The short answer: The Pickleball Association of Bermuda has named its national squad for the Caribbean Pickleball Championships, scheduled from 16 March. Its top player, Phillips, has withdrawn, so Gavin Manders and Sasha Fisher will lead the team as co-captains. Fisher anchors a women’s squad that includes Patricia Mills, Melisa Judd, Lily Hallett and Naphisa Smith.
The Pickleball Association of Bermuda has officially named its national squad for the upcoming Caribbean Pickleball Championships, scheduled to take place from the sixteenth to the twenty-first of March at the WER Joell Tennis Stadium. The announcement highlights both the growing institutional strength of the island’s high-performance sporting programme and the increasingly complex realities of the international professional sporting calendar.
This regional tournament arrives at a critical juncture for Caribbean racquet sports, providing a vital platform for localised talent to secure international ranking visibility within the global pickleball rankings system. However, the host nation will enter the competition without their premier female athlete. Imani Phillips, the island’s top-ranked female player and a crucial component of their gold-medal-winning campaign in the Cayman Islands last year, has withdrawn from national duty to pursue a dense schedule of professional tournaments in Vietnam and across the Asian professional circuit.
In the absence of their top player, Bermuda will rely on a highly seasoned leadership structure. Gavin Manders and Sasha Fisher have been appointed as co-captains, tasked with steering the elite rosters through the psychological pressures of a home-soil title defence. The men’s elite division features Manders alongside Benjamin Jones, Tom Mills, Mical Russell, and player-coach Jamie Stowe.
The women’s squad sees Fisher anchoring a lineup that includes Patricia Mills, Melisa Judd, Lily Hallett, and Naphisa Smith. The strategic direction of the athletes will be supported by assistant coach John Singleton, with an established list of alternates including Jasper Thomas, Courtney Fisher, and Rachel Sawden prepared to step in if required during the strenuous tournament format.
The organisational rhetoric surrounding the squad announcement reflects a marked shift from recreational participation to serious athletic endeavour. Team leadership has publicly emphasised intention, accountability, and the execution of a deliberate high-performance system constructed meticulously over the past three years.
This systematic approach previously yielded a gold medal at the 2025 Caribbean Nations Cup and sustained competitive appearances at recent iterations of the Pickleball World Cup in 2024 and 2025. George Thomas, the association president, highlighted that the upcoming championship serves as an opportunity to showcase what a community of 63,000 residents can achieve through structured athletic commitment.
What’s the score?
The absence of a premier national player due to conflicting international individual commitments signals that pickleball has reached a structural inflection point in the Caribbean, mirroring the club-versus-country tensions long established in professional tennis and association football.
Hit it deeper!
The World Pickleball magazine verdict
Bermuda’s upcoming campaign at the Caribbean Pickleball Championships will serve as a clear barometer for the effectiveness of localised high-performance systems in the face of expanding global opportunities. As the sport professionalises, national federations must continually adapt to the reality that their top players may pursue individual global pathways. The trajectory of the global game relies heavily on robust, highly organised regional blocs like the Caribbean maintaining their competitive integrity. If Bermuda can successfully defend its title relying solely on its domestic developmental pipeline, it will prove that systematic institutional architecture is the most reliable currency in the future of international pickleball.
