The Association of Pickleball Players goes to Arizona Athletic Grounds in Mesa from Thursday 12 to Sunday 15 November with a $125,000 purse and 349 players entered. Most previews will start with the open singles. This one could just as easily start with the 50s and 60s, because that is where the APP has built something nobody else has bothered to.
The open pro field
Men’s pro singles has 41 names for a Thursday 10:00 Mountain start. Jake Bower is in. So is Mateusz Matysik. So are Brandon Lane, Ronan Camron, Ryler DeHeart, Ryan Fu, Jay Devilliers, Beau Martin, Alec LaMacchio — a field that reads like a mid-pack APP week with a few louder European and crossover lines mixed through it. Bower’s name matters here for a simple reason: he is coming off a European Open singles title in Manavgat, and Mesa is a different tour asking a different question.
Women’s pro singles is thinner and sharper: 15 names. Amber Policare. Katerina Stewart. Jada Bui. Brooke Revuelta. Nicola Schoeman. Seone Mendez. Roos Van Reek. That is a women’s singles card small enough that every name on it will be watched, and a mix of players who already know how to win APP gold elsewhere in the calendar.
Women’s pro doubles is where the partnership story sits. Megan Fudge and Jada Bui are entered together — 16 teams, 14 of them complete. Policare is down with Courtney Kowalsky. Stewart with Bobbi Oshiro. Schoeman with Shelby Bates. Mendez with Yana Newell. Thirty-five mixed teams are entered.
Men’s pro doubles has 34 teams. Matysik is with Zack Card. Bower with Eli Trumeter. Camron with Drake Palm. Fu with Zack Marceau. DeHeart with Alex Emery. Lane with Jae Centonze. Some of those entries are still incomplete, including Beau Martin, Aidan Schenk and Lorin Schlecht.
The seniors are not a sideshow
APP runs AARP Champions (50+) and AARP Masters (60+) at this stop — full senior pro slates, not a charity footnote. Champions men’s doubles alone has 19 teams. Champions mixed has 32. Masters men’s doubles has 14. That is more senior doubles volume than many tours put on an entire season, and it is why the seniors deserve more than a polite sentence at the bottom.
Marcello Jardim is in Champions men’s singles and pairs with Jaime Oncins in men’s doubles — a partnership that has already taken AARP Champions men’s doubles titles this cycle, including Seattle and Daytona Beach. Oncins, a former ATP tennis professional, is also in Champions mixed. Vince Van Patten — former ATP player, actor, World Poker Tour voice — is entered in Champions men’s doubles and in Masters men’s singles and men’s doubles, with Scott Moore in the doubles.
Scott Moore is the Masters name the Hall of Fame already knows: APP Masters player of the year, Hall of Fame inductee, with a long senior résumé. He is in Masters men’s doubles with Van Patten. Warren Pretorius is in Masters men’s doubles with Scott Burr, and in men’s singles.
Lee Whitwell sits across Champions women’s singles and women’s doubles. Natalija Todorovic-Shaw, Aila Main, Jennifer Brusco, Erica Jacobs — the women’s Champions cards are populated enough that the 50+ story at Mesa is not a men’s-only curiosity. Masters women’s singles has five names; women’s doubles nine. Smaller, but present.
If you only watch open pro at APP stops, you are watching half the professional product the tour actually sells. Mesa makes that harder to ignore.
What Mesa is for
Mesa is the APP’s last real chance this autumn to make an argument about itself, and the argument is not in the open singles. It is in the 50+ and 60+ brackets, where the tour has built something its rivals have not bothered to: a professional senior game with depth, names and volume. Jardim and Oncins are a partnership with titles behind it. Moore is a Hall of Famer still entering draws. Van Patten brings a crowd that might never watch a 25-year-old drive a third ball.
Bower and Matysik will draw the eye on Thursday morning. By Sunday, the more interesting question may be whether anyone outside the senior game noticed what the APP is quietly doing with it.
Tickets and Megan Fudge’s clinic for Shriners Children’s sit in the same week, a reminder that this is a tour still selling itself one city at a time.
