PPA Tour Mesa Cup – 5 Takeaways – ALW and Ben Dethroned
When you are trying to write about the second progressive draw tournament in a row, there sometimes isn’t time for an introduction.
One thing we want to note is that it is our intention to bring out a big board for the best available men and women in MLP later this week as a lead up to the draft. So, keep an eye out for that.
Time for some takeaways.
(1) ALW and Ben Dethroned – It felt like a long-time coming for Anna Bright and Hayden Patriquin, who had been getting closer and closer to dethroning the clear #1 mixed doubles team in the world. A match point squandered last week in Cape Coral ultimately ended in a 5-game loss to ALW and Ben. This week, in Mesa, turned out to be much different. They took advantage of their opportunities in game 1, came back from an 8-4 deficit in game 2 and never let their foot off their gas to cruise to a game 3 victory.
While ALW and Ben had gone 6 for 6 in their previous matchups against Anna/Hayden, the fact that the matches kept getting closer signalled that the gap was closing. Hayden’s ever-improving play and ability to control so much of the kitchen along with Anna’s improvement in her variety of offense creation, necessitated by Anna’s women’s partnership with ALW, has pushed this team to a different level. As the Johnson’s remain more or less the same team that has been so tough for most teams to beat over the past year, Bright and Patriquin are evolving at a faster rate.
The number of close matches that these two teams have had against one another recently undoubtedly indicates that we are reaching rival territory, which is not a place that Ben and Anna Leigh have found themselves at any point in their partnership. Both pairings are steamrolling the rest of the competition so it makes sense that there is this rivalry brewing.
The most interesting part of this shift towards a rivalry may be seeing how Ben and ALW adjust. Ben has been able to match the evolution of his opponents every step of the way over the last six plus years and there really shouldn’t be reason for us to think he won’t figure it out again. After a tough Mesa event last year where Ben lost in mixed to Dekel Bar/Anna Bright and did not win a title in his first partnership go with Gabe Tardio, we wondered what Ben would do with that adjustment period and all he has done since that time is dominated the sport, once again.
Not to take anything away from Hayden and Anna, but it is worth mentioning that Mesa has been a problematic event for Ben over the past few years. He lost to the Johnson’s in 2023 and, as noted above, went without a title in both doubles events last year. He won in men’s this year and went to a singles final, but the question we have to ask, and kind of hate to ask, is whether the weird lighting situation on championship court in Mesa has anything to do with Ben’s struggles. Ben’s lighting issues have been well documented over the years and culminated in the Eye-Gate controversy at MLP Columbus last year. If Ben is a guy who struggles more than the average bear with less than ideal lighting, we can’t completely ignore that as a potential factor.
Additionally, Ben was playing his first singles event in a while and has not played 3 events through a full progressive draw in what has to be a long time (we didn’t both to do the research on this). The players were coming off a back-to-back in Cape Coral so fatigue cannot be discounted either.
Again, this isn’t to take anything away from what a big win it was for ALW and Ben. It is simply to identify there may have been other factors that led to a straight games Championship Sunday win for Hayden and Anna, and we have to see it more from them before we can determine where this maybe rivalry nets out.
(2) Does anyone know anything? – After a week in Cape Coral that had us wondering whether we had solidified the power rankings for the big 4 partnerships in gender doubles, we had some results that may have up-ended that sentiment the following week in Mesa. Most notably, Catherine Parenteau and Rachel Rohrabacher suffered a shocking loss to Genie Erokhina/Judit Castillo, who actually went on to make the semi-finals after beating Brooke Buckner/Chao Yi Wang. At the Master’s, Rohrabacher was sick. In Cape Coral, they made the semi-finals but got smoked by the Kawamoto’s. In Mesa, they lose to two players that are going to be bench players for an MLP team.
It’s impossible not to wonder if the Parenteau/Rohrabacher partnership is not long for this world and whether they deserve to be part of the big 4 in women’s doubles. On paper, there aren’t any other partnerships that should pose a significant threat to them, but it is concerning for Parenteau that she is not seeing better with Gabe Tardio in mixed as well, although they had a nice win over Dizon/Oncins in the round of 16 in Mesa. Is this finally the slow, precipitous fall of Catherine Parenteau that we thought we were seeing at the end of 2022?
In men’s doubles, Christian Alshon and Hayden Patriquin turned a beat down from CJ/JW into a semi-beat down in the other direction. A close-ish game 1 and a not close game 2 gave the pair their second opportunity at their first gold together, where they took another game off Ben/Gabe and found themselves in a tight 13-11 game 4 loss to close the match. Alshon made a big change to his aggressive style of play by giving up a little more court to Hayden and being much more patient with the speed-ups. Maybe they really are the #2 men’s doubles team out there?
As noted above, we have to acknowledge the back-to-back full progressive draws, which are now a real thing in pickleball where players are going from playing on Sunday to flying across the country to get ready to play again on Tuesday. This is a very new aspect that players have to adjust to and it remains to be seen if it leads to more variance in results. CJ Klinger and JW Johnson also withdrew from the bronze match and those are not two players that you would typically expect to withdraw from a bronze medal match, unless something is wrong.
It is always the case that making sweeping conclusions after a tournament or two is a foolish endeavour because the sample size is so small. That sentiment should probably be doubled down on when it comes to making sweeping conclusions after a tournament on the back-end of a cross country back-to-back.
(3) Singles Benny is Back – You know Mopey Ben and Zombie Ben, who are the same person but with different names. You definitely know Locked In Ben. Unfortunately, we don’t get to see Benny Backdraw anymore, even though he is definitely our favorite pickleball version of Ben Johns. However, now that Ben isn’t playing singles, we got to reacquaint ourselves with Singles Benny in Mesa and what a return it was for him.
Ben didn’t play a singles draw for the first 3 tournaments of the year and it has been unclear how much singles, if any, Ben would be playing going forward. We’re curious what will lead Ben to play singles in the foreseeable future but, regardless of the reason(s) why, there is no question that Ben can still play some damn singles. Ben played another more evolved 2026 version of his cat and mouse style, which Jim Kloss pointed out in his article resulted in a much lower “pressure rate” (i.e. getting to the kitchen first) than what singles was in the past for pro men.
There is no such thing as a soft singles draw in 2026 as evidenced by #72 seed Matthew Barlow’s epic run to the semi-finals with as much fan support as we have ever seen for an individual player. Every player that isn’t a non-singles playin contracted player like Luke Wasson or Greg Dow in a PPA draw is potentially dangerous. Ben has seen this in early rounds of events he was playing towards in 2025. The difference may have been in Mesa that a mentally fresh Singles Benny is a much different player than a tired, end of the season mopey Ben that wants nothing to do with playing singles.
Ben had wins over Max Freeman, Federico Staksrud and Christian Alshon before losing to Christian Haworth in the finals.
It was a reminder that Singles Benny may be mostly gone, but he should not be forgotten.
(4) Crowds Galore – There aren’t too many people in this world who love highlighting a big crowd more than Connor Pardoe.
Going back-to-back with standing room only crowds in Cape Coral and Mesa highlights that there are pockets of the country where pro pickleball demand exceeds the supply. There were large crowds of people on the later weekdays and weekends, which is great to see from a growth of the sport perspective. Obviously turning niche demand into more mainstream consumption is the most difficult part of making the sport more widely viewed, but the demand at some notable spots in the PPA schedule cannot be ignored and presents an atmosphere that makes it feel like there is a lot more room for growth.
(5) Upset City – There were two major upsets to note this past week. We are getting very used to seeing big runs in singles from lesser known players. As noted above, Matthew Barlow, the #72 seed, was the big singles winner of the weekend. The virtually unknown Barlow took down Roscoe Bellamy in the round of 64 and then also beat Hunter Johnson in the quarterfinals. We often see upsets, but we don’t often see this type of stuff happen, including against the #1 seeded player in the world.
The bigger upset came at the hands of Genie Erokhina and Judit Castillo over Catherine Parenteau and Rachel Rohrabacher in the round of 16. Erokhina and Castillo have both been on the scene for a while, and we really don’t see upsets very often in women’s doubles, much less from two veteran players, who have never really shown much in the way of doubles beyond being capable of keeping the ball in play.
Judit and Genie are two annoying players to play against in a much less dangerous way than you would say about the Kawamoto’s, Tyra Black or even Allyce Jones. They don’t always keep the ball low enough, but they keep the ball in play, which generally limits their ceiling. Genie’s movement around the court is always an exploratory adventure in step maximization, but she and Judit were able to get it done. Judit’s game has evolved to a certain degree, but to take down a #3 seed was not to be foreseen at all. They also consolidated their win in the quarterfinals to earn a legitimate semi-final appearance at a big tournament. Credit where credit is due, even if it looks to be a massive outlier event.
The bigger story from all of this has to be Rohrabacher and CP, whose partnership has gone about as poorly as they could have expected going into the year. We noted above their struggles in their first 3 tournaments and we really wonder how much room those two will give this partnership to breathe. Both players are seasoned on the left side but are likely best optimized being the right-side player in a given partnership. It is too early to expect them to make any rash decisions, but they surely need some better results soon.
As an aside on partnerships going the wrong way, you wonder how long Buckner and Wang will keep playing together. They are still MLP teammates for 2026 and appear to be good friends, but they were a couple of rallies away from losing to Isabella Dunlap and Nicole Conrad in the round of 32.
Fantasy Update: Another big win for Chris and that’s 4 in a row to start the year. A big change from our old fantasy draft previews.
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