On The Court Storylines To Watch As The Professional Pickleball Association Kicks Off The 2026-27 Season

Will we see competitors to the No. 1s this season?

Heading into new season, four of the five disciplines on the PPA are led by incredibly dominant players/teams who spent lots of last season consolidating their power and solidifying their hold on No. 1. (All Rankings points are as of 8/29/26)

• Men’s Doubles: Ben Johns & Gabe Tardio are tied atop the standings, each with 21,800 points. That’s fully 7,000 points ahead of the No. 3 ranked player Christian Alshon. The top pair have not lost since November 2025 at Worlds, and after a brief struggle at the beginning of their partnership they’ve the last ten (10) straight tourneys they’ve entered together.
• Women’s Doubles: Anna Leigh Waters & Anna Bright have not lost together since September 2025, a stretch of 13 straight tourney wins. ALW sits atop the standings with 22,800 (a few more than Bright thanks to the machinations of the rolling calendar), but the pair leads the next highest ranked player (Hurricane Tyra Black) by 7,000 points.
• Mixed Doubles: Anna Leigh Waters & Ben Johns have just one loss together since April 2025. They have 16 titles together in that span and each has a massive lead atop the standings. Johns in particular has a 10,000 point lead to the 2nd ranked Mixed male (Hayden Patriquin); that’s as big of a lead as No. 4 Alshon has total ranking points in the genre. Johns, who has never NOT been ranked No. 1 in Mixed Men in the history of the tour seems set to continue at the top for years to come.
• Women’s Singles: Waters has not lost since June 2024: that’s 25 straight events she’s won when entered. For her career, according to Picklewave.com, she’s 210-8 in singles, but is undefeated for more than 2 years running now.

The only discipline with any semblance of parity in the current game is Men’s Singles, where we’ve seen eight (8) distinct winners in the last 29 tourneys (dating to Jan 1 2025 as an arbitrary endpoint). However, even here we’re starting to see real separation: the top trio of Christopher Haworth, Hunter Johnson, and Federico Staksrud have won every singles title but one since Sept 2025, and as a collective trio hold a 3,000 point lead to the 4th ranked singles player at present.

We’re not going to see much change in Women’s Doubles pairs so the dominance may continue:

• Todd & Rohrabacher seem to be the new team as Rachel drops CP, but Todd had already played several times with Rohrabacher last season, including a gold in Sacramento, so this isn’t really a “new team”.”
• Parenteau & Sewing; Parenteau picked up new-to-the-PPA Sofia Sewing in teh wake of parting ways with RR; this should be a solid team.

In Mixed, a bit projected change as well:

• Todd & Rohrabacher seem to be the new team as Rachel drops CP, but Todd had already played several times with Rohrabacher last season, including a gold in Sacramento, so this isn’t really a “new team”.”
• Black/Tardio; Tardio played a lot with Irvine last season, now looks to improve on his results with one of the top Mixed players in the game.
• Todd/Daescu, MLP teammates with Columbus, will run it back on the PPA.
• Oncins/Pisnik are a new-look team that could make some noise for now.

However, we are going to see some churn in Men’s Doubles; read on.

Men’s Doubles top players shuffle partners to start Season

The new season will see some new teams set to challenge the champs. In particular, we are set to see several new Men’s Doubles partnerships set in 2026-27 to try to dethrone Johns/Tardio:

End of 2026 season Men’s Doubles partnerships

• Ben Johns/Gabriel Tardio
• Christian Alshon/Hayden Patriquin
• Andrei Daescu/Federico Staksrud
• JW Johnson/CJ Klinger
• Dylan Frazier/Eric Oncins

Here’s the new partnerships of these top players that we’re seeing to start the season:

• Ben Johns/Gabriel Tardio (no change)
• Christian Alshon going back with Andrei Daescu, with whom he played most of 2025 with to great success.
• Hayden Patriquin going back to Federico Staksrud, a partnership they debuted at the 2024 Tour Finals with a gold and ran back last November in Dallas for another win.
• JW Johnson is picking up Tama Shimabukuro, dropping Klinger. They won a slew of medals in 2025 but never had the success that JW had with Frazier in the years prior, and now Johnson will try to recreate his 2024 success with one of the top up-and-coming teenagers on tour.

The rest of the top players remain in flux: Eric Oncins is playing with Noe Khlif in the season opener, and Klinger is with Will Howells. I wonder if these partnerships are just for NC or if they are longer term. The odd man out from 2025-26’s top pairs is Dylan Frazier, who has seen his stock fall over the past year or so, both in the PPA (where he has just 5 medals since parting ways with JW Johnson) and in MLP (where he was dropped for the 2026 draft, then traded three different times this season). He’s with Dekel Bar first event as the No. 7 seeds, but that doesn’t seem like a long-term pairing either for reasons we’ll discuss later.

Rise of PPA Asia and Australia tours and its impact on the overall rankings

We’ve gone from a very US-centric pro tour two years ago to one that now has dozens of international events on the slate. There are 10 Asian events and 8 Australian events on the calendar for 2026, plus recently created PPA events in places like Italy, Spain, and Canada. These events are mostly fractions of the value of non-slam PPA events (125-level events in smaller places, 250s mostly in Australia and 500s mostly in Asia), but these still the same “PPA ranking points” that are earned in the US. It is a well known secret that players can travel to a PPA Asia event, have a good chance to go deep and earn a ton of points relative to their typical finish domestically.

Now, heading into the 2026-27 season, a slew of players in the No. 20-30 range on the women’s side primarily ply their trade in Asia. On the men’s side, Hong Kit Wong and Eunggwon Kim sit at No. 16 and No. 19 respectively even though they rarely play domestically. US-based players who frequently travel to Asia to earn points (Chao-yi Wang, Tama Shimabukuro, Len Yang, Alix Truong among the most frequent fliers) have much higher rankings than they’re probably meriting, and this skews the rankings and seedings. In fact, this point disparity has already impacted the Tour Finals field last year, when Wang qualified into the top 8 field for Singles despite making just one podium on the main tour the entire season.

Is this a problem? Well, no, not really. We have to start somewhere. Pickleball is becoming a global sport, and it was just a matter of time before regional events impacted the global rankings. Tennis has dealt with this for decades; a point earned in Florida is the same as a point earned in Timbuktu. But it is something to watch for as we see more travelling by players to compete home and abroad, and as unfamiliar names keep pushing their way towards the top of the global rankings.

What impact will Howells, Diamond, and Sewing have?

Three of the best players from the rival APP tour (Will Howells, Sofia Sewing, and Casey Diamond) are now fully committed to the PPA and are set to make impacts. Howells technically started in January 2026 but was injured early and made little progress up the rankings. Now, all three starred in MLP all summer, both Howells and Sewing have big-time partners lined up to start this season. Howells is playing the first event with lefty CJ Klinger while Sewing nabbed Parenteau for her Women’s partner, setting both up for early deep runs to establish their bonafede’s. Sewing will continue playing mixed with her on- and off-the-court partner Diamond and should make an immediate impact.

Sewing is also an accomplished singles players, which simultaneously is the easiest and hardest way to make a quick impact on tour. Easiest because your success in singles doesn’t depend on securing a top partner, but hardest because you’re starting with practically no ranking points. Sewing is the No. 45 seed in North Carolina (out of 47 entrants), but seems to have a workable draw; she plays into No. 9 Truluck and No. 8 Kunimoto for a shot at No. 2 Fahey in a quarter final. Howells, also a top singles player, is not in the Men’s singles draw, perhaps playing things safe after badly spraining his ankle playing singles in January.

The irony of two of the APPs best moving to the PPA this year not lost, as we’re likely to see a ton of players moving the other way in the near future, a trend already started with Jay Devillier’s summer announcement. We’ll talk about why in the second season preview article when we discuss “Off the Court” storylines.

Teenagers took over in MLP; can they do the same in the PPA

A slew of teenagers spent the summer getting high-level MLP cycles and are set to really press the 2nd tier of pros. On the men’s side, John Lucian Goins probably elevated his reputation the most: he went from being St. Louis’ singles specialist to being a starter and (frankly) leading the Chicago Fire into the playoffs with increasingly solid doubles play. Tama Shimabukuro’s exploits are well known based on his precocious age. Other high-profile teenagers from the MLP season include Will MacKinnon and Cam Chaffin.

On the Ladies side, Kiora Kunimoto is already up to No. 8 in women’s singles on tour. Elsie Hendershot was part of one of the best moments of the MLP season, clinching her team’s playoff berth on the season’s final day. Cailyn Campbell was perhaps the most impressive teenager all MLP season. Others making waves included Emma Nelson and Alexa Schull.

I sense that the combination of these players taking great strides forward, the end of the 2023 Tour Wars contracts, and the huge prevalence of players in their mid 30s who have gone from top 10 players to barely top 30 players in three years is going to lead to a wholesale shift in the sport starting with this season.
————————————————————————————–

Stay Tuned for Part 2 of my PPA 2026-27 season preview, where I focus on the “Off the court” stuff that is coming.