PPA Tour Atlanta Pickleball Championship – 5 Takeaways – Men’s Doubles is a Gauntlet
The PPA is making a very concerted effort to differentiate some of these slams from their regular tournaments. Progressive draws, separate tournament specific social media accounts, bigger crowds and generally more hype from the PPA gave Atlanta a little bit more aura this year.
It is clear that Atlanta has become one of the marquee stops and one that players get extra excited for. There are still simple pivots, such as expanding part or all of the event to 3 of 5 games, that the PPA can make to differentiate the slams. However, this should be a long game so we’ll have to see whether more is needed from the PPA to help fans make the distinction or if it is simply a matter of giving this more time.
1. Men’s Doubles is a Gauntlet – Now that men’s doubles is no longer the Ben and Collin show, there is more intrigue from tournament to tournament for fan engagement. The partnerships are still fresh. Heading into Atlanta, Ben/Gabe, Christian/Andrei and Hayden/Federico formed the clear top tier in the men’s doubles field. However, a gold medal performance from JW Johnson and CJ Klinger, featuring wins over the number 1 points team (Hayden/Fed) and the actual number one team (Ben/Gabe), more or less vaults them into that top tier.
As women’s singles, mixed doubles and women’s doubles are essentially a battle for second place and men’s singles is a crap shoot, the men’s doubles brackets remain the most interesting for us as these tiers are being defined in 2025. The Ben Johns partnership domino falling has left things more settled from a partnership standpoint. for the time being. As interesting as men’s doubles is these days, there has become a growing sense that it is a battle of teams to get to a semi-final in that final spot that does not feature one of the top 3 teams.
JW Johnson and CJ Klinger upset the balance at the top this weekend as they took down Patriquin/Staksrud in 3 games during their quarterfinal match on Friday and backed it up with a semifinal win over the newly formed Big D partnership, Dekel Bar and Dylan Frazier, in their 2nd tournament together. Although this is Klinger’s 2nd win over Staksrud/Patriquin in their past 6 months (Klinger and Daescu won in Daytona in December), it was the first time Klinger and Johnson have broken through to beat a top tier team. Doing it to two of the top teams and in straight games in a gold medal match was extra impressive for the ‘Ice and Ice’ duo.
There was a time not too long ago that JW and Dylan Frazier were the primary silver medal team at PPA’s, but they were unable to overcome the Johns mountain. JW was set to play all of 2025 with Gabe Tardio before Tardio left to take advantage of Ben Johns’s sudden availability. These days we haven’t been seeing JW or Dylan competing for men’s titles as they both searched for a consistent, dynamic threat to partner with.
It sure looks like JW has found himself a partner for the foreseeable future. CJ Klinger is undoubtedly an elite men’s doubles player and was the best player on the court, at least according to Zane Navratil, in the final on Sunday. We are very partial to CJ and are so happy to see his success over the past 6 months, but even we have been surprised with his rapid ascension to the top.
The big takeaway for us out of all of this is how hard it is for these other teams in men’s doubles to breakthrough at the top. It is going to take patience from both the new and old guard to find breakthroughs. With how tough it is to make it out of a quarterfinal in men’s doubles, other teams may want to take a page out of the CJ/JW book, who demonstrated some early patience in letting a partnership breathe and develop.
As fast hands and consistency still reign supreme in men’s doubles despite the changes in the modern game, CJ and JW have been near locks to make a quarterfinal but their ceiling has been less certain as they have struggled to push the better teams recently. You need to see results at a certain point so it has to be encouraging for CJ and JW to see such positive results when it is so difficult to make it to a semifinal nowadays. The young duo will have to back up their performance and show that this is not a flash in the pan but, now that they have passed the test of breaking through the ceiling, we expect to see more of this from the pair.
We’ll have to expect that Dekel Bar and Dylan Frazier will keep running it back as they were inches from playing on Sunday instead of Klinger/Johnson.
Outside of the top 4 or 5 teams, the gap between the rest of the field feels bigger than it ever has been before. The shift in landscape over the past year with Federico Staksrud, Hayden Patriquin, Gabe Tardio, Andrei Daescu, Christian Alshon and CJ Klinger all establishing themselves as elite men’s doubles players has created more parity at the very top, but it has also made it that much more difficult for other teams to stay relevant. It was less than 2 years ago that Matt Wright and Riley Newman were winning PPAs and now they are a footnote afterthought quarterfinalist team.
Men’s doubles is a gauntlet like we have never seen before in pro pickleball. And we are here for it.
2. Has Singles Become Mini Tennis? – Shortly after an early round loss at one of the biggest tournaments of the year, number 1 PPA ranked singles player, Federico Staksrud, seemingly expressed multiple levels of frustration on social media. In a post that has since been deleted, Staksrud complained that the new Lifetime ball “is a complete disaster”.
Later that evening, Fed went on a different rant about the state of singles pickleball, saying it has become mini tennis and insinuating that singles is less interesting to watch these days. Setting aside the obvious bias and frustration Staksrud was feeling coming off a disappointing result, the discussion about singles and its current status of watchability is an interesting one.
Singles has always been the least watched event in pro pickleball and it is typically the version of pickleball that amateurs are least inclined to play. Originally, Friday was the singles day because we only used to have tournaments on the weekends and amateur events were built on the backs of people coming to play doubles on days they would have off work. The PPA has been the primary driver of the shift in tournament structure – first moving singles to Thursday to accommodate Championship Sunday and then creating this progressive draw format.
Moving singles to Thursday created even less relevance for the event as the primary viewing day was during a weekday that wasn’t a Friday or weekend. Back when we had live stream YouTube numbers to more accurately track fan interest, it was evident that singles day had significantly less interest overall and that is still reflected in the fan attendance for those Thursday singles days.
Without having live stream numbers, it is hard to say if fans have less interest in watching singles than 2 or 3 years ago. The game is undoubtedly different as increased overall skill and paddle technology has turned most matches into a ground stroke fest that does feel more like mini tennis than ever before. It is part of the reason that the men’s singles field is deeper and more competitive than it has ever been before and why a guys like Alex Crum and Tom Evans can beat the number one player in the world.
Singles has always been the least interesting event for us, but we find ourselves watching it less than ever before. The main reason for that is probably for the complaint the Fed cited around the game being more mini tennis than ever. Honestly, despite having seen Crum’s name in pro draws for a while now, neither of us had watched him actually play singles before Atlanta. There’s a lot of quality players out there and we aren’t all that interested anymore in doing much other than monitoring the singles results of guys who don’t seem to be finding any notable doubles results.
At the same time, singles has been an important breeding ground for the development and discovery of upcoming talent. Federico Staksrud cut his teeth as a singles player before developing into one of the best all around players in pickleball. The list goes on and on of players whose singles prowess put them on the map to enable their foray into higher levels doubles play.
As two guys who have been playing and following the sport for almost 8 years now, we try to be cognizant of all the get off our lawn takes. However, the game has changed substantially and even what we call cat and mouse is very different than what it looked like 4 or 5 years ago. And it’s not like a large percentage of players have ever utilized pure cat and mouse a la Ben Johns.
The competitiveness and parity of the singles fields are far more interesting now compared to when Ben Johns would just beat Tyson McGuffin every tournament. But the singles game itself overall doesn’t excite us in the same way that it used to. Ben Johns’s modern version of cat and mouse is quite fascinating but that is by far a stylistic outlier.
We’re not saying it is bad to enjoy what singles pickleball is in 2025. But it sounds like this sentiment is shared by many others. We don’t want singles pickleball to go anywhere but the tours and USA Pickleball allowing paddle technology to evolve to where it is now has created this situation. And there is unlikely any turning back now.
It feels like it would be a loss to pro pickleball to have singles be diminished as a pro event any more than it is now and have singles become for pickleball what doubles is for tennis – a side bit event than only the hardest of hardcore have any interest in following. At the same time, it is hard to see viewership and fan engagement in the singles side of the game growing if the singles game keeps trending in the direction it currently is going.
3. Stock Up – We only have one name for players who are stock up post-Atlanta and it is the flying Frenchman, Jay Devilliers. Fresh off a knee injury to conclude 2024, Devilliers’ relevancy in pro pickleball has been waning. However, the offseason and the expiration of his sponsorship with Vulcan has given the big guy a new lease on life.
There was nothing spectacular about Jay’s results but quality runs in singles, mixed and particularly men’s after a strong start to the MLP season are encouraging signs. Don’t expect Devilliers to vault himself back into the top 10 discussion because of a new paddle and healthy knee, but it looks like it would be foolish to write off the original bronze stallion as drifting off into the sunset anytime in the near future.
4. Stock Down – We may have been overly bullish on Mari Humberg’s 2025 prospects as her results this year have been disappointing. Although we had Humberg firmly as a Premier player prior to the 2024 MLP draft, the questions that we had going into last year’s draft about the sustainability of her unique style may finally be catching up to her.
Last year, we had worried that players on tour would start getting used to Humberg’s style of play. As she continued making opponents look silly as 2024 went along, we thought going into 2025 we had overestimated the getting used to her factor but we are thinking that may be a driving factor for her stagnating 2025 results.
The other thing we worried about with Humberg was the lack of danger she brings off the bounce as a left side player. She is still slicing everything on her backhand that bounces and it creates a big safety zone in 2025 for opponents. Humberg is doing more off the bounce on her forehand and we know she has a twoey ground stroke that comes out in singles, but we aren’t seeing it used in doubles yet.
The bottom line is that Humberg is having trouble finding wins against better teams in women’s and mixed this year, and likely needs to evolve her game if she wants to make a leap into the upper echelon of women.
We have already talked quite a bit about Quang Duong’s stock being down for MLP purposes but it was another weekend without a big win for Q. Keeping in mind it was his first weekend playing with a competitive paddle, Quang lost handily to Hunter Johnson in the quarters of singles, barely made it out of the round of 16 of mixed with Anna Bright and lost a very close men’s match to Ignatowich/Collin Johns with MLP teammate, Hunter Johnson.
Even though the results were fine overall, we are now a number of months removed from any noticeable jump in Quang’s results. His game is still evolving to a degree as he was initiating more offence with his backhand flick/roll in mixed. Nevertheless we remain skeptical of Quang’s ability to push his game to the next level playing as far off the kitchen line as he does with that more extreme grip. We have been wrong many times before but it is currently stock down for Vietnam’s finest.
5. Keeping an Eye On – The more we think about it and the more data we have, the more we don’t agree with the rule in MLP that waiver pickups cannot be kept for the following season. Although we wouldn’t feel great about rewarding teams that aren’t invested in MLP and/or draft poorly, with with lack of competitive balance, teams being able to pick up and keep previously unknown talent during the season would be one solution to giving the lesser teams a chance to succeed.
With talent coming up from all over the place, more so on the men’s side, we wanted to highlight two intriguing names from Atlanta as players we are keeping an eye on.
John Lucian Goins is not a new name as he has had some big 2025 singles wins that led to him getting a UPA contract. He had a good little showing early on in the round of 128 last week playing with Mya Bui as they took down Zane Ford/Victoria DiMuzio in 3 games. It was less the result for Goins in a relatively even matchup and more about the how as the doubles skills were something we took note of. Zane Ford has been getting a lot of hype but the 17-year-old Goins has to be someone MLP teams should be monitoring.
Goins has an interesting play style. He’s somewhat hitchey with his shot making but he appears to have soft hands and more finishing power than meets the eye initially. It’s only one match but we liked what we saw from Goins in mixed doubles.
Sergey Afanasenka is a unique player in his own right. A former ping pong player, he has no singles results in DUPR and appears to only play men’s doubles.
He and the very tall Andreas Siljestrom almost took down Tyson McGuffin and Dekel Bar in Cape Coral back in March. We watched him there and nothing really stood out about Afanasenka’s right side play. In April, he and Alex Emery, a guy having good success on the California moneyball scene, had a solid run through qualies and into the round of 16 at the recent APP Fort Lauderdale event.
In Atlanta, Afanasenka and Emery got through qualies and won their round of 64 match against Koller/Jakovlijevic then lost in the next round to Ge/Devilliers (15-13, 11-1). The results were intriguing enough for us to watch back Afanasenka’s round of 64 match and there still isn’t much that jumps off the page about his game other than he doesn’t miss a lot and doesn’t appear to be very attackable despite having fairly big swings on his counters.
Afanasenka isn’t a guy we are eyeing up as a future star but it’s notable that a guy with seemingly a JAG skillset has made quality runs in his last 3 pro events.
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klinger is the prototype of what ben is looking for. he has recently taken a giant step forward in his level in last few months. Ben had not taken notice of his vast improvements, and made his choice wihout that context. But I guarantee that cj is more a BJ’s type of right sider than anybody else playing, and he’s left handed to boot. I hope CJ does not lock himself into a long term partnership with BJ because I think it would be short sighted. cj and jw have a really nice chemistry on court. and I don’t see bj having great chemistry with anybody on court. So my advice to cj is I hope he is part of the Resistance. Because ben is coming for him.
We’ll be very surprised if CJ decides to play regularly with Ben, if at all, should that become an option for him