection slot, so there was no preset pick order. Teams could protect up to five players at the keeper deadline on 15 February; 54 players were kept across the league, and the remaining 66 slots were filled at the draft on 27 February.
Kept: none. This team went into the draft with an empty roster and built all six slots from scratch.
Drafted (6):
| Pick | Player | Reported bid |
|---|---|---|
| 11 | Meghan Dizon | $85,000 |
| 13 | Cailyn Campbell | — |
| 14 | Armaan Bhatia | — |
| 17 | Will MacKinnon | — |
| 43 | Rafa Lenhard | — |
| 55 | Naomi Phuong Nguyen | — |
Transactions
No trades and no waiver activity all season — the only team in the league with none. Unusual enough that it may be a gap in the league’s log rather than a fact.
February post-draft roster: Meghan Dizon · Cailyn Campbell · Naomi Phuong Nguyen · Armaan Bhatia · Will MacKinnon · Rafa Lenhard
More: all 20 team rosters · the 2026 draft · season and calendar · pro coverage
About this page. Pickleball Insiders is an independent publication, not affiliated with, endorsed by or authorised by Major League Pickleball or any team or player named here. The roster is reconstructed from the league’s published draft, trade and waiver records applied in date order; where those records do not balance we say so rather than smoothing it over. A best reading of the public record, not an official roster document. Corrections welcome and made in place. Contact · How we work