PPA Tour Texas Open – 2 Takeaways (plus a Bonus MLP Trade Takeaway!) – Wind in the Heart of Texas

We are already getting to that point in the pickleball season where events are bleeding into each other. We had Cape Coral last week and we headed straight to beautiful McKinney, Texas the following week for another event. We’re curious to see how the feel of the year shakes out when the end of April comes around and it will be mostly MLP events through the summer.

Going close to 52 weeks of mostly tour events makes it hard to stay engaged for an entire calendar year. Yes, we have had some fun storylines this year like Andrei Daescu’s continued high level play. Christian Alshon’s singles and doubles truly elite breakthrough has come in 2025. Ben Johns is still the top dawg in men’s doubles. The unprecedented dominance of Anna Leigh Waters continues.

Those storylines can become monotonous, though, as the season goes on and we’ll have to see whether what amounts to essentially a 4-month tour offseason in the schedule can break up that monotony. The flip side is we could still have far too much pickleball. We often point to the NFL as the model of professional sports success in North America but it really helps that football is limited to a shorter season than its rivals in basketball, baseball and hockey.

Yes, the season is being broken up by different tour and team style events, but the fact that the same pro pickleball players are in competition for pretty much 12 months of the year is a big ask for fans.

In the spirit of writing about the things that we are passionate about, the takeaways in 2025 are not quite as comprehensive as they used to be. It comes down to diving into topics that we want to highlight rather than ensuring some kind of spin is put on all the biggest storylines from the weekend. It will be 2 takeaways from the weekend that was in the state where everything is bigger (plus a surprise bonus MLP takeaway).

1. Wind in the Heart of Texas – The wind has become a very hot topic in pickleball and rightfully so. In a sport where the main object is a plastic ball with holes, the wind can be a significant factor. No one likes playing in wind. The points aren’t as clean. The side can be the biggest difference maker. Yada, yada, yada.

It was another crazy windy weekend at the Texas Open and all the chatter about pickleball being an indoor sport came back to life. The affect of the wind was highlighted primarily in women’s doubles as the top two teams were dethroned prior to reaching the finals and Anna Leigh Waters lost following a missed return where she initially went to hit a forehand before the wind pushed the ball to her backhand side.

However, we believe there is more nuance to the whole make pickleball an indoor sport at the pro level push. Our disagreement with the basic premise is not because we think there is something better or more noble about playing through the elements. Rather, it has to do with the growth of the sport.

While it is evident that pickleball is more affected by the wind in comparison to most sports, what we see as missing in this discussion of pickleball needing to be an indoor sport is how that might affect the growth of the game.

As more and more indoor facilities are built, the option to play indoors is more readily available to the average player. This will not change the reality that the long-term growth of the sport is going to be fueled primarily by outdoor, recreational play.

We want this sport to grow but we also can’t expect it to grow under only fully optimal circumstances. As we remain steadfast in our belief that the best chance at success of the pro game is through time in the gradual increase in participation of the game, we also have to accept the reality that outdoor pickleball is likely needed for the long-term growth of the sport.

Sure, the professional game can be different than the amateur game, but there’s also something to be said about amateurs understanding that this is a game that should be played in the elements.

Why shouldn’t it be played in the elements? Of course, within reason.

There is a balance to all of this. The winds in McKinney this weekend were, at times, too much. The PPA appears to have removed the wind requirement threshold it previously had and there needs to be some level of threshold out there to ensure there is a baseline level of integrity in the product.

However, we shouldn’t care so much if sometimes the best teams don’t win. Yes, the wind often does not result in the best product but there is something to be said about the wind providing a product that isn’t always the same at every tournament. Again, within reason.

Pickleball is different than golf, but the British Open is beloved because the unique conditions in that part of the world, particularly wind, is what gives meaning to that major championship.

The Super Bowl is never held in winter conditions, but we love watching the handful of snow games we get each season. It is probably best that we avoid holding pickleball’s marquee professional events and matches in 20mph winds, but that doesn’t mean we should avoid wind 100% of the time. If we strike that balance on a wind threshold that is not resulting in players flat out missing balls and having backup indoor options in those circumstances, we can have events that organically create parity.

There are certain players that are going to be better in the wind. Hurricane Tyra Black and Parris Todd won a gold medal in women’s doubles and this shouldn’t be a surprise that arguably the best player at keeping balls in play, Tyra Black, was able to execute in the wind better than any of her opponents on an incredibly windy day.

Now, those winds in McKinney, Texas were probably too much to be playing in, but some of the more unique results and matches from the tournament are an example of why we don’t want it to go away altogether.

Eric Oncins and his crash and bash combination with Alix Truong was perfect for the terrible conditions that Friday presented.

Pickleball at its heart is an outdoor game. The beauty of the sport lies in its accessibility to easy participation. Indoor facilities where reservations and facility costs are required is not the reason the vast majority of us fell in love with the sport.

It’s best for the growth of the sport that we keep it as an outdoor game, at least for some of the time. 

2. The Ben Johns Way – It cannot be an easy thing being on top of the world and having that taken away from you. It is one of the tougher things the best athletes inevitably have to handle at some point in their career. Being the best simply cannot last forever.

While Ben Johns came away with two more gold medals this week, including a 5-game final over Christian Alshon/Federico Staksrud, there is little question we are seeing a changing of the guard with Ben Johns. Another early loss in singles. More 3-game matches where Ben is getting pushed to the brink in men’s and mixed. The competition is stiffer.

Although we facetiously titled our Mesa Takeaways column “Is Ben Johns Washed?”, what we have seen in the two tournaments since that time is more data to suggest that Ben’s grip as the pinnacle of men’s pickleball is slipping.

The fact that Ben’s grip is slipping is not the topic du jour for us, at least for today. What has us fascinated is how Ben is handling and how he will handle the many contenders to his throne.

Both Ben Johns and Anna Leigh Waters have been in a unique predicament by professional athlete standards over the past 2 plus years (and even longer for Ben). Ben has been the best player by a very wide margin and winning has come relatively easy for him since the PPA Tour was founded at the beginning of 2020.

Ben is a quiet, stoic individual. The way in which he expresses frustration is not as obvious or outwardly loud as some of his competitors. Ben doesn’t get mad. He becomes disengaged and shuts down.

It previously led to our moniker of Benny Backdraw for the rare occasions when Ben lost in the double elimination days and was forced to play a back draw.

We have seen more flashes of Benny Backdraw or Mopey Ben in recent years, but the frequency at which his frustrated mannerisms have been on display has been increasing. We saw it this weekend as he mocked the celebrations of his more boisterous opponents, Kate Fahey and Zane Ford, on the singles and mixed day.

Ben has long not been a fan of players who wear their emotions on their sleeve. This is not new behavior that we are seeing. It’s just that the recent frustration appears to be correlated with the increase in the level of competition he is dealing with.

That’s what comes with the territory of trying to cope with losing when you really never had to accept losing before. It was almost two years ago that we wrote a piece attempting to explain Anna Leigh Waters’s meltdown following a singles loss to Hurricane Tyra Black. In that column, we wondered and questioned how ALW would handle the inevitable losing that would come her way.

As a teenager, we have seen brief glimpses into the tantrum-like responses of a teenager learning to mature in the small, but still very, public eye of pickleball. Amazingly, the losing still hasn’t come for Anna Leigh since we wrote that piece. She is still winning at an incredibly high clip and has somehow widened the gap between her and the next best female player in the sport.

Instead, the time has come for Ben to accept that winning will keep getting harder and losing to be an inevitability. He and Anna Leigh Waters now have to fight in the round of 16 sometimes against players like Kate Fahey/Noe Khlif. He is going to get pushed to the brink by teams like Black/Alshon and the Johnson siblings.

How Ben handles this changing of the guard could dictate how long he stays at the top of the game for.

It is often forgotten that Ben was essentially a teenager when he entered the sport. The only life experience he has as an adult is this weird world of pro pickleball. He has never had to struggle in his life as a professional athlete.

The difficulty for Ben is that, if he wants to remain on top, he can’t be mopey, disengaged Ben every time something doesn’t go his way. While it’s also not good for his brand to act that way, most importantly it is bad for his play on the court.

Ben looked rather disinterested until about 0-4 down in game 2 against Zane Ford when he won a point and decided to mock Ford’s celebratory ways. Ben picked up the energy after that to win game 2, only to go down 6-0 in game 3 and go back to his disinterested, rather be somewhere else ways.

One major difference that we have seen between ALW and Ben is that ALW seems to be born with the mentality that she never wants to lose. Ben has never had that. Winning at all costs is not how Ben has operated. It’s why we have seen him give up on teams at various times in recent MLP history. We saw it with the Chicago Slice in 2023 and we saw it basically for the entire 2024 season with the Carolina Pickleball Club.

Ben was more skilled and smarter than everyone on the court. Now that the skill and intelligence gap is diminishing on the men’s side, Ben does not have the never say die attitude to fall back on in the same way as Anna Leigh.

Ben has won back-to-back gold medals in men’s doubles with Andrei Daescu and Gabe Tardio, two partners he has seemed to enjoy playing with. The margins have been razor thin to get those gold medals. He is showing more positive emotion when winning than we have ever seen before, which is somewhat reminiscent of the days when life became harder on tour for the usually stoic Roger Federer.

What could be tougher to grapple with in pro pickleball than it may be in other sports is that the inevitable decline does not necessarily happen due to Father Time. With the sport still in its infancy, the dominance Ben exhibited is being challenged well before he is reaching his athletic prime. Kyle Yates is the most prominent pickleball player who had to deal with a sharp decline of his status as the best in the game and, from the outside looking in, it did not look to be an easy thing for him to deal with.

Ben Johns is the best version of himself than he has ever been right now. This isn’t an Allen Iverson on the Denver Nuggets and Detroit Pistons type of situation.

Ben’s overall results are still very strong, and he is in an exciting transition period where he is trying to figure out new men’s partners for the first time in years. It’s like Ben is back on the market after a long-term relationship ending and is in that early honeymoon period of fun and curiosity before reality sets in that the dating landscape might not be the same as it once was.

As we head deeper into 2025, it will be fascinating to observe how Ben handles this next stage of his career. In the long-term, it really does seem like Ben needs to find a way to change his attitude, assuming he actually cares to stay on top of the game in the years to come. He can be an energy suck on the court when things aren’t going his way and that’s not ideal when you’re often having to play with someone else.

Can he change? Is he willing to change? Or will he choose to ride out the remainder of his career as the same Ben Johns that entered the sport when he was still a teenager?

Bonus Takeaway: Utah-Bay Area Trade Reaction – The MLP trades have continued to trickle in as Premier and Challenger teams continue to swap players. This one was somewhat confusing as we saw the Utah Black Diamonds flip Alix Truong to the Bay Area Breakers for Allyce Jones. No cash involved. 

It’s an odd move for Utah as they finished the 2024 season much stronger than how they started it. The trade for Connor Garnett boosted the team from laughing stock to frisky spoiler and Alix Truong kept getting better as the season went along. The improvement in her play from when we saw her in DC to the New York event was noticeable. 

We didn’t see Truong as a Premier player when she was drafted in 2024. However, one missing piece from our analysis last year was the age-related upside that may not be as obvious in younger players. In talking about Anna Leigh Waters, Anna Bright alluded to the potential neurological benefits of starting pickleball at a younger age in her appearance on the Talk Pickle to Me podcast.

From what we have been seeing over the past 6 or 7 years, it really seems to be a thing that the kids taking pickleball seriously in their younger years may have more untapped potential than initially meets the eye. Dylan Frazier, Hayden Patriquin, Gabe Tardio, CJ Klinger and Wyatt Stone are all good examples of players who have seen massive jumps in their level from their early years of playing. 

Alix Truong, who is only 20 and has been playing pickleball for a significant length of time, may very well fit into this mold of teenagers with basic age-related upside. Her development is coming a little bit later than we would expect for someone playing as long as she has, but it’s a reminder that these things can take time. 

In any event, Alix Truong was a good asset for Utah considering the 2025 MLP landscape, especially since she is Utah based and the only thing Connor Pardoe cared about in the 2024 draft seemed to be finding local players. Truong is not a lifer Utah local like Allyce Jones, but we have been seeing a gradual, upward trend in Truong’s results. 

Sure, Allyce Jones has been playing better than we would have expected over the past 6 to 8 months in women’s doubles. She has had some very good results with Tyra Black and she is a consistent, ball-maker at the end of the day. The on-court difference between Jones and Truong currently is not massive. 

Still, we don’t see much upside left in Allyce Jones whereas Truong could keep getting better. The ceiling may not be top 5 for Truong but a top half starter is not completely unrealistic. The same definitely cannot be said for Jones. 

One other thing we should mention is that you never know what else could be at play in a deal like this and whether there is more happening behind the scenes that we aren’t aware of. We have heard about factors other than cash and on-court performance playing a part in trades, and it sounds like that could be the case here, at least in part.

https://twitter.com/jimmymiller_pb/status/1902181612521136274?s=46

Jimmy Miller appeared to be indicating on X that Truong suggested a trade for her departure from Utah and Utah made a different trade. If true, Utah either decided Jones was a better current fit and/or Pardoe may have decided to stick it to Truong by sending her to Challenger in exchange for a comparable current asset

The only other thought that comes to mind for us is that Allyce Jones is the more marketable Utah player as a through and through local with roots firmly planted in the state. She is a fan favorite and brings energy like no other. Their other starting female, Mehvish Safdar, brings some fire power, but we do not currently have any real estate purchased on Safdar island. Nor do we see their 3rd female, Genie Erokhina, as anything more than a somewhat capable, low upside option.

Unfortunately for Truong, Eric Tice pointed out that she was a mere 50 points away from being a top 15 PPA ranked player, which meant that she would not be eligible to be traded from Premier to Challenger. But alas, Truong is going to be stuck in Challenger for the time being and does not appear to be happy about it based on her activity on X.

Although we prefer Truong over Jones as an asset, this trade probably doesn’t move the needle much for either team in the short-term. It’s the long-term aspect of this trade that we don’t understand from Utah. Good on Bay Area for taking advantage. 

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