On June 30, 2026, Sansan Inc. announced that Seiga Hatakeyama (29) and Kei Sawaki (15), players the company supports, had signed pro contracts with the \"PPA Tour,\" the world's top professional pickleball tour. A 29-year-old who captained Japan's national padel team, and a 15-year-old with just a year and a half of playing experience. That two people so far apart in career and age reached the world's highest-level contract on the same day is bound to be recorded as the moment Japanese pickleball changed from a \"country that participates\" into a \"country that sends contracted players.\" For every individual playing at home, the career path this deal points to is not someone else's business.<\/p>\n
The PPA Tour (The Professional Pickleball Association Tour) is the world's top pro tour based in North America, where the world's leading players such as Anna Leigh Waters travel and compete under contract. With this deal, the two becomePPA contracted pros<\/strong>and will base their careers on overseas tours as their main battleground.<\/p>\n Seiga Hatakeyama is from Hokkaido. He was runner-up in tennis at the Inter-High School Championships and won the collegiate national title twice in university. In his first year as a working adult he was selected for Japan's national padel team, and as team captain he won the All-Japan Championship three times. In autumn 2024, he entered pickleball as a first-cohort member of Sansan's development project \"Pickleball X.\" At the \"PPA Asia 500 Panas Kuala Lumpur Open\" men's singles in May 2026, he advanced to the final for the first time as a Japanese player and finished runner-up.<\/p>\n Kei Sawaki is a 15-year-old from Tokyo. She started tennis at age 5, holds a runner-up finish at the national elementary school championships, and switched to pickleball at 14. Selected for \"Pickleball X\" as its youngest member, she won both singles and doubles titles at the 2025 Asia Pickleball Junior Open U-16. At the PPA Tour World Championships she took the junior category, and also played in the pro main draw in women's doubles. In 2026 she won a bronze medal in women's doubles at the \"PPA Asia 500 Macao Open.\"<\/p>\n This deal shouldn't be read as sudden good news, but as an outcome exactly as designed under Sansan's domestic promotion efforts and \"Pickleball X,\" which began in February 2024. The project moves athlete support, trial events, tournament hosting, and facility operation as one, and has held up \"developing globally top pros\" from the very start. According to Sansan's materials, the domestic player base has grown to about 330,000, roughly 7x year over year, and in the US the playing population over the past year is put at about 50 million. Now that the rapid expansion of the player base and corporate investment have overlapped, the circuit to push players up to world-standard contracts has finally connected within Japan.<\/p>\n As for Japanese players challenging overseas, the case of former soft-tennis national team memberYuta Funamizu winning his first PPA title<\/a>precedes this, but this is the first time multiple graduates of a corporate development project have reached PPA contracts simultaneously.<\/p>\nWhy now\u2014Pickleball X, a development program built by working backward<\/h2>\n
Comparing the two players' achievements by the numbers<\/h2>\n