MLP San Clemente 2025 – 7 Takeaways – Stock Watch

We are getting into the dog days of summer with a lot of events happening consecutively in this MLP season. So, we figured we could do something fun and a little gimmicky with our takeaways. We are going to do a stock watch of things we are buying, holding, and selling following MLP San Clemente.

1. Sell: Phoenix Flames Vibes – There are a lot of odd things that happen in sports, especially in this team dynamic for an individual sport where different genders, spouses, partners, and siblings have to play against one another regularly. However, the situation with the vibey Flames this past weekend was as weird as we have seen.

Jessie Irvine was an unknown late scratch for Phoenix’s first match on Saturday morning, which meant the Flames were left with Genie Bouchard and Alex Walker as their women. At the end of the match, one of the commentators on the broadcast, Will Daughton, noted that Jessie Irvine did not play due to a “disagreement” between her and Bouchard. This was confirmed by Michelle McMahon on the broadcast prior to the Flames’ second match of the day on Saturday.

So the broadcast just reported that Jessie Irvine didn’t play because she and Genie Bouchard got into a “disagreement”. Wild stuff

— NML Pickleball (@NmlPickleball) June 28, 2025

Truly mind-boggling stuff for a player to be sitting out over a disagreement.

From what we have heard, Bouchard and Irvine have been butting heads all year, and it finally came to a head in San Clemente after something that happened in practice that led to Irvine not only leaving practice, but leaving the venue altogether.

It’s really not all that surprising. While Irvine is not known to be the best teammate in the world, as seen by the fans commenting on this Facebook post, she has always been someone who gives it her all on the court. It has to be grating to be on this showtime Flames team playing women’s doubles with someone who seemingly, really doesn’t care about her results in Bouchard.

Although that may not justify walking out on your team, the growing frustration is understandable.

It seems like Genie Bouchard set the bar so low when she first arrived on the scene that many people are missing how little she has been trying in 2025. Yes, Bouchard is much better than she was at the start of 2024. She had a brief stretch towards the end of last year where she was practicing and getting better as she spent time with Ryan Sherry.

2025 has been a different story. The results have plateaued in singles and been poor in doubles. Despite having enough raw skills to be a quality pro, she is not passing the eye test by any means. And why would she care?

Bouchard was handed a bag by way of a 7-figure annual contract from the PPA Tour during the Tour Wars without any performance requirements or incentives. She never professed to care about, or even play, pickleball prior to 2024. Her lack of results was rewarded with a starting spot in Premier and a likely lucrative paddle sponsorship from the guys who own the team she was drafted to. She doesn’t need to care if she doesn’t want to.

This brings us back to the Phoenix Flames. Genie Bouchard played the 1st match on Sunday with the Flames and Jessie Irvine ended up playing the 2nd match. Not with each other.

Irvine and Alex Walker proceeded to steamroll the Mad Drops women en route to a Dreambreaker loss. Irvine won both matches and looked very motivated. Walker played well, giving the Flames another glimpse at what that duo could look like together.

We’ll have to see if Irvine gets shipped out and another team like the Carolina Hogs benefit from this soap opera. It would be surprising to see Genie get traded as the Flames organization has demonstrated they care more about antics than winning, and it wouldn’t be ideal to move the player they recently gave a paddle sponsorship to.

Notably, Jack Sock and Tyson McGuffin had a solid weekend together, going 3-2 with very close losses to the Sliders and Max Drops men. This team could be a play-in team with a second competent Premier starting woman.

The optics have shown fun and good vibes on the sideline during the season, but when some people want to win and others don’t, it is more likely than not that something has to give. Something gave for Phoenix this weekend, and we’ll have to see if anything is done before the trade deadline.

2. Buy: SoCal Hard Eights Vibes – The SoCal Hard Eights will not be a play-in team, but they have become fun as all hell. They have revamped their female situation to add two teenagers with firepower and gusto. However, it was their men, Blaine Hovenier and Ryan Fu, that brought the big energy for the team in California.

We joked around about Blaine Hovenier’s very positive Challenger draft analysis on PickleballTV. It is abundantly clear that there isn’t another person in pro pickleball as positive as Hovenier. His signature “right now” is brought out whether he is up 10-5 or down 2-9. There’s a never-say-die attitude that is as equally infectious as it is annoying for opposing teams.

The Hard Eights took the LA Mad Drops to a Dreambreaker in their first match of the weekend, driven by a comeback men’s win by Hovenier and Ryan Fu as well as a mixed win by Hovenier/Jaline Ingram to push it to a Dreambreaker. They proceeded to give the Columbus Sliders men and #1 mixed team all they could handle in a 4-0 loss.

And they finished off their weekend with a regulation win over the Utah Black Diamonds. The group is limited from a talent perspective, but there are signs of life with this team. Ryan Fu’s hands are fast, compact, and sneaky powerful (did James Ignatowich pick the wrong player from his coaching tree?), and their women bring the heat regardless of their limited experience.

The Hard Eights are a vibe as a non-playoff team, and we are here for it. Team of the weekend with only one win? Sure, why the heck not.

3. Hold: LA Mad Drives – It was a somewhat disappointing weekend for the LA Mad Drops, at least as disappointing as 4-1 gets you. They had to go to a Dreambreaker against the bottom-feeding SoCal Hard Eights. They lost in regulation to a Brooklyn team with two on-site subs. They had a regulation win over Utah, a solid Dreambreaker win over the Columbus Sliders and another Dreambreaker win over Phoenix. Two Dreambreaker wins against non-play in teams is not as encouraging as the win looks on paper.

This weekend demonstrated both what makes the Mad Drops scary as well as vulnerable.

The Mad Drops are scary because they have 4 teams that can win any given game to 11, and they only have to win 2 of them to get to a Dreambreaker where they are favored in almost every match-up.

The Mad Drops are vulnerable because they have two men that have a wide range of outcomes in any given match. Their matchups against SoCal and Brooklyn showed the chinks in their armor as they lost the men’s matches in both matchups and their mixed teams each suffered a loss that caused them to lose valuable points.

Hunter Johnson and Quang Duong have been dubbed the Mad Drives due to their propensity to drive instead of drop. It makes for fun rallies and crazy defensive stands, but the Mad Drops men are not going to win against the top teams hammering balls from the baseline without trying to get to the kitchen.

The tiers of MLP currently look more like Dallas and St. Louis, New Jersey, and then an interchangeable group of 4 in a 3rd tier rather than tier 2 – LA, Brooklyn, Columbus, and Texas.

The LA Mad Drops may be the most feared team in that group of 4 because of their ability to beat anyone on any given day, but we are close to selling our stock on the big picture Mad Drives strategy.

4. Buy: Young Talent – One of the biggest things we have learned in our time playing and watching pickleball over the past 8 years is that you have to be careful making proclamations about teenagers learning the game of pickleball. It really seems like there is something to the idea that teenagers have much more room to grow and are far more malleable than adults because they are farther from being fully formed humans.

Your Jorja Johnson’s, Hayden Patriquin’s, Gabe Tardio’s, CJ Klinger’s, and even Wyatt Stone’s of the world looked a lot different a few years ago than they do right now. We have learned there is simply more development room with the kids than there is for the already broken-in adult athletes.

Cailyn Campbell (15 years old) and Jalina Ingram (17 years old) are both interesting prospects as they lack fear and have power you can’t teach. There are undoubtedly nuances of the game they need to improve on, but they do things that newer players can’t do, which is particularly intriguing for a couple of teenagers. Both have high-end pop and Ingram has a one-hand backhand roll that is still a rare trait for even the top women.

Campbell looks more the part of a potential future star than Ingram, at least in our eyes. Campbell looks smooth, has all the shots she needs, and only appears to need to dial in the soft stuff and decision-making. The one concerning thing we have seen with Ingram is an awkward-looking slice, especially on the backhand side, which is often not a great sign for elite-level upside. At the same time, we know we have to be more careful about that kind of player evaluation when Ingram is much younger than your standard ex-college tennis player.

We like them both, but we are higher on Campbell right now.

Unfortunately, unless MLP does something about the rules, the Hard Eights won’t be able to keep Campbell or Ingram as they were both scooped up off waivers. Ingram and Campbell are the type of players that are the pathway for these lesser teams to find a way to compete with the top teams in future years. If you hit on one of these waiver pickups and Ryan Fu is better than you might have expected, maybe you have a chance to compete next year.

Either way, it’s cool to see new talent come in and hopefully these teenagers like Campbell and Ingram will be making noise against the best in the game sooner rather than later.

5. Hold: Utah Black Diamonds – Utah is back to being what we thought they are. Following an ill-advised bike accident that left Tyler Loong with 15 stitches on his leg and a break/fracture to his non-dominant right hand, the Black Diamonds had more of the weekend that we expected from this team.

They had a good comeback Dreambreaker win against the Phoenix Flames, but then lost in regulation to LA, Columbus, and SoCal. They did get a narrow Dreambreaker win over the Brooklyn On-Site Subs to salvage their weekend.

This team is as good as they can be with the roster the way it is. They remain in a play-in spot, but it’s hard for them to do anything against anyone good without two Premier quality female starters.

6. Buy: Male Super Subs – King AJ Koller and Round ‘Em Up Rafa Hewett got it done this weekend for the Brooklyn Pickleball Team. With all 3 of their men unable to go this weekend, Brooklyn chose Koller and Hewett (their other option was Collin Johns) as the on-site alternates to fill in. And fill in, they did.

We wrote about Koller as a super sub after Daytona and were perplexed to see Koller remain a free agent following the 2nd and final waiver period. He has proven to be the perfect sub. Focus and decision-making are his biggest deficiencies as a player, but that is minimized when he only needs to bring a more focused level for shorter stretches of time.

Rafa Hewett, recently gone from Challenger, is also the perfect on-site sub in a lot of ways. He, along with Koller, are two guys who aren’t prone to get nervous when they are in a nothing-to-lose substitute situation. Rafa always believes he is the man and that he belongs.

Brooklyn’s super subs got a big regulation win over the LA Mad Drops as Koller/Hewett took down the Mad Drops men. They didn’t win a game the rest of the weekend, but they both provided enough juice in mixed with Brooklyn’s very strong women’s duo, Rachel Rohrabacher and Jackie Kawamoto, to help Brooklyn get 10 out of a possible 12 points.

It wasn’t the toughest schedule in terms of competition, but it was great to see a couple of players who didn’t really have much to play for giving it their all the whole weekend.

7. Hold/Sell: Chao Yi “Zoey” Wang – Challenger is a funny deal this year. All 6 teams make the playoffs and all 6 teams move up to Premier to create one division in 2026. The players should always feel like they have something to play for, but the teams don’t really have anything on the line.

It’s pretty clear after two Challenger events that we have the Las Vegas Night Owls and the rest of Challenger as two tiers. However, Las Vegas’s record may give the appearance of being more of a juggernaut than they really are.

It’s a bit weird to give a hold/possible sell on Zoey Wang with her 16-4 record in Challenger and 9-1 team record. We really liked the Wang pick by Las Vegas in the first round of the 2024 draft. She was in the Premier mix to be drafted and sat right at the end of our top 24 board. As more of an unknown commodity, she had all the tools in the bag that you could want from an elite left-side female, except maybe elite hands, and that has not changed.

However, we are now well over a year removed from Wang’s selection to Challenger and about 18 months into her full-time pro pickleball career, and things look like they have stagnated. The biggest issue seems to be that she hasn’t developed the high-end consistency required of the elite players in the sport.

Brooke Buckner and Pablo Tellez aren’t always the highest floor players either, and anything can happen in one game to 11, but we saw some questionable results from Wang in San Clemente. There was a loss to Alix Truong/Alex Walker, a near loss to DJ Young/Alix Truong, a close win over Paula Rives Pala/Martina Frantova and Andrea Koop/Christa Gecheva, and a loss to Daniel De La Rosa/Christa Gecheva.

Again, anything can happen in a game to 11, but the variance in Wang’s level from game to game still deviates too much for someone thought to be capable of being an elite player in the game. Wang, at times, looks like she should be a top 10 player, but the results both on tour and MLP don’t reflect that.

We’re getting close to a threshold breaking point for Wang in her development. If we don’t see a jump in her consistency very soon, there’s a good chance it is never going to come.

Agree or disagree? Let us know in the comments or email us at nmlpickleball@gmail.com! You can also follow us on X, Instagram and Facebook @nmlpickleball