PPA Finals in San Clemente cap the 2025-26 pickleball season

San Clemente turned into the kind of pickleball stop that sells itself. The Toys ’R’ Us PPA Finals landed at Life Time Rancho San Clemente, 111 Avenida Vista Montana, with the sport’s top names, a championship format that punished every slip, and a setting the tour has described as one of the most picturesque in pickleball.

That combination matters because the Finals were built less like a loose exhibition and more like a true destination championship. The field was limited to the top eight singles players and top 16 doubles teams, then split into pool play from Wednesday through Friday. The top two in each of the two pools moved on to Semifinal Saturday, so the bracket never allowed anyone to coast through a morning session. The winner in each division also collected 2,000 points, a number that made the week about much more than a title trophy.

The star power was part of the draw. Anna Leigh Waters skipped singles but still played the two doubles events, keeping her at the center of the weekend’s biggest matchups. Ben Johns, Gabriel Tardio, Christian Alshon, Hayden Patriquin, Federico Staksrud, JW Johnson, Christopher Haworth, Anna Bright, Tyra Black, Jorja Johnson, Catherine Parenteau, Rachel Rohrabacher and Kate Fahey all gave the San Clemente stop the kind of recognizable names that help turn a tour date into a travel target.

For retreat operators and destination hosts, that is the real lesson. When elite competition is paired with a venue that already feels like a getaway, the trip becomes easier to package around more than just matches. San Clemente offered the full mix: a marquee pro event, a known facility, and enough top-end tennis-style pressure to make a spectator feel like they were getting a weekend of instruction by osmosis, even without a clinic on the schedule. The separate PPA 500 for pros who did not qualify for the Finals added another layer of action, which helped keep the site busy all week.

The Finals also fit into a cleaner season structure that makes the pro game easier to follow for travelers who plan around it. The PPA said its rankings began on February 13, 2020, and the tour’s streamlined calendar now has the 2026 season culminating in May before Major League Pickleball begins and runs through August. PPA and MLP have already announced a merger, with more than 150 players signing multi-year contracts in the combined ecosystem.

That kind of structure gives a place like San Clemente more than a tournament weekend. It gives it a role in the sport’s calendar, where a coastal venue, top-tier draws and a defined championship path can turn one stop into a blueprint for how pickleball travel gets packaged next.