Charlotte Hornets guard Brandon Miller is swapping his basketball shoes for pickleball paddles this weekend, bringing NBA teammates and franchise legends together for a cause that hits close to home. The inaugural Brandon Miller Celebrity Pickleball Classic is set for Saturday at Rally, the indoor-outdoor pickleball venue in Charlotte's Lower South End, with proceeds aimed squarely at the city's food insecurity crisis.
According to Queen City News, Miller is bringing athletes and celebrities together for the new fundraiser, with the Team Miller Foundation handling ticketing and event details through its online page. The tournament will be held at Rally, which features eight indoor and outdoor courts plus dining and craft cocktail spaces, according to CLTure. Rally opened in 2023 as Charlotte's flagship pickleball venue, part of a wave of commercial courts that have sprung up as the sport's popularity has surged nationwide.
Hornets Roster and Franchise Legends Take the Court
Expected participants include Hornets head coach Charles Lee, guards Coby White and Kon Knueppel, and Charlotte franchise legends Dell Curry and Muggsy Bogues, per CLTure's reporting. The mix of current roster members and historic Charlotte sports figures is designed to draw fans and raise the event's profile in its first year. Miller himself enters the weekend fresh off a breakout season, having averaged 20.2 points per game during the 2025–26 campaign and earned 2024 NBA All-Rookie First Team honors after Charlotte selected him second overall in the 2023 draft out of Alabama, according to RealGM.
The event caps a stretch of good publicity for Miller, whose relationship with the local press led Charlotte media members to award him the Rick Bonnell Award for the second time in his career this past April, an honor named for the late Charlotte Observer beat writer that recognizes professionalism and media cooperation, per the Team Miller Foundation.
Fighting Food Insecurity in Charlotte's Crescent
Money raised from the classic will go toward efforts to fight food insecurity in Charlotte, according to Queen City News, feeding into the broader mission of the Team Miller Foundation, which the Miller family established on June 1, 2023, shortly before Brandon was drafted. The foundation, run by Miller's parents, siblings, and extended family, focuses on food access, healthcare, education, and youth sports for underserved communities, per its own materials.
The need is stark. NC Child's December 2024 data card found that 18.3% of children in Mecklenburg County were living in food-insecure households, a 4.6 percentage point jump over the prior year. Separately, research from UNC Charlotte and local hunger relief organizations cited by WFAE indicated that roughly 15% of Mecklenburg County households experience food insecurity, concentrated heavily in the city's economic crescent. Regional hunger relief group Nourish Up opened a Hunger Hub of Hope in 2024 specifically to serve high-need zip codes across that stretch of the county.
A Foundation Built Around Family Health and Education
The Pickleball Classic also benefits the foundation's She's a Bad Mammograma initiative, launched after Miller's mother, Yolanda, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023 before becoming cancer-free, according to CLTure. Yolanda Miller remains active on the foundation's leadership team, and the program has become a centerpiece of the family's healthcare advocacy work in Charlotte.
Beyond emergency food relief and cancer awareness, the foundation has pushed into education. In July 2025, Miller and his foundation partnered with two-year online college Campus to launch the Miller Scholars program, which provides select students up to $20,000 in tuition coverage along with laptops and Wi-Fi access. The inaugural class awarded eight full tuition packages.
Saturday's tournament arrives as pickleball has become the fastest-growing sport in the country, a boom that has reshaped Charlotte's recreational landscape with new commercial venues and public courts alike, including Mint Hill's new splash pad courts. For Miller, whose 22-point playoff performances helped ignite Hornets fever uptown this past spring, the event marks his most ambitious off-court venture yet, one that pairs Charlotte's newest sports craze with one of its most persistent community challenges.
