Kunimoto and Campbell Chase First PPA Final as Las Vegas Reaches the Last Four

Upsets have shaped the Rate Las Vegas Open all week. Now they have consequences. Kiora Kunimoto and Cailyn Campbell meet with a first main-circuit US PPA final guaranteed, Anna Leigh Waters remains alive in her pursuit of career title No.200, and several of the partnerships that shaped Arizona face their biggest tests yet.

Upsets create attention. What happens afterwards tells you whether they mattered.

The Rate Las Vegas Open has spent much of the week removing established names from places they were expected to occupy. Christopher Haworth disappeared from men’s singles. Kate Fahey is gone from women’s singles. Dylan Frazier and Len Yang have been removed from men’s doubles.

Now the tournament has reached the stage where those disruptions have consequences.

None is clearer than women’s singles.

Sixteen-year-old Kiora Kunimoto and 18-year-old Cailyn Campbell will meet in Saturday’s semi-finals knowing that one of them will reach Championship Sunday at a main-circuit PPA Tour event in the United States for the first time.

Kunimoto created her opportunity by eliminating top seed Kate Fahey 11-8, 2-11, 11-5. Campbell was considerably more clinical against No.4 Chao Yi Wang, winning 11-6, 11-3.

Neither player has previously reached a main-circuit US PPA final.

This is not simply an open section of a draw waiting for somebody to inherit it.

Both players removed one of the women expected to control it.

Now one of them gets the breakthrough.

Kunimoto is turning potential into evidence

There is a difference between being identified as a promising young player and accumulating results that force people to pay attention.

Kunimoto is moving towards the second category.

Her victory over Fahey is the clearest singles result of that progression, particularly because Las Vegas was already presenting Fahey with an opportunity of her own. Anna Leigh Waters chose not to play singles this week, leaving Fahey as the No.1 seed ahead of Kaitlyn Christian, Lea Jansen and Wang.

Kunimoto did not merely benefit from Waters leaving the bracket.

She beat the player positioned to capitalise upon that absence.

The way she did it matters too. After taking the opening game 11-8 and then being overwhelmed 2-11 in the second, Kunimoto recovered to close the decider 11-5. Rather than allowing Fahey’s response to change the direction of the match, she found another one of her own.

There has been evidence elsewhere that this step was coming.

Kunimoto has been building through the PPA Challenger pathway and had already started carrying that form into the main circuit. At the Arizona Open, she and Elliott Schupp reached the mixed doubles quarter-finals after arriving with an 11-2 record across their previous two Challenger tournaments, including a title in Atlanta.

That was one of the reasons WPM identified Kunimoto as a player worth tracking when Las Vegas began. Our tournament preview asked whether Mesa’s emerging challengers could repeat their progress against a restored field.

Las Vegas is beginning to provide an answer.

Kunimoto’s week has not been confined to singles either. She and Judit Castillo reached the women’s doubles quarter-finals and took the opening game against Lacy Schneemann and Fahey before eventually losing 9-11, 11-2, 11-9.

One result can be an upset.

A sequence starts to look like trajectory.

Beating Fahey and reaching a first Championship Sunday would make that distinction increasingly difficult to ignore.

Campbell has been building more quietly

Campbell arrives at the same opportunity from a slightly different place.

Her improvement has attracted less attention, but the direction has been increasingly visible.

A mid-year assessment published by Pickleball.com placed Campbell among its top 20 women and highlighted a young player whose results were beginning to improve, with power already one of the stronger parts of her game.

Her Las Vegas performances support that trajectory.

Campbell survived a demanding opening singles examination against Alicia Lai, winning 14-16, 11-4, 11-9. She then removed Isabella Dunlap 11-6, 11-8 before producing her cleanest result of the tournament against fourth-seeded Wang, 11-6, 11-3.

That progression is worth noticing.

A three-game escape became a straight-games victory.

Then the No.4 seed was dispatched without Campbell allowing the match to become complicated.

The semi-final therefore brings together two young players whose paths have converged at exactly the same point.

Kunimoto has produced the tournament’s bigger scalp.

Campbell has built momentum through increasingly convincing performances.

One is leaving Saturday with a first PPA final.

The other side of the draw looks very different

The second women’s singles semi-final provides the contrast.

Lea Jansen defeated Genie Bouchard 11-3, 12-10 and now meets Kaitlyn Christian.

Whichever player advances brings considerably more experience of the latter stages of professional singles than Kunimoto or Campbell.

That creates the possibility of a Championship Sunday final built around two very different stages of a career.

The first objective for Kunimoto and Campbell, however, is simpler.

Get there.

For a tournament that began with Waters’ absence creating an unusual opportunity in women’s singles, the identity of the eventual beneficiary remains unresolved.

It will not be Fahey.

It will not be Wang.

And at least one of the two teenagers still standing will have done something neither had managed before this week.

Men’s singles has reacted differently to disruption

Men’s singles appeared ready for a similar transformation when Luc Pham eliminated top seed Christopher Haworth in the Round of 16.

WPM identified Pham’s 4-11, 11-7, 11-8 victory as the defining result of the Round of 16, because it removed the Arizona champion and opened the upper half of the draw.

John Lucian Goins made sure the opportunity did not become Pham’s.

Goins beat him 11-1, 11-0 in the quarter-finals, an emphatic end to the run that had threatened to reshape the entire upper half.

His reward is Ben Johns.

Johns had his own problem to solve against Christian Alshon, losing the opening game before recovering 3-11, 11-3, 11-6.

The lower half followed a similar pattern.

Federico Staksrud lost his opening game to Gabriel Joseph but recovered 9-11, 11-4, 11-8, while Hunter Johnson beat Roscoe Bellamy 11-5, 11-4.

The result is almost the inverse of women’s singles.

There, the disruption survived long enough to guarantee a new finalist.

In men’s singles, the draw absorbed its biggest shock and began returning towards familiar territory.

Haworth is gone, but Johns, Staksrud and Johnson remain.

Goins is the player with the opportunity to prevent the reset from becoming complete.

Alshon and Daescu now have something meaningful to prove

Men’s doubles brings us back to a storyline that began before Las Vegas.

Christian Alshon and Andrei Daescu recently changed sides, putting Alshon on the dominant left and Daescu on the right.

The theory was straightforward enough.

Alshon had spent much of the MLP season playing left for Brooklyn alongside Riley Newman, compiling a 22-6 record in that combination. His increasingly aggressive game and athletic reach made the move attractive enough to test on the PPA Tour.

The early evidence has been substantial.

The revised alignment debuted in North Carolina and produced silver after a four-game final against Ben Johns and Gabriel Tardio.

Then came Arizona.

This time Alshon and Daescu won gold, beating Yuta Funemizu and Nicolas Acevedo in a deciding game after surviving seven championship points.

WPM entered Las Vegas asking whether that title could become repeatable evidence rather than an exceptional result.

The question remains alive.

Alshon and Daescu defeated Augustus Ge and Jack Sock 11-8, 11-4 in the quarter-finals and now face Hayden Patriquin and Federico Staksrud.

This is where tactical changes become more interesting than diagrams.

Alshon and Daescu have already shown that the switch can produce a title. The next question is whether it can repeatedly take them through the strongest partnerships in a PPA draw.

Their potential Championship Sunday opponents underline the point.

Ben Johns and Gabriel Tardio beat Will Howells and Pablo Tellez 11-3, 11-7 and remain alive in the opposite half.

Before anybody reaches them, however, Johns and Tardio have an unexpected problem to solve.

Martinez Vich and Acevedo have created the doubles opportunity

Jaume Martinez Vich and Nicolas Acevedo did not scrape through their quarter-final against Dylan Frazier and Len Yang.

They beat them 11-5, 11-2.

That margin changes the tone of their semi-final against Johns and Tardio.

A lower-seeded partnership surviving a succession of close matches can arrive in the last four feeling like the beneficiary of a volatile draw.

A team beating Frazier and Yang by a combined 22-7 score has earned a different level of attention.

For Acevedo, there is also continuity from Arizona, where he and Funemizu pushed all the way to the final before losing to Alshon and Daescu.

Las Vegas gives him another opportunity to reach Championship Sunday, this time alongside Martinez Vich.

To do it, they have to remove Johns and Tardio.

That is exactly the kind of match in which an unexpected run either becomes significant or ends as a good week.

Waters’ road to 200 is getting shorter

The largest number hanging over Las Vegas remains 200.

Anna Leigh Waters arrived at the tournament with 198 career PPA Tour titles. Because she elected not to enter women’s singles, the arithmetic was uncompromising from the beginning.

She needs both doubles titles.

Both remain possible.

Waters and Ben Johns reached the mixed doubles semi-finals by beating Nicolas Acevedo and Isabella Dunlap 11-1, 11-4.

Their next opponents are Tyra Hurricane Black and Gabriel Tardio, who defeated Will Howells and Meghan Dizon 11-7, 11-8.

In women’s doubles, Waters and Anna Bright produced one of the most emphatic quarter-finals of the tournament, beating Layne Sleeth and Alix Truong 11-0, 11-0.

The milestone is therefore close enough to stop feeling theoretical.

But the difficulty of it is also becoming clearer.

Waters cannot simply win on Saturday and reach 200.

She needs to survive two semi-finals, then win two Championship Sunday finals.

Four matches.

Two disciplines.

Two titles.

No margin for one bracket to go wrong.

That creates an unusual dynamic around a player whose dominance can sometimes make milestones appear inevitable. Las Vegas has turned this one into a genuine multi-bracket pursuit.

WPM has been following that pursuit since the draws were released. Waters arrived in Nevada two titles short after leaving Arizona on 198. Saturday determines whether both routes to the landmark survive until Championship Sunday.

Tyra Black can interfere with both halves of the chase

There is another thread connecting the two doubles competitions.

Tyra Hurricane Black remains alive in both.

She and Tardio stand between Waters and Johns and the mixed doubles final.

Black and Catherine Parenteau also reached the women’s doubles semi-finals after beating Sofia Sewing and Tina Pisnik 11-2, 11-1.

That gives Black the potential to affect Waters’ pursuit of 200 in either discipline.

Elsewhere in women’s doubles, Ting Chieh Wei and Meghan Dizon defeated Isabella Dunlap and Genie Erokhina 11-6, 13-11, while Schneemann and Fahey survived their three-game examination from Kunimoto and Castillo.

Waters and Bright remain the obvious focal point because of the milestone.

The bracket around them is not merely scenery.

Saturday is about conversion

Earlier rounds of tournaments are about possibility.

A seed falls and a section opens. A teenager beats an established player. A new partnership starts to look interesting. A favourite suddenly has a clearer route.

By the semi-finals, possibility is no longer enough.

Las Vegas has reached the point of conversion.

Pham created one of the tournament’s defining upsets against Haworth. Goins made sure it did not become a Championship Sunday run.

Kunimoto removed the No.1 women’s seed and now has the opportunity to make that victory part of something larger.

Campbell has worked through her own section and is one win from exactly the same breakthrough.

Martinez Vich and Acevedo have already produced a men’s doubles result worthy of attention. Johns and Tardio determine whether it becomes a final.

Alshon and Daescu have moved beyond the novelty of switching sides. Silver in North Carolina and gold in Arizona mean Las Vegas can provide another piece of evidence about whether the new arrangement has genuinely raised their ceiling.

And Waters has reached the stage where the 200-title milestone can be counted in individual matches rather than tournaments.

That is what Saturday offers.

Not another collection of upsets.

Consequences.

For Kunimoto and Campbell, those consequences are immediate.

Two teenagers walk onto court having never reached Championship Sunday at a main-circuit PPA Tour event in the United States.

One of them will walk off having changed that.

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Further Reading

• Luc Pham Stuns Haworth as Las Vegas Quarter-Finals Take Shape
• Las Vegas Seeds Fall Before the Round of 16
• Rate Las Vegas Open: Early Casualties Clear the Stage for the Heavyweights
• PPA Las Vegas Open 2026 Preview: Can Mesa’s Challengers Repeat?
• Waters Nears 200 as Las Vegas Tests the Partnerships That Shaped Mesa