Most of the talk surrounding the new rules for the 2025 Major League Pickleball season has been centered around the switch from rally scoring to side out scoring for the doubles matches.

It makes sense, especially since rally scoring has been a defining aspect of MLP since the league’s inception. The change to side out scoring is significant in many ways, but there’s another new rule coming in 2025 that’s just as—if not more—newsworthy.

It doesn’t have a name, but I’m calling it the 'Home Court Advantage Rule.'

How it works/Differences from 2024

Here’s the gist of it, as written in the 2025 MLP Rules Guide:

• “Teams designated as the “Home” team for a match will be responsible for submitting their player lineup for each match as well as each game lineup for women’s, men’s, mixed 1, mixed 2 and the DreamBreaker by 10pm local time the night before scheduled matches. “Home” teams will be able to see the opponent’s lineups and respond to the gender, mixed, and DreamBreaker lineups.”
•  

The last line is the most important.

In 2024, the pre-match coin toss was used to determine who would react to the mixed doubles pairings and DreamBreaker lineups (in addition to which team would serve first and which side each team would start on).

In that process, each team would have a chance to make selections for two of those four decisions, with the team that won the coin toss earning the right to make the first selection.

Most of the time, those teams chose to react to the mixed doubles pairings of their opponents.

The reason for this is because reacting teams, in theory, have a lot more control over how the match will end if they can set the mixed doubles matchups.

If a team feels that they have an advantage in one mixed doubles matchup over another and they win the coin toss, then they can arrange things to ensure that specific matchup happens.

Or, if a team is already leading 2-0 after gender doubles, they can arrange for their top mixed doubles pairing to face off against their opponent’s weaker mixed doubles pairing to attempt to secure a regulation victory.

 

Let’s not forget about DreamBreakers here, either.

In 2024, the team that got to react to the mixed doubles pairings had to be first one to submit its DreamBreaker lineup.

Now, the designated “home” team will be able to react to both the mixed doubles lineup and the DreamBreaker lineup, giving that squad a huge advantage before players have even stepped on court.

Distribution of Home Matches

Another consideration here is the distribution of home matches for every team.

This season, every team will play 25 regular season matches while competing at five of the ten regular season events. This means that they will play an unequal number of home and away matches.

That didn’t really matter in 2024 because there was no tangible advantage to being the home or away team, but it now has huge implications because of this new rule.

With 25 matches, the most even spread would be 13 home matches and 12 away matches (or vice versa), but it may not be feasible to ensure that split for every squad with 16 teams now competing at the Premier level.

The issue, of course, is that if Team A plays 13 home matches and Team B plays only 12 home matches, then Team A will have played an extra match with a huge advantage that Team B will miss out on.

It’s an issue similar to strength of schedule. Not every team has the same schedule, so there will be differences in difficulty.

For example, in an article published in August, The Dink’s Erik Tice found that the New Jersey 5s had the easiest schedule (measured by the average win percentage of their past and future opponents) and that the Columbus Sliders had the toughest schedule.

There were lots of other factors at play, of course, but New Jersey went on to make the playoffs, while Columbus finished near the bottom of the standings.

Strength of schedule will certainly be worth monitoring again in 2025, but we’ll also need to keep an eye on how many matches each squad plays as the home team.

MLP won’t release individual team schedules until a few weeks before each event, so it’ll be a while before we’re able to see any statistically significant discrepancies in home team matches or strength of schedule.

The season begins Thursday at MLP Orlando, where every Premier level team will be in action over the course of four days at the USTA National Campus in Orlando, FL.

Catch all the action on Pickleballtv, and think about who’s home and who’s away when you’re watching.