Top seeds sweep the 2026 PPA Tour Finals in San Clemente

The 2025-26 Carvana PPA Tour season closed Sunday, May 10 at Life Time Rancho San Clemente, with all five top seeds winning their brackets at the Toys R Us PPA Finals. Forbes' Todd Boss wrote the line cleanest: "Top seeds win out to finish the Pro Pickleball Association season at the Tour Finals." A season that had run more than 25 events from January through early May wrapped without an upset in any of the four pro brackets.

The brackets

• Mixed doubles: Anna Leigh Waters and Ben Johns. The week's most expected result. Waters and Johns were top-seeded all season and converted at the Finals.
• Women's singles: Kate Fahey defeated Brooke Buckner in the final. Fahey took the title in Waters' absence (the world #1 had withdrawn from singles four days earlier; we covered the announcement in our May 4 brief). The PPA Tour storyline that's carried through the week: Fahey's win avenges her Hanoi loss earlier in the year, the kind of season-arc bookend that the tour's docuseries crews live for.
• Men's singles: Christopher Haworth, who stayed hot through the bracket according to the PPA's post-event recap.
• Men's doubles: Acevedo and Powell defeated Shimabukuro and Funemizu in the final. The match got FOX network broadcast distribution, the largest single TV audience the Tour has assembled for a men's doubles bracket this season.

The bigger storyline: no upsets

That all five top seeds won is itself the story. Two years ago the pro tour was still in its "anyone could win" phase, with new top-10 entrants every other month. The 2025-26 season produced what looks like a real ranking system: the players the tour's seeding algorithm placed at the top are the players who won at the Finals. Forbes' framing was that the season produced "a real top 10" in a way the sport hadn't before.

For rec viewers, the lesson is that the women's and men's singles ladders, and the doubles partnerships at the top of both, are now stable enough to follow week-to-week. Waters at #1 (singles + mixed + doubles when she's competing in it), Johns paired with Waters in mixed, Acevedo/Powell holding men's doubles. Those names are not changing every month.

What's next on the calendar

The PPA portion of the season is now done. The next major event on the unified pro calendar is the Veolia Pickleball National Championships, scheduled for August 31 through September 6, 2026 in Cary, North Carolina, per the PPA Tour's 2026 schedule. In between, MLP regular-season play continues; most of the players who competed at the Finals will be on MLP rosters through the summer.

For the corporate context behind why Pickleball Inc. now runs both the PPA and MLP under one umbrella, see our brief on the Apollo Sports Capital $225M investment. For the Prime Video docuseries that follows these same players across the season, see our Partners brief.

Watching with intent

If you sat down to watch any of the Finals matches this weekend, the rec-applicable patterns to look for are the same ones the named coaches teach: court positioning at the kitchen line, body position on the third shot, how the pros use the gap on stack-and-shake plays, and the placement (not pace) work that wins most rallies. Our how to watch pro pickleball productively guide walks the specific intent-loaded viewing protocol.