Waters and Johns dominate San Clemente Finals with record runs
Waters and Johns swept the mixed final, then kept rolling in San Clemente as championship numbers showed how elite pickleball is won on control, not chaos.
Anna Leigh Waters and Ben Johns turned the mixed doubles final into a clinic on restraint, winning 11-5, 11-5, 11-5 over Rachel Rohrabacher and Christian Alshon and finishing with the kind of control that separates top seeds from everyone chasing them. Waters and Johns collected their 15th mixed title of the 2026 season and moved to 64-3 in finals together, while Waters closed without an error on serves, returns or thirds. Even a 69-shot rally could not shake them.
That was the clearest message from Championship Sunday at the 2026 Toys “R” Us PPA Finals, held May 4-10 at Life Time Rancho San Clemente in San Clemente, California. The Finals are the PPA Tour’s season-ending championship event, reserved for only the Top 8 qualified singles players and doubles teams in the world, and the tour now reaches its peak in May before Major League Pickleball begins. By the time the day ended, the champions had not just won. They had imposed the terms of every match.
The pattern showed up again in men’s doubles, where Johns and Gabe Tardio beat Andrei Daescu and Federico Staksrud 11-8, 11-3, 11-0 for their 16th title of the season, the most of any team across men’s, women’s or mixed. The numbers tell the story of a pair that did not need extra margin to finish points. Johns stayed clean at the kitchen and baseline, and Tardio entered the Finals undefeated in 2026, a mark that underscored how rarely opponents were able to force their way into control of a match.
Waters also kept showing up at the center of the bracket’s biggest outcomes. In women’s doubles, she and Anna Bright beat Parris Todd and Rachel Rohrabacher 11-7, 11-6, 11-2 for their 15th title together and 23rd as a tandem. The last two games tilted hard once Waters and Bright found their range, and that kind of late-match surge is a familiar separator in elite doubles, where the better pair not only builds leads but protects them without drift.
The singles finals added the same theme in smaller doses. Kate Fahey blanked Brooke Buckner 11-0 in the opener before closing 11-9, and Christopher Haworth beat John Lucian Goins 11-2, 11-8 for his seventh title of the season. Haworth, listed in the PPA profile as the men’s singles No. 1 player, had turned pro in 2023 after first picking up pickleball in 2022, a fast rise that fit the final’s broader theme: at this level, rapid improvement still has to be paired with cleaner decisions under pressure.
San Clemente’s championship slate also brought in Catherine Parenteau and Jade Kawamoto, Hayden Patriquin and Christian Alshon, Jorja Johnson and JW Johnson, and Lea Jansen, but the Sunday scoreboard kept circling back to the same truth. The winners did not just hit harder or run hotter. They won the long points, avoided the loose ones, and made the final look less like a scramble than a plan carried out to the last serve.
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