PPA Tour Masters – 6 Takeaways – New Year, Same Sunday Results…Kind Of

First tournament of the year. First major of the year. Palm Springs, California. Time for some takeaways!

(1) New Year, Same Sunday Results…Kind Of – New partnerships and a new year of hope for a changing of the guard from the players not named Anna Leigh Waters and Ben Johns. Those hopes were temporarily put to rest after the first major of the year in Palm Springs. 

Ben Johns and Gabe Tardio looked as dominant as they ever have. They gave up more than 7 points in only one game during the entire tournament, which was game 1 of the gold medal match against Alshon/Patriquin. Neither the old guard big 4, CJ Klinger and JW Johnson, nor the new guard big 4, Christian Alshon and Hayden Patrquin, were able to touch the #1 team in the world. 

Anna Leigh crossed the 600 calendar day without a loss, securing her 40th triple crown after a gruelling 5-game mixed final. 

The rest of the doubles draws were not as straightforward, even though the end results were the same as what we are used to seeing. 

Anna Bright and Anna Leigh Waters were pushed to 3 games by Kaitlyn Christian/Jessie Irvine in the quarters and then by Tyra Black/Jorja Johnson in the semis. Heck, Tyra and Jorja had them on the ropes at 5-2-1 in game, before ALW and AB found their better stuff to secure the win. 

In mixed, the draw opened up for Bright/Patriquin following Noe Khlif and Tina Pisnik’s surprise 13-11 in the third victory of the Johnson siblings in the quarterfinals. Despite going the distance in their quarters and semis matchups, Bright/Patriquin gave themselves another shot at the King and Queen of mixed on Sunday. 

The loss in 5 for Bright and Patriquin is one that Bright surely won’t enjoy writing about as part of her next newsletter. After dropping game 1, they won games 2 and 3, and then had chances in game 4 to put themselves in a winning position at 7-8. But alas, multiple sitters were missed and Ben/ALW figured it out, as they so often do. 

Ben and Anna Leigh lost 1 match in 2024 and lost 2 matches in 2025. It is an astounding feat, but Bright/Patriquin are getting closer. While the Sunday result is the same for the time being, you can only play so many close matches without having it go the other way, right? 

In fact, that sentiment feels like it goes the same way potentially for ALW and AB. Tyra and Jorja are a tough matchup for them, and they keep pushing them in opportunities they have. Being battle tested is one thing, but you can only escape your way out of precarious situations so many times. 

Men’s singles is a gauntlet and Chris Haworth may very well be the best of the bunch currently.

It’s a new year with mostly the same Sunday results. However, this weekend felt a little bit different after it was all said and done. Maybe, just maybe, the gap is closing enough that complete and utter dominance will not be the storyline for every Sunday in 2026. 

(2) Not Wrong? Just (really) Early? –At arguably the PPA’s most prominent event of the year, Sock put together the best tournament of his career by a country mile. Best pickleball tournament of his career, to be clear.

We all know the story. Former top 10 singles is tennis, former #1 in doubles and gold medal Olympain. We have heard it a thousand times before. Prior to his full-time shift to pickleball, Sock won a gold medal with Anna Leigh Waters at the PPA North Carolina event in 2023, but he did lose in men’s doubles in the first round with Tyson McGuffin.

He came in with a ton of hype and then a couple of yahoos decided to draft him with the 6^th overall pick of the MLP draft in 2024 with the NY Hustlers. Despite a playoff appearance with the Hustlers, 2024 was an incredibly disappointing year for Sock. Outside of reaching a one singles final early on in 2024, there were no results to speak of even though he played a healthy chunk of the year with Catherine Parenteau in mixed. 

After moving past some personal issues, Sock’s 2025 was quietly a much better year than 2024. He didn’t win any titles nor did he take over the pickleball world by any stretch of the imagination. However, Selkirk finally releasing a competitive paddle combined with more of a focus on his pickleball game led to slow, but steady, improvement over the course of the year.

The singles improvements were obvious. He was moving better, showing the ability to sustain his level of play over the course of more grueling battles. The backhand started to become a real weapon and the consistency was better and better.

If you were watching closely, the doubles was also being refined. He had wins a couple of different wins against Augie Ge with Eric Roddy and Blaine Hovenier as his partners in doubles. He and Caliyn Campbell lost a tight mixed match to Riley Newman at World’s that they had no business losing. The flashes were showing more and more.

At the Masters, Sock’s overall improvement was on full display with the best combined partner level he has had in quite some time, possibly even to date – Mari Humberg in mixed and Pablo Tellez in men’s.

Humberg and Sock took down both Tyson McGuffin/Chao Yi Wang and Jay Devilliers/Jessie Irvine. In men’s, Tellez and Sock put the clamps down on Roscoe Bellamy/DJ Young and beat Jaume Martinez Vich/Matt Wright with a tight, 11-9 in the third win. Martinez Vich may not be fully healthy, but that is a team that made a Sunday last year together.

In singles, Sock had his most complete tournament performance with a 3-game win over Staksrud in the quarters, coming back in game 1 against Roscoe Bellamy to eventually win in straights and pushing Chris Haworth in the final before appearing to injure himself on the last point of the match. This was Jack’s third final in singles, but this one felt different than his other ones. So long as he is healthy, it feels like he should be in the mix all year to win titles.

It remains unclear what the ceiling is for Sock as a doubles player. We had him at #21 in our doubles power rankings to start off the year. He’s got all the tools to be as good as anyone out there but whether he’s willing to put the doubles work in along with his mind allowing him to play how he needs to at the highest level are different questions. Some things are still fundamentally wrong, but a lot less than where he was a year and a half ago.

Even if Jack isn’t putting in the work that some of the other pro pickleball players are putting in, he can be the best in the world in singles. No one does more ridiculous things over the course of a match than Jack Sock. We wouldn’t bet on it, but we also wouldn’t be shocked if he was the #1 player in singles at some point in the future.

Talent has never been the issue for Sock. There’s other things that have gotten in his way, primarily himself, and have made his pickleball development far less linear than his talent should allow. As much as it doesn’t surprise us to see him have a good tournament, it also would not be surprising to see him slip back to his old ways over the next few tournaments.

At the end of the day, at the first tournament to start of this year in 2026, Jack Sock showed through his on-court performance he has the capability to put it all together.

Not wrong, just (really) early? 

(3) A Tradition Unlike Any Other – Okay, so the PPA Tour Masters isn’t quite The Masters that takes place in Augusta, Georgia every year. A tournament has brought us some of the greatest moments in sports history. In our best Dave Fleming voice, however, the PPA is building its own traditions and making a mark for the sport.

Sure, you could say that the PPA appropriated two of the greatest traditions in individual sports, Wimbledon whites and The Masters name, and made a pickleball major out of them! But, you have to start somewhere. It’s hard to create traditions and the PPA has found a winning recipe with their version of the Masters.

This is a tournament that people now look forward to. They look forward to the whites for the first tournament of the calendar year in the picturesque back drop of Palm Springs, California.

One of our concerns about the sport is how to differentiate regular tournaments from the “majors” as they have done in tennis and golf. People understand that the best players in the world fresh off an end of year hiatus all come together to wear white at the first major of the year.

The PPA Tour Masters has l become a thing and it’s cool that things like this are happening in pro pickleball.

(4) The Lob Serve is in – We didn’t expect that 2026 could be the year of the lob serve but that’s just what ALW is trying to accomplish. She spent a good chunk of the tournament testing out this new weapon(?) of hers, to some mixed results. We saw other people using the lob serve like Anna Bright, which included a lob return to the lob serve from Lea Jansen.

The lob serve in itself is not a takeaway. Rather, it is a reminder of our sport being this thing that is still probably very unsolved.

Think about how long it took for people to figure out that you needed to shoot a lot more 3’s in basketball or that a sacrifice bunt should not be the default play in baseball. Modern analytics have helped drive a lot of these efficiencies in more solved professional sports, but we’re a long way from that in professional pickleball.

We have seen how much the game has changed in recent years and we’re excited to see what other shots that wouldn’t even have been considered a few years ago start to become more of the norm.

We started seeing Anna Leigh Waters experiment with the short hop, third shot drop last year, and we were actually seeing Pablo Tellez do it on a more consistent basis at the Masters. CJ Klinger used a nasty little drop shot volley off a couple of drives in his match in Daytona against Riley Newman and Noe Khlif, and was successful doing it once against Ben Johns on Saturday. Ben Johns used the Yuta Funemizu cross body forehand pancake against Jack Sock in their quarterfinal match.

There is so much out there that we are figuring out and there is likely a lot going on with the best players in the world in terms of experimentation that has not seen the light of day yet.We’ll have to see if 2026 is the year of the lob serve, but we also should expect more innovation coming with each passing tournament. 

(5) Are the draws a little bit deeper than we expected? – It is one tournament and one set of data points for us to glean from for 2026. It’s worth discussing whether there is more than meets the eye for teams that can hit the podium at a given tournament. 

The men’s bracket feels like the least exciting right now. Ben and Gabe are at a different level as Alshon/Patriquin, Klinger/Johnson and Daescu/Staksrud round out the top 4 partnerships, who all made the semi-finals.

In women’s, Parris Todd was missing from the field due to her suspension and is part of the top 9 grouping of players in women’s doubles. However, it was Lacy Schneemann and Etta Tuionetoa who reached a semi-final after an upset in straight games over Rohrabacher/Parenteau. We need to see more, but there has to be some concern for the Catherine/Rachel duo after being up 9-4 in game 1 and dropping the match in straight games.

Finally, in mixed, Noe Khlif and Tina Pisnik won a bronze medal, which included a massive upset win over the Johnson siblings. They also took a game off Anna/Hayden in the semis. Kate Fahey/Federico Staksrud also had a surprise semis appearance following a grueling round of 16 matchup against Howells/Rohrabacher and then winning their quarterfinal matchup in 3 against Alshon/Black. 

It was not an upset laden weekend, but seeing any upset in the later stages of the draw is notable at a major and something to put us on notice that there may be more medal contenders out there than we initially believed going into the year. 

pic.twitter.com/5xD4Kvjr6B

— Federico Staksrud (@federicostak) January 18, 2026

(6) The Duc of Questionable Decisions – The above tweet from Federico Staksrud was a response to UPA-A President, Jason Aspes, posting a photo of Connor Pardoe, Quang Duong and Doc Duong smiling while hanging out in Rancho Mirage like best buds. Aside from the hilarious Simpsons reference, the photo brings more questions about the Quang Duong situation as there had already been chatter that Duong would be back with the UPA at some point this year. 

We wrote back in July when Duong’s contract was terminated that the termination was “one of the most bizarre sequence of events for pro pickleball”, and things are only more bizarre with Duong’s situation. 

We were skeptical of the series of life choices that made Quang a serial contract breacher, but the lack of care surrounding their UPA requirements indicated that there was a bigger plan in place for Quang to cash in overseas in Asia where he is a big star. A move back to the UPA has to be at least a partial concession that Duc’s brazen guidance of Quang has been misguided. 

In fact, more and more it is looking like Duc is not only an overbearing sports parent, but he is also a misguided agent without any clue about his long-term plan for his son’s future as a professional pickleball player. 

This is only an outside observation but it is hard to ignore the choices being made. The buck, literally and figuratively, would appear to stop with Duc when it comes to these decisions, the latest of them being some controversy around his exit from his latest paddle sponsor, Sypik. 

The more we learn about the Duong’s, the less confidence we have that Duc has any idea what he is doing. 

Fantasy Wrap-Up: A tight week to start the year. Chris comes away with a 60-58 win over Jer, which is big to start the year as Jeremy has always dominated NML exclusive fantasy pickleball. The win was had even though Chris sat Jack Sock and missed out on 4 points after his silver medal finish. A poor choice that didn’t end up costing him as taking the safe points with Alshon and Haworth on the same side of the draw was exactly that, the safe decision. 

On Jer’s team, he played Dekel Bar over Noe Khlif and that would have gotten him to a tie as Noe got a surprise bronze in mixed with Tina Pisnik. The Johnson’s getting upset in the quarters was the real dagger, though. 

The only other benched player of significance was Lacy Schneemann, who got 2 points for her semi-final appearance with Etta Tuionetoa. We’ll be back this week in Minnesota and then we’ll have our first waiver period before the next event in Mesa.

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