Cary’s Outsiders Broke the Draw. Now the Contenders Have to Collide

The Round of 16 produced two emphatic women’s singles upsets, ended John Lucian Goins’ run after his defeat of Ben Johns and compressed Cary’s five pro draws into a last eight where the outsiders now have to prove they belong.

For most of Thursday in Cary, the leading contenders did what leading contenders are supposed to do.

Then Sofia Sewing beat the No. 8 seed 11-4, 11-2.

Keilly Ulery removed the No. 5 seed 11-2, 11-4.

Noe Khlif dispatched John Lucian Goins, one of the stories of the tournament after his earlier defeat of Ben Johns, 11-1, 11-9.

By the end of the Round of 16 at the Veolia Pickleball National Championships, the tournament had developed two rather different personalities. Women’s singles had broken open, while almost everywhere else the quality had compressed, leaving fewer mismatches and considerably less room for anyone still standing.

That is what makes Friday interesting.

Cary has moved beyond the stage where an upset is enough. The outsiders who disrupted the bracket now have to prove they belong at the sharp end of it, while the established contenders are finally being forced into one another.

The tournament has reached the last eight.

There is considerably less room left.

Sewing and Ulery did not sneak into the quarter-finals

There are upsets that require a player to survive, to steal a few points at the right moments and then hold their nerve when the favourite finally begins to resemble one.

Thursday’s two biggest women’s singles results were nothing like that.

Sewing, shown as No. 45 on the current bracket, allowed Kiora Kunimoto six points. Ulery, seeded 26th, allowed Lea Jansen six.

Between them, two players seeded outside the top 25 outscored the No. 8 and No. 5 seeds 44-12, without requiring a deciding game or allowing either match to reach the sort of finish where reputation and experience might have been given another chance to intervene.

They took the matches away from them.

Sewing’s run is becoming particularly difficult to dismiss as one isolated upset. She had already beaten Marcela Aguila Ampon 11-8, 11-6 and Liz Truluck 11-7, 11-4 before reaching Kunimoto, which means three opponents have now tried to stop her and three have failed.

Now comes Kate Fahey.

The second seed’s Thursday could scarcely have been more different. Fahey beat Hannah Blatt 11-2, 11-2 and reaches the quarter-finals having been given very little reason to doubt herself.

Ulery receives Brooke Buckner, who was similarly efficient in beating Cailyn Campbell 11-3, 11-4.

Getting this far is already an achievement for both outsiders. Winning again, against opponents who have spent much more of the tournament behaving like quarter-finalists were expected to behave, would begin to turn excellent individual results into something more substantial.

The other half of the bracket remains more recognisable. Anna Leigh Waters demolished Jessie Irvine 11-0, 11-1 and now meets Judit Castillo, who recovered from dropping the opening game against Chao Yi Wang to win 8-11, 11-1, 11-3, while Kaitlyn Christian and Catherine Parenteau complete the last eight after both advanced in straight games.

So women’s singles arrives at Friday split neatly in two.

Waters remains the enormous problem everybody eventually expects to have to solve.

Sewing and Ulery are trying to change who gets the opportunity.

Men’s singles has become a different tournament

The disruption in men’s singles happened earlier.

As WPM reported before the Round of 16, Goins had already removed Johns from Cary in one of the most extraordinary scorelines of the week, winning 11-0, 6-11, 11-0. His own run ended emphatically on Thursday when Khlif beat him 11-1, 11-9.

Khlif now faces Hunter Johnson, who conceded only five points against Mohaned Alhouni.

At the top, Christopher Haworth beat Christopher Crouch 11-3, 11-5 and now faces Tama Shimabukuro, who removed Matthew Barlow 11-6, 11-9.

Federico Staksrud was similarly controlled against Rafael Lenhard, winning 11-6, 11-6, while his quarter-final opponent Jaume Martinez Vich had to find a rather different route through Thursday.

Martinez Vich lost the opening game 13-11 to Alexander Crum before responding 11-3, 11-6, turning a match that had begun to move away from him into a comfortable-looking scoreline by the end.

That contrast matters. Staksrud arrives having controlled his Round of 16 from the front, while Martinez Vich has already been forced to solve a match in which the first answer he tried did not work.

The final quarter-final carries a similar tension.

Christian Alshon beat Luc Pham 11-7, 11-2.

JW Johnson had to survive one of Thursday’s best singles matches, losing the opener 11-7 to Camden Chaffin before taking the second 13-11 and the third 12-10. Thirty-three points were played across those final two games, and Johnson’s quarter-final place was ultimately separated from Chaffin’s exit by almost nothing.

Now he gets Alshon.

There is no Ben Johns waiting at the end of this bracket any more, but that does not necessarily make the route easier. What his defeat has done is make the opportunity larger, because Haworth, Staksrud, Alshon, Johnson and the four men opposite them can all look across what remains and see a tournament that is still available to them.

If you’re following how the global game is shifting week by week, the World Pickleball Report breaks this down every Wednesday.

Mixed doubles has nowhere left to hide

If there is one Cary draw worth clearing the schedule for on Friday, mixed doubles has a compelling case.

Ben Johns and Anna Leigh Waters against Kate Fahey and Federico Staksrud.

Jorja and JW Johnson against Parris Todd and Andrei Daescu.

Anna Bright and Hayden Patriquin against Catherine Parenteau and Riley Newman.

Rachel Rohrabacher and Christian Alshon against Tyra Black and Gabe Tardio.

Four quarter-finals. Very little filler.

The Johnson siblings produced Thursday’s most emphatic Round of 16 performance in the division, conceding a single point in an 11-1, 11-0 victory over Dylan Frazier and Kaitlyn Christian, while Johns and Waters beat Brooke Buckner and Camden Chaffin 11-6, 11-5.

Todd and Daescu advanced 11-6, 11-7 against Etta Tuionetoa and Khlif. Bright and Patriquin beat Lacy Schneemann and Jack Sock 11-8, 11-3.

Fahey and Staksrud had to work harder, with Christa Gecheva and Rafael Lenhard pushing the opening game beyond 11 before the higher seeds took it 12-10 and then closed the second 11-8. Black and Tardio received their own warning from Dekel Bar and Jessie Irvine, surviving a 13-11 first game before putting considerably more distance between the teams in the second, 11-5.

The result is a last eight in which each match asks a different question.

Can Fahey and Staksrud create enough pressure to disturb the Johns-Waters machine? Can Todd and Daescu slow a Johnson pairing that gave its previous opponents almost nothing? Can Parenteau and Newman disrupt the attacking rhythm Bright and Patriquin want to establish?

And what happens when Rohrabacher and Alshon meet Black and Tardio in a match containing four players perfectly comfortable turning a neutral exchange into something much faster?

The early rounds can tell us whether a partnership is functioning.

Friday starts telling us whether it is good enough.

Men’s doubles has already produced its warning

The men’s doubles bracket contains perhaps the clearest example of why seeding becomes less useful once a tournament reaches this stage.

Ben Johns and Gabe Tardio, the No. 1 seeds, advanced 11-8, 11-6 against Michael Loyd and Martin Emmrich. Their quarter-final opponents are CJ Klinger and Will Howells, who beat Connor Garnett and Roscoe Bellamy 11-7, 11-7.

Federico Staksrud and Hayden Patriquin were more emphatic, conceding seven points in an 11-2, 11-5 win over Jonathan Truong and Wyatt Stone, but Eric Oncins and Khlif arrive having already dealt with adversity. They lost a 12-10 opening game against Will MacKinnon and Brandon French before recovering 11-7, 11-5 to reach the quarter-finals.

The lower half carries the greater disruption.

Andrei Daescu and Christian Alshon, the No. 2 seeds, beat Julian Arnold and James Delgado 11-5, 11-5. Instead of another high seed, they now get Camden Chaffin and Christopher Haworth, the No. 34 pairing who reached the last eight by beating Andre Mercado and Indigo Dagnall 11-3, 11-5.

Then comes Tama Shimabukuro and JW Johnson against Dekel Bar and Dylan Frazier, two teams arriving by rather different routes. Shimabukuro and Johnson had to recover after losing the first game to Zane Navratil and George Wall, eventually winning 9-11, 11-3, 11-8, while Bar and Frazier needed only two games to dispatch Tyler Loong and Goins 11-3, 11-4.

Johns and Tardio remain the top seeds, Daescu and Alshon remain the second seeds and Staksrud and Patriquin remain firmly in the argument.

Cary has simply reached the point where none of those descriptions wins anybody a game.

Women’s doubles puts Sewing back in the middle of it

Sewing’s Thursday did not end when she removed Kunimoto in singles.

Alongside Catherine Parenteau, she then survived the only three-game Round of 16 match in the women’s doubles draw, beating Mari Humberg and Milan Rane 11-7, 4-11, 11-6.

Their quarter-final opponents are Rachel Rohrabacher and Parris Todd, who conceded three points in beating Genie Erokhina and Kiora Kunimoto.

At the top, Anna Bright and Anna Leigh Waters were even more severe, allowing Zoey Weil and Liz Truluck one point in each game. Bright and Waters now face Alix Truong and Layne Sleeth, themselves coming off an 11-1, 11-2 victory over Ashley Griffith and Jade Rau.

Tyra Black and Jorja Johnson meet Etta Tuionetoa and Meghan Dizon, while Lacy Schneemann and Tina Pisnik face Kate Fahey and Lea Jansen.

That last match contains its own small piece of Friday intrigue because Jansen’s singles tournament ended badly against Ulery, 11-2, 11-4, before she had to return to court and find a way to keep another part of her Cary week alive.

A few hours later, she and Fahey were through after beating Chao Yi Wang and Victoria DiMuzio 11-5, 11-4.

Tournament days do not always leave much time for disappointment.

Sometimes another draw is already waiting.

The first upset gets attention. The next match tells us more

Cary has already lost Ben Johns from men’s singles. Sewing has already beaten three opponents from a low starting seed, Ulery has removed Jansen and Chaffin and Haworth have reached a men’s doubles quarter-final as the No. 34 seeds.

Those results changed the tournament.

Friday asks the harder question of whether they changed the hierarchy, because producing the result nobody expected is one challenge and returning the following day, when everybody is paying attention and another established opponent is waiting, is quite another.

Sewing no longer gets to be merely the surprise who reached the last eight. Fahey is waiting.

Ulery gets Buckner.

The men’s singles draw no longer contains Johns, leaving everyone who survived him with a route that looks different from the one printed at the beginning of the week, while mixed doubles has compressed into four matches where reputation offers increasingly little protection.

Across the doubles draws, the same process is taking place. Outsiders who survived the opening rounds are finally arriving opposite the partnerships they were seeded to avoid, and the favourites who spent the first part of Cary protecting their positions now have to start proving why those positions belonged to them.

The PPA has also split Friday’s schedule because of the expected heat, with singles beginning at 9am ET and doubles resuming at approximately 4:30pm ET.

The Round of 16 showed us who could break the draw.

The quarter-finals will tell us who can live in the space they created.

For a clearer view of where the sport is heading each week, you can join the World Pickleball Report here.

Further Reading

• Latest pickleball news from around the world
• Tournament coverage and results
• Rankings and player profiles
• Regional pickleball coverage

Chris Beaumont

Founder and Editor-in-Chief

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Beaumont is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of World Pickleball Magazine. Chris follows the global game closely, reporting on the latest news, developments, stories and tournaments from all five continents. He also hosts the World Pickleball Podcast, interviewing people at…

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