Major League Pickleball announced a series of rule changes Wednesday morning that will be implemented at this week’s MLP Columbus presented by The James at Ohio State.

The new rules cover three key areas: serves, on-site player alternates, and team benches.

Service Rule

The biggest change here is that MLP serve rules will now be the same as PPA serve rules.

New serve rules were introduced ahead of the season-opening MLP Orlando that allowed players to toss the ball up and—generally—hit much harder serves, but there were inconsistences with how the new rules were enforced.

Here is how the updated service rules are written in the MLPlay Rules Guide:

The release of the ball must be no higher than the top of the hip bone. The ball can travel upward after release, but only equal to one (1) height of the ball itself. The swing of the paddle must be more “South to North than East to West”. A CLEARLY low to high swing of the paddle is required.”

On-Site Player Alternates

A Premier level team that does not travel its bench players out to an event and has to use an on-site player alternat in one of its matches will be penalized a point in each doubles game in which the alternate plays.

This was another point of contention in Orlando, due to the Los Angeles Mad Drops using AJ Koller to fill in for Hunter Johnson.

Each Premier level team now has six roster spots instead of four, which allows them to modify their starting lineups as needed and deal with any unexpected injuries from their starters.

The Mad Drops have Wes Burrows as their third male player, but he wasn’t with the team at the opening event of the season.

As such, they had to have Koller—one of three on-site player alternates for the event—fill in and take part in their three matches.

If teams try to do this in the future, though, it won’t be without consequences.

Now, if a team has an injured player and uses an on-site alternate (instead of another player from their roster), that team will start every doubles game that the alternate plays in down 0-1.

Team Benches

The final rule change has to do with teams switching benches in between each game.

This has been the norm in MLP, but now teams will stay at the same bench for the duration of the match.

We’ll see if this helps prevent any more sideline encounters like we saw between the St. Louis Shock and New Jersey 5s.

We’ll see these new rules in action this weekend in Columbus, with action from Pickle & Chill starting on Thursday.