Finals Recap: Johns and Waters Close the Year on Top in San Clemente

Season’s over, folks. The Toys “R” Us PPA Finals in San Clemente just wrapped the 2025-26 PPA year, and if you like your season finales with a little drama and a lot of gold medals, this one delivered.

The format: top 16 men and top 16 women, pool play, then the brackets. No easy draws. Everybody in the building earned their spot.

Let’s start with the headline: Ben Johns went undefeated in his events. Men’s doubles gold with Gabe Tardio. Mixed doubles gold with Anna Leigh Waters. When the lights are brightest, Johns is still the standard. You can drill all winter, but you can’t drill “Ben Johns shows up in finals.” That’s a gift.

Waters matched him in doubles. She took women’s doubles gold with Anna Bright, and mixed with Johns. Then she withdrew from singles with a knee injury — the one blemish on an otherwise perfect week for her, and honestly the smartest move she made. Rest the knee. The offseason is for healing.

With Waters out of singles, the door opened and Kate Fahey walked straight through it. Women’s singles gold, and she closes the year ranked number two in the world. That’s not a consolation prize. That’s a statement. Watch her next season.

On the men’s side, Chris Haworth won singles gold as the top seed — and he earned it the hard way. He dropped a pool-play match to Connor Garnett, 12-10, 11-6, then bounced back and took the whole thing. Haworth holds the number one ranking to close the year. Bouncing back from a loss in pool play to win the event? That’s championship composure, and I will be showing that tape to every junior I coach.

The pool play gave us the upsets we come for. Garnett over Haworth — already mentioned, and no fluke. Tina Pisnik and Lacy Schneemann beat Tyra Black and Jorja Johnson, and Black was battling illness; they didn’t advance out of the pool. Credit to Pisnik and Schneemann for taking what was in front of them.

Two more pool results worth your attention. McGuffin and Khlif took down Staksrud and Daescu. That’s a result that turns heads in the locker room. And on the rough end: JW Johnson and CJ Klinger went 0-3 in pool play. Sometimes the ball just doesn’t bounce your way all week. Reset, recover, come back hungry.

Meanwhile, the players who didn’t qualify for the Finals had their own stage: a concurrent PPA 500 in San Clemente. The winners there: Kiora Kunimoto took women’s singles, Rafa Lenhard took men’s singles, Shimabukuro and Funemizu won men’s doubles, and Dennehy and Townsend won women’s doubles. Good for them — the depth of this sport keeps getting deeper, and these are names you’ll hear more of.

So what did the season finale teach us? Three things. One: the top of the mountain hasn’t moved. Johns and Waters are still the two names that matter most. Two: the challengers are closer than the scoreboards sometimes show — Fahey’s number two, Haworth’s number one, and Garnett beating Haworth in pool play tells you the gap is a crack, not a canyon. Three: the doubles scene is wide open behind the big pairs, and next season’s partnerships are going to be fascinating to watch.

That’s the debrief. Great season, everybody. Rest up, drill your thirds, and I’ll see you at the kitchen line next year.