The Finals Are On in San Clemente

The season ends the way it should: everybody in one place, nowhere to hide.

The CIBC PPA Tour Finals, presented by ROAR Organic, are underway at Life Time Rancho San Clemente in Southern California. This is the championship week of professional pickleball — the best players on tour, split into pools, fighting for two semifinal spots per pool in every event. No easy draws. No soft matches. Just the best of the best and a scoreboard that doesn’t care about your seeding.

Here’s how the week works. In each event — men’s singles, women’s singles, men’s doubles, women’s doubles, mixed doubles — the players are divided into two pools: the ATP Pool and the Erne Pool. You play everybody in your pool. The top two advance. Point differential breaks ties. Simple, brutal, fair.

And the opening action has already delivered.

Let’s start with the match that got everybody talking. Tyson McGuffin and Andrei Daescu took down Federico Staksrud and Hayden Patriquin 6-11, 11-4, 11-6 in the Erne Pool of men’s doubles — handing the partnership its first loss after two gold medals and zero losses to start their run together. Staksrud and Patriquin had been the machine. McGuffin and Daescu looked at the machine and shrugged. That’s the Finals. Your winning streak is just a number someone else gets to erase.

New partnerships, instant results

Then there’s the debut story. Dekel Bar and Christian Alshon are playing their first tournament together — first one, ever — and they opened by beating JW Johnson and Gabe Tardio 11-1, 11-7 in the ATP Pool of men’s doubles. Read that again: 11-1. Their first match as a team and they dropped a pickle on one of the tour’s most dangerous pairs. Alshon himself said the newness might be an advantage this week — no tape, no habits for opponents to study. When you’re brand new, you’re a surprise every single point.

On the women’s side, the ATP Pool of women’s doubles got spicy fast. Jorja Johnson and Lacy Schneemann beat Anna Leigh Waters and Catherine Parenteau on Thursday — an upset over the top seeds that blew the pool wide open. But Waters and Parenteau bounced back against Tina Pisnik and Parris Todd, winning 11-1, 7-11, 11-5, and the tiebreaker math sent them through: point differential of 24, the best of the three 2-1 teams. Johnson and Schneemann took second with a differential of 11. Pisnik and Todd are out. That’s pool play in one paragraph — you can lose to the champions, beat someone else, and still go home. The differential doesn’t remember the story. It remembers the numbers.

In the Erne Pool of women’s doubles, Mari Humberg and Jessie Irvine beat Tyra Black and Allyce Jones 7-11, 11-6, 11-3, dialing in their third-shot drives after dropping the opener. Anna Bright and Rachel Rohrabacher blanked Callie Smith and Lucy Kovalova 11-0, 11-8 — six minutes for the first game, then a rally from 1-5 down in the second. Different paths, same result: alive and moving on.

And in the men’s Erne Pool, Staksrud and Patriquin recovered from the McGuffin loss the only way you’re allowed to: by winning when it mattered. Their 11-4, 11-6 victory over Dylan Frazier and Pablo Tellez was win-or-go-home — both teams at 1-1, loser eliminated — and the “machine” looked like the machine again.

Why this week matters

The Finals are not another tournament. Everybody knows everybody’s game by October. The partnerships have been together all year. The scouting reports are memorized. What separates this week from the Chicago Cups and the Arizona Opens is that there is no next week to fix it. You lose in pool play, you watch the semifinals from the stands like everybody else.

That’s why the new pairs matter so much. Frazier is playing with Tellez instead of JW Johnson — his usual partner of two years — which puts Frazier on the left side, a look opponents rarely see from him. Bar and Alshon are a total unknown. In a week where every point of differential can be the difference between the semis and the parking lot, the team nobody has scouted has a real edge.

The backdrop doesn’t hurt either. Rancho San Clemente in October — sun, ocean air, Southern California at its show-off best. The crowd is close to the courts. The noise carries. Broadcasts are running on Pickleballtv and YouTube, so the whole pickleball world is watching the same points.

One more thing to love about the format: two pools mean two races at once. While the ATP Pool sorts itself out on one set of courts, the Erne Pool is producing its own drama a few yards away. It’s the best week of the year for the obsessive — you can watch two different tournaments happen simultaneously.

The semifinals and finals come next. The pools have done their job: they’ve separated the survivors from the spectators. The question now is the one this sport asks every single week, and answers differently every single time.

Who wants it most when the differential is zero and everything is on the line?