PPA Tour Cape Coral – 5 Takeaways – A Weekend of Seconds

The PPA Tour keeps rolling along in 2026 with a packed Cape Coral event. Florida is one of the hotbeds of pickleball, and the Cape Coral fans were coming out in droves as the week went on. 

Championship Sunday coincided with the keeper deadline for MLP teams and our plan is to get up a mega preview of sorts later in the week breaking down the situation for all 20 teams. So, keep an eye out for that. 

1. A Weekend of Seconds – Seconds may mean leftovers to some, but for the Cape Coral event, it meant something entirely different. As the top doubles teams in the world are solidified with some combination of Ben Johns and/or Anna Leigh Waters, Cape Coral may have signaled a changing of the guard for the second-best doubles teams in the PPA.

Hayden Patriquin and Anna Bright have been so close to climbing the Anna Leigh/Ben mountain, and they were as close as they have ever been on Sunday, which included having match point in game 4. Patriquin/Bright kind of dismantled the Johnson siblings on semi-final Saturday before giving the two best players in the world all they could handle the following day.

The Johnsons were the definitive second-best mixed team on the PPA in 2025, but it has been a shakier start to 2026, as Hayden/Anna have left little doubt as to their place in the mixed field. Impressively, Patriquin/Bright looked in control of the gold med match after game 1 until about the end of game 4. Whether the St. Louis Shock teammates are suffering from more of the “wanting it too much” syndrome that has plagued their ability to break through with an MLP title is uncertain, but this is a mental hurdle that will inevitably be overcome at some point if they keep putting themselves in winning positions.

One of the more surprising results from the weekend had to be JW and CJ dominating Alshon and Patriquin in the semi-finals, winning 11-2, 11-3. It was an off performance from the newer partnership, particularly Christian Alshon, who demonstrated what their floor looks like against one of the better teams on the PPA. JW and CJ, on the other hand, showed what their very high floor and sneaky high ceiling are capable of. Although Hayden/Christian may be the best shot to dethrone Ben/Gabe in a given match currently, there is a strong argument that CJ/JW are the second-best men’s doubles team out there because of their floor/ceiling combination.

CJ and JW complement each other well, as CJ provides more creative offensive ability, whereas JW provides needed finishing power. Combine the very steady play and elite hands that the two players possess, and you have a recipe for a pair that can beat almost anyone out there and is not prone to suffering losses like Hayden/Christian did over the weekend. They are a better version of Andrei/Fed and have the hands as well as the steadiness to give Hayden/Christian a really tough match every time.

Unfortunately for CJ/JW, the Gabe/Ben pairing continues to appear as a better version of them. Nevertheless, it was only one match against Hayden/Christian, and surely that was about as poorly as those two could play. But it puts CJ/JW at #2 in our men’s doubles power rankings for the time being.

Finally, the women’s doubles situation may be the murkiest of them all at #2 and #3. The Kawamoto’s are two for two in Championship Sundays this year, losing in straight games to the Anna’s on both occasions. The Kawamoto’s have benefitted from avoiding the Anna’s on their side of the draw, while Tyra Black/Jorja Johnson have not.

We actually haven’t seen a Jorja/Tyra vs. Kawamoto matchup since the Cincinnati PPA last September, where the Kawamoto’s came back from being down two games to none to win in five games. In Lakeland, the Kawamoto’s won in three against Jorja/Rachel and handed it to Tyra/Parris. This year, the only other team to take a game off the Kawamoto’s were Alix Truong and Meghan Dizon at the Masters, as they steamrolled Parenteau/Rohrabacher in the semi-finals on Saturday after their slow start going down 1-6.

All of that is to say that the results over the past number of months suggest that the PPA’s best part-time players have vaulted themselves into the #2 spot for the women’s doubles power rankings. Similarly to CJ/JW, the Kawamotos may actually present an easier matchup for the #1 team, but their games are so difficult for opponents to contend with, including the firepower and defence of Jorja/Tyra.

It’s still a small sample data set, but we may have three new #2 doubles teams in pro pickleball.

2. Genie’s Big Weekend – Genie Bouchard had herself a tournament in Cape Coral. After 2025 ended with more of a whimper than a bang, Bouchard lost convincingly to Kaitlyn Christian at the Masters to start off the year. We have both been down on Genie after 2025 showed she could be a force to be reckoned with in singles, and one of us even wondered in our recent fantasy preview article whether Bouchard has gone from underrated to overrated in singles.

Of course, Bouchard heads to Florida to take down #1 seed Kate Fahey and Catherine Parenteau, and then pushed Kaitlyn Christian to the brink in the gold medal match. It was a clear reminder from Bouchard that she is still getting better and is not someone to take lightly in any given tournament.

Can you really blame us for thinking that her improvement had stagnated? She lost to Ava Ignatowich in straight games in Dayton. She lost to Chao Yi Wang in three games in Lakeland and lost to Samantha Parker in straight games at Worlds.

At the same time, when you have a player who appears to get better almost exclusively by playing at tournaments, the results are probably going to vary more than most players from event to event. Despite some of the pickleball play still looking awkward in certain areas, it is apparent that Genie is on a different athletic level than her competitors, and it is why she is able to have a performance like she did in Cape Coral. It is similar to Jack Sock, except the gap between Genie and the rest of the women’s field in terms of athleticism is probably larger.

We’ll be curious to see if this becomes more of the norm for Genie or whether she will continue to be the enigmatic talent who can beat the best players out there but also lose to Ava Ignatowich and Samantha Parker.

Norway consistently wins the most medals at the Winter Olympic Games, with a population of just 5.6 million people.

A big part of their success is how they treat youth sports—and it’s the opposite of what we do in the US. Here’s what we can learn from Norway:

1. Scorekeeping:… pic.twitter.com/ypcePlZLmP

— Brad Stulberg (@BStulberg) February 12, 2026

3. The Potential Darker Side of the Rise of Juniors – There was one match this past weekend involving some junior players that gave us pause and led us to consider the less happy side of the rise of juniors on the pro tour. There continued to be good junior performances in Cape Coral, most prominently seeing Tama Shimabukuro make a quarterfinal with Yuta Funemizu. Shimabukuro/Funemizu beat Max Freeman/Tyson McGuffin in three in the round of 32 and then beat Collin Johns/Jaume Martinez Vich in three.

The bright side of junior pickleball has been well documented, as we wrote about after some majorly impressive junior performances in frosty Minnesota.

However, the other side of this is whether there are too many junior players trying to give it a go on the PPA and whether this wave of signings is harming more players than it is helping. For every Tama Shimabukuro, Cam Chaffin, or Kiora Kunimoto, how many other players are out there who are either signed to the tour or angling to be signed by the tour who really have no business going that route so early in their lives?

The Kitchen posted a clip from a recent Pickleballers episode discussing whether 5.0s are making the jump to pro qualifiers too soon and that resonated with how we feel about 5.0 players, and could also be applied to the junior context. The ability to jump onto the tour without having to fully earn it could be hurting the development of many junior players more than it is helping.

Norway collecting the most medals to date at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics going has led to a lot of discussion about the approach Norway, and other Scandinavian countries, have to youth sports, which is very much in contrast to the way we handle elite youth sport development in North America.

Pickleball is unique in that teenagers of both genders have the ability to compete with adults at the top of the sport. Still, we have to wonder whether the teenage infusion in the pro game should be reserved more for true outliers, rather than simply the best juniors in a relatively small pool around the country.

It’s only a thought we had during the tournament and one we need to see more data on to come to a bigger conclusion. But it just seems as though there isn’t a need to become a pro athlete at such a young age for most players. If you’re good enough, your time will come, and there has to be a real risk that development is stunted as many get their butts kicked with limited reps on the PPA.

4. Has Quarterfinal Friday Become the Most Boring Day? This is likely too extreme of a statement, but since the PPA implemented progressive draws, the quarterfinals were once seen as arguably the most exciting day, with so many good players and teams playing one another.

Taking singles out of the equation, the problem is that the gender doubles brackets have turned into a battle between the top four teams and the rest of the field. The results in Cape Coral on quarterfinal Friday were as lopsided as they get, with the top four seeds all making it through in straight games in gender doubles. Not a single team dropped a game, and not a single team gave up more than eight points in a single game.

That’s actually insane.

It is worth noting that Eric Oncins and Dylan Frazier took bronze over CJ Klinger/JW Johnson in Minnesota, and Catherine Parenteau/Rachel Rohrabacher lost to Etta Tuionetoa/Lacy Schneemann in Palm Springs. This isn’t something set in stone as much as Cape Coral’s results showed, but it is worth monitoring if we see more of these quarterfinal days with all the top gender doubles teams in action.

The draws may have simply worked out so that the matchups weren’t great for the lower-seeded teams, but it is clear we have a true top four in both gender doubles events right now, with Eric Oncins and Parris Todd as the odd players out who have the ability to be part of that group.

One thing I admire about @federicostak is his ability to flush bad losses instantly. Loses to a no name loser rapper – makes finals next tournament. Loses to an eighth grader – wins next tournament. Happy birthday Feddy! 😂🫶

— Alex Crum (@ACBabyBabyy) February 15, 2026

5. Fed’s Resilience – We’ll steal this takeaway from Alex Crum, who posted on X how impressed he was by Fed’s resilience. He suffers bad or unexpected losses, and keeps fighting. After losing to Cam Chaffin in Minnesota and a disappointing Masters performance, he goes on a big run to win gold in Cape Coral.

Fantasy Recap: Three straight wins for Gritty to begin the year with a 63-55 victory. One of the big differentiators was Gritty getting five points from outside the top 15 singles players, Jay Devilliers and Kiora Kunimoto, and two points from Wyatt Stone and Will MacKinnon with their round of 16 performances. The other differentiator for Gritty was the Kawamoto’s, who made their second final, but this advantage will be going away as they don’t have another PPA scheduled before the MLP season begins in May.

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