14-year-old Kelly Goodnow becomes youngest PPA Tour gold medalist

Kelly Goodnow turned a Boise breakthrough into a piece of PPA Tour history, winning her first gold medal at 14 years and three months old and becoming the youngest gold medalist the tour has ever seen. The mark had stood since Anna Leigh Waters won women’s singles at the 2021 Takeya Showcase at 14 years and six months, a gap Goodnow shaved down by a few months with her Boise PPA Challenger title.

The win came in women’s doubles with Carlota Trevino, and the path was anything but soft. Goodnow and Trevino opened by knocking out top seeds Jalina Ingram and Lindsey Newman in a three-game semifinal, rallying from a 0-11 first game to win 11-8, 11-5. In the final, they closed out Marianna Petrei and Chloe Igleski 11-5, 11-7 to secure the championship and complete a run that looked less like a surprise and more like a player arriving on schedule.

For coaches and junior-program directors, the details matter. Goodnow’s Boise title followed silver at the Black Desert PPA Challenger in May with 13-year-old Elsie Hendershot, showing that her rise was already underway before Idaho. Her PPA Tour profile says she turned pro in 2025, was one of the youngest signed PPA players in history at 13, and is already a two-time PPA Junior World Champion. The same profile lists 26 PPA medals, residence in Phoenix, Arizona, a start in tennis at age 4, and even a 6 golf handicap, a reminder that many top junior pickleball athletes are building athletic engines across multiple sports before they ever get to a Challenger bracket.

Boise also showed how broad the week was for Goodnow. Tournament results list singles matches against Jillian Niemann, Janet Liu, and Chloe Diskin, with Goodnow reaching the main-draw quarterfinals before losing to Diskin. That kind of two-draw workload is becoming a defining part of the junior-to-pro transition, especially for families and camps trying to map travel, recovery, and match volume around real competition instead of isolated showcase moments.

Goodnow said the gold felt “so awesome,” and the reaction fits the scale of the result. A 14-year-old took down a standing age record, beat the top seeds, and finished with a Challenger title that says as much about pickleball’s accelerating junior pipeline as it does about one weekend in Boise.