Minto US Open – Live Random Thoughts – Doubles and Mixed Doubles

We’re finally back to some pro action for Friday and Saturday. It feels weird to have such a lull in the time span for pro events. There’s mixed senior pro today as well, which is a grind of a week for a lot of these top seniors. The seeding is so important at the US Open and apparently they have been doing their own mix of ratings and rankings that is arbitrary – cannot comprehend why we can’t have some kind of transparency with this stuff across the board.

In case you have forgotten, we did our Fantasy Draft Preview with Eddie and Webby live last Saturday so you can watch that. If you care to see the picks, see our post here with the infamous chart.

Sunday, Mayb1st – Mixed pt. 2

2:10 pm EST (Gritty) – We’ll continue to be frustrated with zero streaming. So we didn’t see what by scores looked to be an epic bronze match. Parenteau/McGuffin take it 12-10 in the third. As impressive is Lindsey Newman’s ability to compete so soon after her pregnancy. The gold will be played later but Johns/Jardim won easily over Loong/Irvine. Strong weekend for Loong.

11:25 am EST (Gritty) – A lot of the mixed stuff is finishing up. Big day for Jessie Irvine/Tyler Loong who are in the finals together. We did not draft them and this is a strong weekend for Tyler. They got through Stratman/Collin, Lucy/Matt and the Newmans. Quite the run. The sub-par year for Lucy/Matt is still a thing and they will face Simone/Ben who barely squeaked by Vivienne/Dekel. Parenteau/McGuffin wasn’t as much of a test. If Simone can find a gold here, she can probably play out the rest of the year pretty damn happy.

Saturday, April 30th – Mixed Doubles and Doubles

6:40 pm EST (Gritty) – Parenteau/Jansen get the 3 game win. That’s huge for them in the new partnership and must make Parenteau feel justified for the time being. Mixed will finish tomorrow.

4:26 pm EST (Gritty) – The gold matches are being played and then shown on CBS Sports as a tape delay so that means no streaming. The Johns get another gold though with an 11-8, 11-9 win over Newman/Wright.

1:32 pm EST (Gritty) – It is more weather delays and not looking great the rest of the day. We’ll see if play gets going at some point.

11:37 am EST (Gritty) – This is a super weird day with the rain delay. If I’m not mistaken, there are some players simultaneously playing their gender doubles matcbws along with the mixed doubles bracket. The gold medal matches will take place later tonight. The outlier result came in women’s this morning with Koop/Tereschenko beating Smith/Kovalova. This is a troubling trend for Smith/Kovalova as teams seem to have a book on them with Callie getting all the thirds and teams may be more prepared for her speed up spots. Koop/Irina will face Parenteau/Jansen who were able to get by Stratman/Jardim so that will be a real shot at gold for the new pairing. The women’s bronze is currently being played.

On the men’s side, Koller/Wilson took bronze over Loong/McGuffin after Koller/Wilson snuck by Zane/Altaf 16-14. You have to think Tyson may really be thinking about this Devilliers partnership as this result very much highlights he can get better results elsewhere – yes, Jay/Tyson have a couple of bronzes but it’s the way Tyson got 4th this weekend. While that’s a quality result for both of those teams, Dekel/Adam fail to podium in a bigger field and they are a team to monitor going forward.

Mixed is still in the earlier stages. Koop/Navratil tuning up Jansen/Wilson is a bit surprising and then Stratman/Collin Johns had to fight hard just to beat Kochli/Cincola, which continues Collin’s trend of questionable mixed results.

Friday, April 29th – Doubles

9:32 pm EST (Gritty) – So play was cancelled as you’re probably aware by this point. There is some more Crbn news as US Open put out a statement about it on Facebook finally. It’s a weird statement at best as it puts the onus on Crbn and essentially absolving the US Open or USA Pickleball of anything to do with this, which simply would not be the case in the middle of the tournament. We’ll likely have more on this either later in the weekend or our Monday takeaways. All the drama.

3:34 pm EST (Gritty) – We are currently in a weather delay after the Johns took down Koller/Wilson and we were in the middle of game 1 of McGuffin/Loong and Newman/Wright. We’ll take a bit of this space to write about the Crbn paddle situation. Megan Hall provided an update on Instagram that the Crbn has been banned and is no longer on the approved USAP Approved paddle list. On a quick initial search, it appears that is the case. So it looks like what they have done is decided in the middle of the tournament to outright ban the Crbn paddle, and even as players have played matches today with the Crbn they are later being told later they cannot.

Since stuff is happening, we want to add a little bit of possible context to this with the caveat that these are only rumblings without anything confirmed. Megan noted in her Instagram update that the Crbn paddle is out of spec, meaning it is not compliant with standards. It appears unclear if this paddle is simply a bad batch, similar to what Electrum had noted previously. As people may be aware, the Crbn has been selling like hotcakes so it is possible other paddle companies are not happy with this, especially if the paddle is non-compliant. We already knew from the previous PPA banning the Crbn rumors that never came to fruition that players are not happy about what the Crbn can do. What we have heard is that testing of the paddle may have been spurred on by manufacturer(s) of paddles and/or certain player(s). Testing seems to have been done of the Crbn paddle at the US Open after players like Staksrud, Tellez and JW had good success using it last weekend and now it is getting banned right at the tail end of the tournament. Again, this is more speculation than fact but we heard this stuff before any of the Today in Pickleball announcements. As the saying goes, where there is smoke… 

Regardless, this is a terrible mishandle of the situation by the US Open and USA Pickleball. It’s an awful precedent to set to be banning a paddle in the middle of the tournament and you have to wonder what type of pressure they may be getting that would cause them to make this decision. You can’t be figuring this stuff out in the middle of the biggest tournament of the year. 

2:15 pm EST (Gritty) – Some very close women’s matches early on in the day. Whitwell/Jorja Johnson almost took down Parenteau/Jansen after they won game 1 and then lost 12-10 in game 2. Lots of tournament left and many tournaments to come, but it will continue to be odd in our view the switch to Jansen as a partner at this point in time for Parenteau. The very interesting match will The other close women’s match came with Irvine/Newman winning game 1 and then losing game 2, 11-9, against Koop/Irina. 

On the men’s side, the semi-finals are just underway as Collin and Ben are facing AJ and Thomas. McGuffin and Loong have had a quality day so far and the intriguing part of what look like pretty elementary wins through to the quarter-finals is that Jay/Tyson have not been able to do that all year. However, here is Loong with McGuffin and suddenly they are having no trouble beating teams they are supposed to beat – DeHeart/Rettenmaeir and Cassidy/Long are not slouch teams. Bar/Stone and Merchant/Navratil, who have had an especially good day, are still alive in the back draw. 

11:51 am EST (Gritty) – Adam Stone’s tough year continues as he and Dekel lose to Koller in two games in the quarter-finals. It’s not a big upset by any stretch but Dekel/Adam were the US Open silver medalists last year. Stone/Bar also did beat Koller/Wilson earlier in the year. Still awaiting the McGuffin/Loong vs. Cassidy/Long result.

On the women’s side, the seeding becomes so important as the Kawamoto’s are the #9 seed. After smoking Sheehan-Dizon/Jones, 11-2, 11,3, they will almost certainly have to play Callie and Lucy. Basically any other match would be more favorable than that matchup for the Kawamoto’s, who really have no business being a #9 seed, especially if the US Open is doing some mixture of arbitrary ratings. It’s not a point based system so to have 8 teams higher than the Kawamoto’s out there is something that’s hard to believe considering their strong, but limited, results.

10:39 am EST (Gritty) – No streaming until 2pm EST, which has to be the biggest misstep of the Open. We’ll update some men’s results. One somewhat upset was Merchant/Navratil over Lica/JW Johnson quite easily. We would have both had that going a different way and, at the very least, a lot closer. Merchant/Navratil got a game off of Wright/Newman before they got rolled in games 2 and 3.

Another surprise has been the struggle of Daescu/Pat Smith who barely won against the youngsters Sobek/Josh Elliott and then lose to Brendan Long/Rob Cassidy. Long gets some good wins and Cassidy is always underrated, but that’s still not one you would expect them to lose. However, after seeing the scores in their first round match it is less surprising.

The interesting match of the quarters will be Wilson/Koller against Bar/Stone. That one could easily go either way.

Maybe will be more than an aside but Today in Pickleball, run by Megan Hall, has reported the US Open has banned the Crbn paddle for pro players. There have been rumblings so there may be more fire to this smoke, but we’ll have to see if this does come to fruition. It would be very interesting, if true.