Waters is the certainty. Worlds week is really about who owns men’s pickleball now

The PPA’s biggest week starts today with 3,000 points per title and a listed $1,648,641 in payouts. One woman hasn’t lost a singles match since May 2024. The men’s draws haven’t had a settled owner all year.

At about 11:19pm local time on 30 May 2024, in a weather-wrecked Texas Open in Rockwall, Salome Devidze beat Anna Leigh Waters in a women’s singles semi-final. The Dink’s account records the time, because the writer checked his watch. It is worth checking, because nobody has done it since.

Waters arrives in Farmers Branch, a few miles north of Dallas, as the No. 1 seed in women’s singles and with a streak that the PPA’s own Worlds storylines put at 888 days by the time she plays. She hasn’t lost a singles or women’s doubles match in 2026. She and Anna Bright are the defending champions and top seeds in women’s doubles, and the tour calls them the heaviest favourite of the three No. 1 seeded doubles teams. She and Ben Johns are the defending champions and top seeds in mixed.

So there is a story here about Waters, and it is a good one. It is also, most likely, a story that ends on Sunday the way it has ended for two and a half years. The more interesting question at Worlds is the one on the other side of the draw sheet.

What’s at stake

Worlds is a PPA Major and carries 3,000 ranking points per division, the most on the calendar. The event page lists a total payout of $1,648,641 across the five pro divisions, appearance fees included. The tour says every top-ranked pro is in the draws and that more than 3,200 players are taking part across the week, amateurs included.

The format is progressive: one round per bracket per day, and no bronze matches. Pro qualifying is today. The round of 64 is on Tuesday, with no byes in singles or mixed, then one round a day until the quarter-finals on Friday, the semi-finals on Saturday and Championship Sunday on 8 November. All three doubles finals are best of five games. That makes it a long, attritional week, and long weeks favour the deepest players rather than the hottest ones.

Last year, briefly

The 2025 Worlds, at the same club, set the template. The PPA’s Championship Sunday stats tell it in five lines:

• Women’s singles: Waters beat Kate Fahey 11-4, 12-10. It was her 45th consecutive win in a final.
• Women’s doubles: Bright and Waters beat Catherine Parenteau and Parris Todd 11-2, 11-2, 11-5.
• Mixed: Waters and Johns beat Jorja and JW Johnson 11-7, 11-4, 11-7.
• Men’s singles: Staksrud, seeded second, beat the 13th seed Chris Haworth 11-9, 11-1, after trailing 5-0 in the first game and then outscoring him 22-5.
• Men’s doubles: Patriquin and Staksrud, the third seeds, beat the fourth seeds JW Johnson and CJ Klinger 8-11, 11-7, 11-4, 11-8. It was Patriquin’s second Worlds men’s doubles title in a row; he won in 2024 with Newman.

The women’s results were a parade. The men’s results were a scramble: a No. 13 seed in the singles final, a No. 3 seed winning the doubles.

Our numbers: the women’s side has one answer, the men’s has several

Count the No. 1 seeds who won in 2025 and you get Waters three times and nobody else. Look at this year’s seeds and the pattern holds. Waters is the top seed in all three of her events. On the men’s side, the top seed in singles is Haworth, last year’s 13th seed. Staksrud, the champion, is second. Johns, who has more PPA men’s singles titles than anyone (Staksrud’s 17 were “second-most all-time behind Ben Johns (42)” at this point last year, per the PPA), is 19th and plays the local player Brandon French in the first round.

Men’s doubles is the clearest sign of all. The PPA says the last three events with full draws went to three different teams. Johns and Christian Tardio are the No. 1 seeds, but Johns has not won any of the last four men’s doubles events he has entered, and he has had three different partners across them: Staksrud in Arizona, Jack Sock in Chicago and Tardio in Las Vegas and Hong Kong. The defending champions, Staksrud and Patriquin, are the No. 2 seeds and arrive having won the Hong Kong 1500 last week.

One number for the men: three. Three different men’s doubles champions in three full-draw events, three different partners for the sport’s most decorated player in four events, and three in a row for Patriquin at Worlds if he wins on Sunday.

The argument: Staksrud’s week to lose

Here is the firm call. The player of the week will be Federico Staksrud, and the men’s game is now properly post-dynastic.

The case for Staksrud is simple. He is the defending singles champion and half of the defending doubles pair. He has just won in Hong Kong. Last year he beat Haworth in the singles final after Haworth had won their previous six meetings, according to pickleball.com, which is the sort of result that rearranges a rivalry. In a progressive draw with no byes, a man who can win two brackets in one week has the most chances to collect points.

The case against him is Haworth, who is now the top seed, and Hunter Johnson, the No. 3 seed who the PPA says “ran the table in Hong Kong” in singles. Johnson took bronze here a year ago. Christian Alshon is seeded fourth. Any of them could win; that is the point. The men’s singles has gone from a sport with a king to one with a council.

“Post-dynastic” doesn’t mean Johns is finished. He is still the top seed in men’s doubles and the defending mixed champion with Waters. It means the men’s titles are now decided by form, partnership and the draw, not by who walks in the door. For a sport trying to sell itself as a spectator event, that is very good news. The women’s side has a great champion. The men’s side has a competition.

The Europeans, and the Britons we can’t find

Four Europeans are seeded, nationalities from their PPA player profiles. Spain’s Judit Castillo is the No. 8 seed in women’s singles and the PPA flags a possible round of 32 with the 25th seed, Sewing. Slovenia’s Tina Pisnik partners Kate Fahey as the No. 4 seeds in women’s doubles. Romania’s Andrei Daescu and Christian Alshon are the No. 3 seeds in men’s doubles; they took bronze here last year. Spain’s Jaume Martinez Vich and Nico Acevedo are the No. 8 seeds and, the tour says, “red hot”. If both pairs keep winning, they meet in the quarter-finals. Martinez Vich also plays mixed with Etta Tuionetoa as the 31st seeds.

No Briton is named in the PPA’s seedings preview. We could not check the full draws, which are published on a JavaScript-rendered platform our tools couldn’t read, so we can’t say whether any British players are in the main draws. We’ll report it as soon as we can confirm it either way.

The other Nationals, and the other Open

Worlds clashes almost exactly with the USA Pickleball National Championships at Barnes Tennis Center in San Diego, 31 October to 8 November, and with the first European Open in Türkiye, 3 to 8 November. All three finish on the same Sunday. On money the comparison with San Diego is lopsided: the listed Worlds payout is about seven times its $225,000-plus pro purse. We covered why the clash matters and how the San Diego week opened. Brookhaven hosted the USA Pickleball Nationals as recently as 2023. This year it gets the bigger cheque instead.

How to watch from the UK

Every court streams on PickleballTV. Tuesday to Saturday coverage starts at 11:00 Central, which is 17:00 in London now that both countries have changed their clocks. Championship Sunday starts an hour earlier, at 16:00 London. On Thursday night the celebrity pro-am, headlined by Mark Wahlberg, is on Tennis Channel. No ranking points are at stake, which may be the most relaxed hour of the week.

What to watch, round by round

• Tuesday: Johns v French in the men’s singles round of 64. The tour also flags CJ Klinger, seeded 64, against the No. 10 seed Zane Ford.
• Wednesday: a possible Waters/Johns v Callie Smith/Collin Johns mixed round of 32. Collin, says the PPA, has never beaten Ben on tour.
• Friday: Alshon/Daescu v Martinez Vich/Acevedo, if the seeds hold.
• Sunday: five finals, three of them best of five.

What comes next

By Sunday night Waters will very probably still be unbeaten in singles, with as many as three more titles. That is the headline the tour will want. The more telling result will be the men’s. If Staksrud wins two, he is the clear leader of the men’s tour going into 2027. If the titles split again, the PPA has a season-long story it didn’t have to invent.

One woman has an answer. The men are still arguing, and that is the best thing about the week.

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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