Luana "Lulu" Stanciu: the Romanian tennis player who found her sport late and got very good at it fast

Most people who are excellent at a racket sport by the age of twelve never get to choose a second one. The first sport takes everything. It picks the schools, the cities, the friends, and eventually it decides how the story ends, usually before the athlete is ready for it to.

Luana Stanciu got a second one. She is better at it than she was at the first.

Bucharest, and a childhood organized around tennis

Stanciu grew up in Bucharest in a household full of sport, with two brothers and parents who kept the competitive temperature high. She trained at the G&M Tennis Academy under coach Gabriel Moraru and became one of the top under-16 and under-18 juniors in Romania.

That is a specific kind of upbringing. Romanian junior tennis is a serious pipeline with a narrow gate at the end of it, and the players who come through it arrive with technique that was drilled young and never really leaves. Watch her backhand now and you are watching a shot that was built in a different sport two decades ago.

America, on a tennis scholarship

She came to the United States to play Division I college tennis, first in Louisiana and then on a full ride at South Dakota, and she finished a graduate degree while she did it. She played professionally in tennis as well.

Then the part of the story that decides everything happened, and it happened by accident. During graduate school she took an internship that put her on the business side of tennis, running events and learning coaching operations. That turned into a full-time role with Cliff Drysdale Tennis, where the job was making club events work and making members want to come back.

She was, in other words, employed to be the person who makes a racket-sport community feel alive. That detail matters more than it sounds, and it comes back later.

Discovering the sport she is actually built for

Stanciu found pickleball in 2023 through open play, the same way almost everyone finds it. She was working in tennis at the time. By 2024 the competitive part of her had taken over completely.

The transition is not as simple as people assume. A tennis player brings a serve, footwork, and the ability to hit hard from anywhere, and those things do transfer. What does not transfer is the soft game. Pickleball is decided in a nine-inch window above the net at the kitchen line, at a pace that feels insultingly slow to someone whose instincts were trained to end points. Tennis converts who fail at pickleball almost always fail there, because they cannot make themselves stop swinging.

She made the adjustment fast. In 2024, playing for a team called Cobra Kai alongside Jake Namken, Ashley Griffith, and Maxwell Ruyle, she won the DUPR 18 division at the Dink Minor League Pickleball National Championship in St. Louis.

Worth being precise about what that is, because the shorthand version of it gets stretched. Minor League Pickleball is the amateur team circuit, and its national championship runs in DUPR brackets from 12 up to 22, so a division title there is not a professional national title and we are not going to dress it up as one. What it is, is the proving ground. It is where a player who has been in the sport for about a year finds out whether the game travels under pressure with a team depending on her. Hers did. In March 2025 she joined the PPA Tour and started entering singles, doubles, and mixed.

The professional climb, which is not a straight line

Since joining the tour she has played the full circuit, including the PPA Veolia Atlanta Open and the Orange County Cup, and has partnered in mixed doubles with Sam Querrey, formerly a top-twenty tennis player in the world. In 2025 the NY Hustlers added her to their Major League Pickleball roster, and in May 2026 she reached the mixed doubles quarterfinal at the Wilson PPA Challenger.

Nobody should pretend this has been a procession. Entering a professional draw two years after learning a sport means losing to people who have been playing it for a decade, repeatedly, in public. Her ranking has moved up and down. That is what the second and third years look like for almost everyone who converts from another sport, and the players who survive it are the ones who treat a bad tournament as information rather than a verdict.

What has changed noticeably in 2026 is the audience. Her following has grown sharply over the past few months, driven by the training and vlog content she posts alongside the results, and by the fact that a lot of people recognize their own situation in hers. Coming to a sport late and refusing to be embarrassed about it is a relatable position.

The interview

In April 2026 she came on Balls Deep, the podcast I cohost with Ava Ignatowich, and talked through the switch in her own words.

The useful part of that conversation is the honesty about what did not carry over. Plenty of players will tell you a tennis background is an advantage and stop there. She goes further and separates the two halves: the things that arrived intact, and the things she had to rebuild from nothing. Most of the episode is about the rebuilding, which is the part nobody posts about. She also gets specific on how she structures training now, and on what actually moves a player up a level rather than what feels productive.

For the longer version of her backstory, she sat down with Curtis Reese on The Pickleball Show in November 2025, with her manager Martin Alexander along for the conversation. That one runs from Romania to the tour in more detail. The thing worth noticing across both is how much time she spends on building the sport rather than climbing it, on event operations and on what makes a club worth returning to. That is the Cliff Drysdale job showing through, and it is unusual in a touring pro.

What she plays

Stanciu plays the EZ Speed E16, the 16mm elongated paddle in our line. Elongated is the standard shape at this level, and the 16mm core is the plusher of the two thicknesses we build, which suits a player who has to reset a lot of fast hands at the kitchen and wants the ball to stay down when she does.

It is certified by UPA-A, which is the standard the PPA Tour runs on and the harder of the two tests, because it measures spin on a robot and then re-tests the paddle after it has been deliberately beaten up. A paddle that passes it is a paddle that is still legal after a season of being used properly. That is the whole engineering brief at Eleven Zero, and it is why the paddle is in her bag rather than a sticker on it.

The useful part

The reason to pay attention to Stanciu is not that she is going to win a Slam next month. It is that she is a live demonstration that the door is not closed.

She was a serious athlete in a different sport, she found this one at an age when the conventional wisdom says the ceiling is already set, and she is now three years in and competing against professionals. Most of the people reading this found pickleball the same way she did, at an open play, holding a borrowed paddle.

She did not start over. She started again, which is a different thing.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Luana "Lulu" Stanciu?

Luana "Lulu" Stanciu is a professional pickleball player from Bucharest, Romania who competes on the PPA Tour, plays for the NY Hustlers in Major League Pickleball, and is a signed Eleven Zero pro.

What sport did Luana Stanciu play before pickleball?

Tennis. She was a top under-16 and under-18 junior in Romania, played NCAA Division I college tennis in Louisiana and South Dakota, and played professionally before switching to pickleball.

When did Luana Stanciu start playing pickleball?

She discovered pickleball through open play in 2023 and was competing seriously by 2024. That year she won the DUPR 18 division at the Dink Minor League Pickleball National Championship in St. Louis with the team Cobra Kai, and she joined the PPA Tour in March 2025.

What paddle does Luana Stanciu use?

She plays the Eleven Zero EZ Speed E16, a 16mm elongated paddle certified by UPA-A, the standard used by the PPA Tour.

What team does Luana Stanciu play for in Major League Pickleball?

The NY Hustlers added her to their roster in 2025.

Where can I watch a Luana Stanciu interview?

Her most recent video interview is the April 2026 episode of Balls Deep, the pickleball podcast cohosted by Ava Ignatowich and Eleven Zero cofounder Camila Zilveti, where she breaks down what transferred from tennis and what she had to rebuild. She also appeared on The Pickleball Show with Curtis Reese in November 2025 for a longer version of her backstory.