He became a world champion in one of the strangest racquet sports on earth. Now Ben Cawston is unbeaten in Europe, chasing Asia, and asking how far European pickleball can go.
By Chris Beaumont
The first thing to understand about Ben Cawston is that pickleball did not humble him because he was bad at racquet sports.
It humbled him because he was already world-class in one of the most unforgiving ones on the planet.
Before he became Europe’s No.1 men’s doubles player, before the unbeaten run with Theo Platel, before the gold medals in Vienna, Rome and Barcelona, Cawston was a world champion in rackets, the old British sport played on a court three times the size of a squash court with a ball almost as hard as a golf ball and travelling at more than 180 miles an hour.
That was the game he had spent his life mastering. That was the game in which, at 23, he became the youngest world champion in more than a century.
And then he picked up a pickleball paddle and got smoked.
“I played Louis Laville, Freddie Powell and Tom Turney,” Cawston says, laughing at the memory. “At the time there were three of the five best players in the UK, and I just got absolutely smoked in every combination whoever I played with. I just thought, this is amazing.”
Key Takeaways
- Ben Cawston is Europe’s highest-rated men’s doubles player with an unbeaten European record alongside partner Theo Platel — 17 pro golds and counting.
- A former rackets world champion, Cawston sees pickleball splitting into regional styles — with Asia’s patient, badminton-influenced game challenging the American creative model.
- He believes Ho Chi Minh City may now be the pickleball hub of the world — and that European players must get exposure in Asia to close the gap with the global elite.
That reaction tells you quite a lot about him. Most elite athletes do not enjoy being made to look ordinary. Cawston did. He found it addictive. He had just climbed the mountain in one sport and, almost immediately, another one gave him a fresh problem to solve.
That is where this story really begins.
The sport before the sport
To understand why Cawston has adapted so quickly to pickleball, you have to go back to the stranger part of his sporting life.
Rackets is not a game most pickleball fans will know. It sits in the same historic family as real tennis. Squash grew out of it. It is old, niche, hard, and for years it was tied heavily to Britain’s private-school system. Cawston, educated at state schools, was not supposed to fit naturally into that world.
His route in was far more accidental.
His father, a tennis coach, heard the sound of a ball thudding against the walls at Harrow School, wandered in, got curious, then pulled his son into the sport. That was it. Cawston was around seven years old.
By 14, he was national under-15 champion. Later, when he beat the best school players from that traditional private-school pipeline, it caused enough of a stir to make national press.
At the time, it was not just a sporting upset. It was a social one too. The state-school kid had come in and beaten boys who were supposed to own the sport.
“A few people did not exactly like it,” Cawston says. “But most of the sport was super happy that the game was opening up a bit more.”
That background matters. It explains some of the toughness. It explains some of the calm. It also explains why his move into pickleball has never felt like a hobbyist’s dabble. He is not a curious tourist. He is a racquet-sport lifer, and he looks at games the way problem-solvers do.
If you’re following how the global game is shifting week by week, the World Pickleball Report breaks this down every Wednesday.
From Chicago to a new obsession
The road from rackets world champion to Europe’s leading pickleball player did not begin in England. It began in Chicago.
Cawston had gone there to prepare for his world-title match. The courts in the United States are slightly different, so he spent two months getting used to them. During that trip, pickleball kept appearing in the background. It was on television. It was in conversation. One player he met casually mentioned he was a full-time pickleball player.
That stopped him in his tracks.
As someone already living inside a niche racquet-sport world, Cawston thought he had a decent grasp on obscure games and the economics around them. The idea that somebody ranked around 50th in the world could make a living from pickleball felt faintly absurd.
He came back to England having won the title he had spent his whole life chasing, but with a problem he had not expected. He did not know what came next.
That was when pickleball started tugging at him.
He had seen clips. He remembered the strange little sport from Chicago. He pestered Louis Laville on Instagram asking how to get involved. Eventually he got on court, got beaten badly, and got hooked.
There is something revealing in how quickly he threw himself into the deep end. He did not drift into low-level recreational games and gently find his feet. He went straight into open competition, made quarter-finals at nationals after barely any proper play, and then started trying to work out how to get close to the best players in Britain.
That phrase comes up often with Cawston. Work out. Figure out. Solve. Even now, when he talks about the highest levels of the sport, he rarely sounds overawed. He sounds interested.
Why Theo Platel works
At the centre of Cawston’s European dominance is Theo Platel. Together, the pair have not lost in Europe. That unbeaten streak has brought 17 European pro golds and established them as the standard-bearing partnership on the continent.
What is striking is that neither of them had cracked the code before they found each other.
“We did not have the best records before we found each other,” Cawston says. “Neither of us had won an RTA men’s doubles.”
Their first tournament together came in Stuttgart, partly because Platel’s usual partner was injured. They won comfortably. Nine months on, the rest, as Cawston puts it, is history.
The obvious explanation is tactical fit. Platel is the more aggressive left-side player, the bigger on-court presence, the one taking more balls. Cawston is comfortable on the right, talking more between points, steering certain strategic moments. But that only gets you so far.
“I just got absolutely smoked in every combination whoever I played with. I just thought, this is amazing.”
The deeper reason is trust.
They are close friends away from the court, and Cawston is clear that this matters. At the sharp end of matches, honesty gets harder. Good partnerships survive because players can say the uncomfortable thing at the uncomfortable moment.
“If he’s doing something silly, or I am, he’s not scared to tell me,” Cawston says. “I think that’s really important.”
It is an answer that fits him. He does not romanticise chemistry. He makes it sound practical. Friendship matters because it makes correction easier. Trust matters because it makes pressure survivable.
And in Europe right now, that combination has been too good for everyone else.
Europe’s king, but not Europe’s prisoner
Cawston’s current standing is clear enough. On the day we speak, his doubles DUPR sits at 5.807, fractionally ahead of Spain’s Pep Canyelles and enough to make him the highest-rated player currently living and competing in Europe.
He laughs about how quickly that can change, but only slightly. Europe’s top group is tight. The names circle each other. Ratings tick up and down. Still, the fact remains. Right now, he is the benchmark.
What is more interesting is how little he seems interested in treating Europe as the end point.
He speaks warmly about the RTA, praising the reliability of the events and the fact players know they will get a decent tournament on a good venue. That matters in a sport where new tours appear frequently, often with louder promises than delivery.
But he also sounds restless.
Europe, in his view, is moving. It is growing. It is not yet moving fast enough.
That is why Asia keeps coming up.
“I would advise players in Europe to get your name out over there,” he says. “The opportunities seem to be endless now.”
It is not hard to see why he believes that. He has been to Mumbai for the World Pickleball League, to Vietnam, to Dubai, to China. He has seen what professional pickleball can look like when the lights are brighter, the audiences bigger, and the ecosystem more ambitious than anything Europe is yet offering.
And unlike many players talking about Asia from a distance, he has been in the middle of it.
What Asia is getting right
There is a point in the conversation where Cawston says something that should make the rest of the pickleball world sit up.
In his view, Ho Chi Minh City may now be the pickleball hub of the world.
Not Europe’s fastest-growing city. Not Asia’s most exciting market. The hub of the world.
He is not saying the very top level in America has been overtaken. He is too measured for that. But he is saying something else, and it may be more important. In Vietnam, pickleball is beginning to matter culturally, not just recreationally.
He talks about paddles being sold in convenience stores. He talks about pickleball on television alongside football and badminton. He talks about star players being recognised in the street, drawing crowds and needing security.
“We could drill six hours a day here, but we’re not seeing what they’re seeing.”
In most markets, pickleball still struggles with the same problem. Plenty of people will play it. Far fewer care to watch it. Fewer still care about the players.
In parts of Asia, especially Vietnam, that equation is starting to change.
That is where Cawston becomes one of the more interesting voices in the sport, because he is not just discussing results. He is thinking about structures and audiences. He sees the difference between a sport people enjoy and a sport people follow.
And he is blunt that Asia is ahead on that front.
“It’s the random people on the street,” he says, in effect. “They’re watching.”
That is a huge statement. It also gets to the heart of why the current pickleball map feels more fluid than the American establishment might like. The PPA still has the deepest fields and the strongest players overall. But elsewhere, especially in Asia, the sport is starting to build atmosphere, fandom and local styles of play that do not simply imitate the United States.
The sport is splitting into styles
One of the most fascinating parts of talking to Cawston is how clearly he sees pickleball not as one universal game, but as a sport beginning to separate into regional identities.
The American style, in his telling, is creative and controlling. The best players are superb at neutralising pace, dragging rallies into dink exchanges, then manufacturing openings from there. Connor Garnett’s two-handed backhand is one example he gives, not just because of the shot itself, but because of the way it creates problems before an attack has even begun.
The Asian style, particularly in doubles, is different. More patient. Less eager to force the first acceleration. More willing to sit, absorb, defend and counter. In slower conditions, with softer balls and different sporting backgrounds, that makes sense. Many of those players come from badminton. Their hands are lightning-fast. Their instincts in transition are different. They are waiting for you to overreach.
“Eighty dinks in a row,” Cawston says, almost admiringly.
It is a brilliant phrase because it captures both the patience and the discipline. Asia, in his view, is not simply catching America by becoming a copy of it. It is arriving with its own logic.
That should matter to Europe too.
If pickleball is going to become truly global, it cannot just be one dominant style exported worldwide. It has to be a sport where conditions, backgrounds and local habits shape different versions of excellence. Tennis has clay, grass and hard courts. Football has tactical cultures. Cricket has distinct national identities. Pickleball may be heading the same way.
Cawston seems energised by that rather than threatened by it.
How close is Europe, really?
For all his dominance at continental level, Cawston is realistic about the distance still to travel.
He has played on the US PPA Tour. He has qualified into main draws. He has gone up against established names such as Garnett and Blaine Hovenier in Asia. He does not talk like someone convinced there is an unbridgeable gulf. But neither does he pretend the gap is imaginary.
What he sees is consistency. Exposure. Pattern recognition.
The best Americans, he says, are not just technically better in obvious ways. They are more used to the latest version of the game. They see patterns more often. They spend more time in the sport’s most advanced environments. They are constantly adjusting because everyone around them is adjusting too.
That creates a kind of developmental pressure Europe does not yet replicate.
“We could drill six hours a day here, but we’re not seeing what they’re seeing,” he says.
That feels like one of the most honest descriptions of Europe’s position at the moment. The continent has talent. It has athletes. It has players capable of competing. But it still lacks some of the daily immersion that turns good habits into elite instincts.
The encouraging part, from Cawston’s perspective, is that exposure works quickly. He points to players like Armaan Bhatia, who needed time in the United States to adjust to ball, environment and rhythm, but started closing the gap fast once he had it.
The implication is obvious. Europe is not condemned to trail. But it does need more of its best players spending time where the sport is moving quickest.
A life between two sports
For now, Cawston lives in a tension that many emerging pickleball professionals will recognise. He is still the world champion in rackets. He still has to defend that title later this year. He has won major doubles titles in the United States in that sport too. Rackets is not just his past. It is still part of his present, and, crucially, part of his income.
Pickleball remains the obsession pulling hardest, but Europe is not yet quite mature enough to make that choice simple.
“If what happened in Vietnam suddenly happened in England next year,” he says, “the rackets would probably be hung up then.”
That feels like the key line.
Because Cawston’s story is not only about one player’s rise. It is about the current state of European pickleball itself. Talented enough to produce elite athletes. Not yet developed enough to keep all of them fully inside the sport.
He has one foot in an old, aristocratic, deeply British game and one in a new, global, chaotic one. In a strange way, that makes him a perfect athlete for this moment. He understands tradition. He understands reinvention. He knows what it is to master a closed world and then walk into a bigger, louder one where nothing is settled.
By the end of 2026, his stated goal is simple enough: medal at a PPA event in Asia.
It is a good target. Ambitious, but believable. It also feels like only part of the story.
Because the bigger question around Ben Cawston is not whether he can keep winning in Europe. He already is. It is whether players like him can help drag Europe into the next phase of the sport, where the continent stops being treated as an outpost and starts being taken seriously as part of pickleball’s competitive future.
Cawston sounds like someone who intends to find out.
This article appeared in the April 2026 issue of World Pickleball Magazine.
If you want the full breakdown, including deeper analysis, additional insights, and exclusive content, you can download the full April issue of World Pickleball Magazine here:
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Chris Beaumont
Founder and Editor-in-ChiefChris Beaumont is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of World Pickleball Magazine. Chris follows the global game closely, reporting on the latest news, developments, stories and tournaments from all five continents. He also hosts the World Pickleball Podcast, interviewing people at…
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