D-Joy Singles Finals: Camron, Palm, Huynh and Stewart

Ronan Camron meets Drake Palm in the D-Joy men’s singles final, while Vietnam’s Trang Huynh faces Katerina Stewart for the women’s title.

The short answer: At the Petrolimex Saigon Cup in Ho Chi Minh City, Ronan Camron beat Mikar Fisher 11-6, 11-2 and Drake Palm beat Richard Livornese Jr 11-1, 11-1 to set up the men’s singles final. Vietnam’s Trang Huynh beat Pei Chuan Kao 11-1, 11-6 and will face Katerina Stewart, who beat Bobbi Oshiro 11-3, 5-11, 11-3.

Ronan Camron ended Mikar Fisher’s impressive run and Drake Palm conceded only two points in his semi-final, while Trang Huynh ensured Vietnam will have a player in Sunday’s women’s singles final at D-Joy.

Key takeaways

• Ronan Camron beat Mikar Fisher 11-6, 11-2 to reach the men’s singles final.
• Drake Palm dismantled Richard Livornese Jr 11-1, 11-1 and will face Camron for the title.
• Vietnam’s Trang Huynh beat Pei Chuan Kao 11-1, 11-6 to reach the women’s singles final.
• Katerina Stewart recovered from losing the second game to Bobbi Oshiro and won 11-3, 5-11, 11-3.
• Mixed doubles takes over much of Friday’s programme, with Camron and Stewart partnering one another while Huynh, Phúc Huỳnh, Trịnh Linh Giang and Nguyễn Đắc Tiến all remain involved.

Ronan Camron arrived in Ho Chi Minh City carrying a World Cup bronze medal and the frustration of having watched a Vietnamese opponent stop him from going any further in Da Nang.

Four days later, he has another singles final to play.

Camron swept aside Mikar Fisher 11-6, 11-2 in the semi-final at the Petrolimex Saigon Cup, ending a run in which the British player had looked like one of the most dangerous men in the D-Joy field, while Drake Palm produced an even more emphatic performance on the other side of the draw, conceding just two points against Richard Livornese Jr.

The result is a Camron-Palm men’s singles final on Sunday, but the American pair will not have the singles stage entirely to themselves.

Vietnam still has Trang Huynh.

She overwhelmed Taiwan’s Pei Chuan Kao 11-1, 11-6 to reach the women’s singles final, where she will face Katerina Stewart after the American survived a three-game semi-final against Bobbi Oshiro, winning 11-3, 5-11, 11-3.

After an opening day dominated by the size and international character of the field, Thursday gave D-Joy something much more useful.

Finalists.

And with mixed doubles now bringing many of those same players back onto court on Friday, the third leg of the D-Joy Pickleball Tour is beginning to develop its own set of overlapping stories.

Camron stops Fisher before he can get started

Fisher had given Camron plenty to think about.

The British player had conceded just five points across four games on Wednesday, progressing through his opening matches 11-1, 11-2 and 11-2, 11-0 to reach the last 16 with the strongest scoring record among the leading contenders.

By the semi-final, however, that momentum had disappeared.

Camron won 11-6, 11-2, taking 22 of the match’s 30 points and preventing Fisher from turning the contest into the kind of sustained examination his opening-day form had suggested might be coming.

The score matters because Fisher had looked so difficult to trouble on Wednesday. Camron did not merely stop his progress. He prevented the semi-final from ever becoming the contest Fisher’s earlier performances had promised.

For Camron, the response is significant.

His World Cup singles run ended against Martin Stanchev before Camron recovered to secure bronze in Da Nang. He has now moved through another international field only days later and earned an immediate opportunity to convert another deep run into a title.

WPM covered the opening stages of the tournament in our Day One report from D-Joy, when Camron, Fisher, Jay Devilliers, Ryler DeHeart and Livornese were among the leading names still standing.

The man waiting for Camron in the final did not require much time to reach the same destination.

Palm gives Livornese nowhere to go

If Camron’s semi-final was convincing, Palm’s was brutal.

He beat Livornese 11-1, 11-1.

Twenty-two points won. Two conceded.

That score carries additional weight because Livornese arrived in Saigon directly from a successful World Cup, where he and Jack Munro won men’s doubles gold for the United States.

There was little evidence on Thursday that the confidence from Da Nang could be translated into this singles semi-final.

Palm simply removed him from it.

It creates a men’s final between two players arriving from emphatic semi-finals. Camron conceded eight points against Fisher. Palm conceded two against Livornese.

Across four games, Sunday’s finalists gave up ten points between them.

The question now is what happens when neither man is playing an opponent he can force out of the match.

Trang Huynh gives Vietnam another finalist

The most significant home result came from the women’s draw.

Trang Huynh beat Pei Chuan Kao 11-1, 11-6, taking the first game with almost no resistance on the scoreboard before maintaining enough control in the second to prevent the Taiwanese player from creating a route back into the match.

More important than any supporting statistic is what the result means for Sunday.

There will be a Vietnamese player in the women’s singles final.

That comes only days after Vietnamese players controlled the closing stages of the World Cup men’s singles draw in Da Nang, where Lý Hoàng Nam beat Phúc Huỳnh in an all-Vietnamese final.

D-Joy does not need to reproduce the World Cup to validate Vietnamese pickleball again, and Huynh should not be required to carry an argument about the entire domestic game, but her progression extends an impressive period in which Vietnamese players are repeatedly surviving international fields rather than merely populating them.

Now she gets an American opponent who has already demonstrated her ability to survive a change in momentum.

Stewart survives oshiro’s response

Katerina Stewart opened her semi-final strongly, taking the first game against Bobbi Oshiro 11-3.

Oshiro answered.

She won the second 11-5 and forced the match into a decider, turning what had begun as a comfortable Stewart advantage into the only three-game singles semi-final among the four supplied by D-Joy.

Stewart responded decisively.

She took the third 11-3 to complete an 11-3, 5-11, 11-3 victory and secure her place opposite Huynh on Sunday.

The result continues a remarkable stretch for Stewart, who won women’s singles gold at the World Cup in Da Nang earlier in the week before travelling south for another tournament.

Huynh and Stewart therefore reach the final from contrasting semi-finals. The Vietnamese player controlled hers from beginning to end. Stewart had to regain control after Oshiro forced the match in another direction.

By Sunday, one of those routes will have produced a D-Joy title.

Friday changes the tournament again

Neither Camron nor Stewart can simply wait for the singles finals.

They are playing mixed doubles together.

The official D-Joy draw for September 11 places Camron and Stewart against Brooke Revuelta and Mauro Garcia, with the round of 16 feeding into the quarter-finals and semi-finals before the mixed doubles final on September 13.

It is only one of several combinations that underline the depth and international character of the field.

World Cup men’s doubles champion Jack Munro partners Roos van Reek against Bình Rafa and Hồ Vũ Hoàn, while Jay Devilliers and Anne-Sophie Courteau face Bobbi Oshiro-Alconcel and Brandon Lane.

Megan Fudge and Ryler DeHeart meet Max Manthou and Shelby Bates.

Vietnamese interest appears throughout the draw.

Phúc Huỳnh partners Jada Bui against Daniel de la Rosa and Jolie Lam, while Trịnh Linh Giang plays with Domenika Turkovic against Glauka Carvajal Lane and Zack Marceau.

Women’s singles finalist Trang Huynh is back on court alongside Patrick Brian Kawka against Chen Qing and Nicholas E. Wiseman.

Elsewhere, Nguyễn Đắc Tiến and Si Bon Ngoc face Harsh Mehta and Pei Chuan Kao.

The bracket captures the character of this tournament particularly well, with players from the United States, Europe, Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia appearing both alongside and opposite one another, sometimes only days after competing in completely different combinations at the World Cup.

The workload is no longer hypothetical

That also makes the question of fatigue much more concrete.

Camron has reached a singles final and now enters mixed doubles.

Stewart has reached a singles final and partners him.

Trang Huynh has reached the women’s singles final and immediately turns to mixed alongside Kawka.

Oshiro has just played a three-game singles semi-final and now partners Brandon Lane.

Livornese’s singles run has ended, but his tournament comes directly after a World Cup week in which he reached the top of the men’s doubles podium. Munro carries the same Da Nang workload into Friday.

Players do not have the luxury of treating each discipline as a separate tournament, because the physical cost accumulates across the week even when the brackets do not interact on paper.

That matters particularly at an event containing close to 1,800 registrations and a professional programme embedded inside a much larger tournament structure.

According to HTV, D-Joy Leg 3 runs from September 9 to 13 at D-Joy Nam Saigon and is the final points stop before November’s Vietnam Masters.

The event is also listed by the APP as an APP-powered tournament, further connecting this Vietnamese circuit with the wider professional calendar.

As the draws shrink, recovery may become almost as important as momentum.

D-joy now has its shape

Wednesday was about identifying contenders.

Thursday removed most of them.

Fisher had looked dominant until Camron stopped him in two games.

Livornese reached the semi-final before Palm allowed him two points.

Oshiro forced Stewart into a third game but could not finish the comeback.

Pei reached the women’s last four before Huynh ensured Vietnam would have somebody playing for a singles title.

Those results give the tournament something it did not possess 24 hours earlier: clarity.

Camron versus Palm.

Huynh versus Stewart.

Two singles finals already set for Sunday, with mixed doubles now forcing several of those finalists straight back onto court before they get there.

There is still plenty left to decide in Ho Chi Minh City, particularly once the doubles draws begin shrinking around the weekend contenders, but the tournament has moved beyond introductions.

The names that mattered on Wednesday have now had to prove it.

Some could not.

Camron, Palm, Stewart and Huynh did.

And for Vietnamese pickleball, only days after Da Nang produced an all-home men’s singles final on the World Cup stage, there is another player carrying the home challenge into Sunday.

This time, it is Trang Huynh.

Frequently asked questions

Further reading

• D-Joy Day One: Camron Advances as Vietnam Keeps Two Men in the Hunt
• Latest World Pickleball Magazine coverage

Chris Beaumont

Founder and Editor-in-Chief

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Beaumont is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of World Pickleball Magazine, published by World Pickleball Media Ltd. He follows the global game closely, reporting on news, developments, stories and tournaments from all five continents. He also hosts the World Pickleball…

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