Heat Check After the English Nationals: Why the Finalists Climbed and the Champions Seemed to Stand Still

The short answer: In WPM’s Results Elo table after the 2026 English Nationals, the biggest climbers were the beaten finalists. Eleanor Tomkinson rose from 657th to 225th (+66 points), Evie Kenna from 302nd to 165th (+39) and Louis Laville from 40th to 28th (+26). James Ling won two Open titles and went from 200th to 202nd. That is not because the model ignored the champions. Ling’s doubles ratings rose sharply too, but his headline figure is his best discipline, which is singles, and nobody played singles at Bolton. These are World Pickleball Magazine model ratings, not official rankings.

Sunday at Bolton Arena, mixed Open final, third game. Eleanor Tomkinson and James Ling against Molly O’Donoghue and Louis Laville, the top seeds and the holders. The first game went 11-3 to Tomkinson and Ling, the second 11-7 the other way, and the third went to 12-10. Two points either way and the headline is different. As it happened, Ling had his second title of the weekend, after the men’s doubles with James Chaudry the day before, and Tomkinson had a gold medal to go with the women’s doubles silver she had won with Evie Kenna.

We wrote about Ling’s weekend here, and I won’t repeat it. This piece is about what happened next, in the numbers, and why the numbers seem, at first sight, to have got it backwards. The short version is that they haven’t, but the reason is not the one you might guess.

What Heat Check is, and what it isn’t

First, the label on the tin. Heat Check is World Pickleball Magazine’s own rating model. It is not an official ranking. Pickleball England does not publish it, the PPA does not use it, and nobody gets seeded by it. It is our attempt to put players from different tours and countries on one scale, and it is only as good as the results we feed it.

The method page sets out how it works. Where a player has a PKLStats Rating, the Heat Check base is the average of that rating and our own Results Elo. Most English domestic players have no PKLStats Rating, so for them the base is the Results Elo alone. The Elo is the part that moves after a tournament. Everyone starts at 1,500. Each match moves the rating by up to 24 points (the “K-factor”), depending on how surprising the result was. In doubles we use the team’s average rating. The current version, v2, was published on 26 October, and it includes Pickleball England matches from PickleBook, the federation’s tournament system.

One detail matters for everything that follows. We keep a separate Elo for each discipline: men’s or women’s singles, men’s or women’s doubles, and mixed. A player’s headline Results Elo is the best of those, among the disciplines where they have played at least eight matches.

The figures in this piece compare our results data before and after the Nationals were added on 2 November 2026. The update took in 162 Open doubles matches played at Bolton on 31 October and 1 November. The positions are places on the Results Elo table, which covered just over 2,000 players after the update. That is not quite the same list as the Heat Check score table on the site, which adds capped form and other signals, so a player’s place there can differ. Tomkinson, for example, sits 161st on the live Heat Check global list.

The movers

Source: WPM Heat Check results data, before and after the 2026 English Nationals were added on 2 November 2026; results from Pickleball England’s PickleBook. Positions are on WPM’s Results Elo table. WPM model ratings, not official rankings. Table: World Pickleball Magazine.

Read down the right-hand column and the story seems to jump out. The three biggest movers among the medallists won one gold between them. The Open champions did not move at all. That looks like a model that doesn’t rate winning. Look one layer down and it is something else.

Why the champions seemed to stand still

Here are the champions’ doubles numbers, discipline by discipline, from the same data.

Ling’s men’s doubles Elo went from 1,497 to 1,572, up 75. His mixed Elo went from 1,519 to 1,596, up 77. Chaudry’s men’s doubles Elo rose from 1,567 to 1,642, also up 75. Katie Morris gained 55 in women’s doubles and 50 in mixed. Those are some of the biggest gains of the weekend. The champions did gain, and gained heavily.

So why does the table say zero? Because each player’s headline figure is their best discipline, and for all three of them that is singles. Ling’s men’s singles Elo was 1,596 before Bolton. Chaudry’s was 1,669; he is a former national singles champion. Morris’s best figure was also a singles one. The Nationals were doubles only, so those singles figures did not change, and even after big gains the champions’ doubles numbers still sat at or below them. Ling’s mixed Elo finished level with his singles figure, to the point.

Ling’s slip from 200th to 202nd, then, is not a judgement on his weekend. His headline didn’t move, and two players who did move went past him.

Why the finalists climbed

The finalists are the other side of the same arithmetic. For them, doubles was already their best discipline, or became it at Bolton, so their gains went straight into the headline.

Take Tomkinson. Her best figure before the weekend was 1,523, in women’s doubles. Over the weekend she reached two Open finals. With Ling, as third seeds, she won her mixed group 4-0, beat Morris and Lofthouse 11-4, 13-11 in the semi-final, and then beat the top seeds. With Kenna she won her women’s doubles group and beat Lauren Gosling and Rachel McCrae in the semi-final before losing the final to Morris and O’Donoghue 11-2, 5-11, 11-3. Her mixed Elo went from 1,512 to 1,589, the same 77 points as her partner’s, because in doubles both partners move together. That 1,589 became her new best, and the headline jumped 66 points.

Kenna’s climb, 302nd to 165th, works the same way: her mixed Elo, already her best, rose 39 points. So does Laville’s, from a much higher base. His men’s doubles figure went from 1,686 to 1,712. He reached two finals and lost both, one of them 12-10 in the third game. In Elo terms, losing narrowly to a strong team costs little, and the wins on the way to the final still count.

O’Donoghue, who won the women’s doubles with Morris, is a useful check. Her best discipline is doubles, so her gain showed: her headline rose 26 points. Champions whose best discipline is doubles climbed. Champions whose best discipline is singles did not.

So the honest summary is this. The Nationals told us the English doubles game is deeper than our model thought, and it moved the champions’ doubles ratings as much as anyone’s. What it couldn’t do was move a singles figure with doubles matches.

Our numbers, and their limits

I want to be careful about three things.

First, 162 matches is a decent sample for one event and a small one for a career. The model will move again after the next event, and some of the climbers will drift back if they don’t repeat it. Tomkinson’s live page shows Medium confidence, on a 19-7 record across Pickleball England events.

Second, the jumps further down the list are as striking as Tomkinson’s. Jason Edwards Pereira rose from 1,238th to 574th, Anakin Owen from 991st to 507th, Jack Macgregor from 986th to 532nd and Stuart Parminter from 939th to 465th, each on gains of around 30 points. Players near the bottom of a ratings table are bunched closely together, so a modest gain moves them a long way, and the model knows least about them. Treat those as a signal to watch, not a verdict.

Third, and most important, this is not an official ranking. Nobody is seeded on it and nobody should be. Pickleball England’s seeding for its own events is a matter for Pickleball England. We have argued elsewhere that the Nationals should raise its standards for 2027, and seeding is part of that conversation, but that is a separate argument from what our model says.

There is also a lesson for us. A headline figure built on a player’s best discipline is a fair way to say how good someone is at their strongest event. It is a poor way to show what happened at a doubles-only tournament. In future Heat Check pieces about a single event we will publish the discipline figures alongside the headline.

A year ago

The history makes the climb look less sudden. At the 2025 Nationals, according to Pickleball England’s results, the women’s Open doubles went to Thaddea Lock and O’Donoghue, the men’s to Laville and Josh Bright, and the mixed to O’Donoghue and Laville.

Tomkinson, who plays as Ellie on the PPA Tour, was already a national champion, in singles. At the English Nationals Singles in May 2025 she beat Lock, a former champion, 11-4, 4-11, 11-9 in the final. She told Pickleball 52 afterwards: “If you asked me a year ago, ‘Do you think you’ll be there?’ I’d have said no.” She added: “You’ve just got to keep your mind in each point and see how it goes.”

That is a fair description of how a rating model works, too. It doesn’t know a player’s story. It knows the points. Eighteen months after that singles title, the points from Bolton caught up with her doubles.

Laville’s trajectory runs the other way. A year ago he was holding two Open titles. This year he reached both finals and won neither, and our model says he is a better doubles player than it thought on Friday. Both things are true. It is entirely possible to lose your titles and improve your rating in the same weekend, because the people beating you were better than anyone knew.

The global view

Heat Check is a global list, which is the point of it. Anna Leigh Waters sits at the top of the Heat Check global table, as you would expect. A Bolton weekend moving an English player from 657th to 225th on our Results Elo table is meaningful, in company whose upper reaches are built mostly on professional results.

It also shows why a model that includes national federation results matters. Version 2 feeds in PickleBook results, so players who do most of their winning at English events now count. On the live UK page, Ben Cawston, Laville, Tomkinson and Morris are the top four British players, in that order. English players now show up in the same model as the American and Asian pros they meet on tour, and the model is learning about them one event at a time.

The verdict

Here is the call. The Nationals winners earned their titles, and nothing in our numbers takes that away. In fact our numbers back them: Ling, Chaudry and Morris made some of the biggest doubles gains of the weekend. The headline table hid that because it shows each player’s best discipline, and Bolton was a doubles event.

The finalists’ climbs are real too. Tomkinson, Kenna and Laville came out of the weekend with silver medals and better ratings, and the model is telling us it had underrated them going in.

Watch Tomkinson next. Her headline rose further in one weekend than any other medallist’s, and the next event will tell us whether the model has caught up with her or overshot. We will publish the next Heat Check snapshot with the method beside it, as always.

Titles tell you who won. Ratings tell you who surprised us. At Bolton, the champions surprised the model as much as anyone; the headline just didn’t show it.

Heat Check: WPM model ratings, not official rankings. Results Elo data before and after the 2026 English Nationals were added on 2 November 2026; live figures at /heat-check/ and /heat-check/uk/. Method: /heat-check/method/. Results: Pickleball England PickleBook. 2025 results: Pickleball England. Quotes: Pickleball 52.

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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