A PPA event at Indian Wells, California, in 2022, not the Ottawa 125. Photo: Vision360media / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The short answer: All five pro titles at the PPA Ottawa 125 went to teenagers. Every gold medallist whose official PPA profile we could find lives in the United States, mostly in Utah. Canada’s second national-tour event is a story about the youth pipeline, but it is America’s pipeline, not Canada’s. Not yet.
Let me begin with the bit that will make me unpopular in Ottawa. When PPA Tour Canada staged its second event, in the Canadian capital, on the same weekend as the Hong Kong Slam, the obvious headline was “the future is here”. It was. It just had a Utah postcode.
The scoreboard
Andrew Caldarella is 17, and his PPA profile lists his residence as Provo, Utah. He won men’s doubles with Braden Jacobson (16, Spanish Fork, Utah) and mixed doubles with Elsie Hendershot (13, Mapleton, Utah). He lost the men’s singles final, so no triple crown.
Hendershot did the same: two golds, then silver in women’s singles to Kelly Goodnow. Goodnow is 14, lives in Phoenix, Arizona, according to her profile, and won women’s doubles with Hendershot as well. Danny Phillips, 16, won the men’s singles. He has no PPA profile we could find, but USA Pickleball’s 2020 junior spotlight placed him in northern Utah, where he was the youngest entrant at Nationals two years running.
So that is two golds each for Caldarella, Goodnow and Hendershot, one each for Phillips and Jacobson, and nobody over 17 on the top step. Natalia Simson, 13 (Algonquin, Illinois), took silver in women’s doubles with Mary McGowan (18, Virginia) and bronze in women’s singles.
Utah supplied three of the four singles finalists. That is not a coincidence. That is a system.
Where was Canada?
Further down the podium. Marie-Christine Salvas, whose PPA profile lists Drummondville, Quebec, took mixed bronze with Xavier Richard. We could not find official profiles for several of the other medallists, and a PPA profile lists where a player lives, not the passport they hold. So we are not going to hand out nationalities we cannot prove.
The pattern is clear enough without that. A national tour exists to give a country’s own players ranking points, match play and a stage. Ottawa did all three. But the players best placed to use them were American teenagers with years of junior national titles behind them. Hendershot partnered Jacobson to a 16U mixed title when she was 11, which tells you how long this group has been playing together.
That is not a criticism of the teenagers, who simply turned up and won, which is rather the point of sport. It is a question for Canada. Does a national tour grow a national game, or does it give strong US juniors a nearer, cheaper ranking event?
The global angle
The PPA now runs regional tours in Canada and Asia alongside the main tour. In Hong Kong the same weekend, “the usual suspects” took gold, in pickleball.com‘s phrase. Ottawa showed the other side of the model. The second tier is where the next generation gets its reps, and right now the deepest generation is coming from a few towns in Utah.
Tennis has a word for events like this: Challengers. They are where strong players collect points, and the hosts are not always the ones collecting them.
The next test comes quickly. PPA Toronto 125 runs 26-29 November. If a Canadian-based junior reaches a pro final there, the pipeline story becomes a Canadian one.
Until then, the verdict stands. Canada built the stage, and Utah’s teenagers are the ones performing on it.
