Anna Bright and Kate Fahey directed more than 80 per cent of their shots towards Jorja Johnson in the MLP Mid-Season Tournament final. The plan ended an unbeaten season, exposed a pressure point in the New Jersey 5s and changed the question opponents must ask when facing the world’s best player.
Updated 17 July 2026 with expanded tactical analysis and shot-distribution data.
Key Takeaways
- Anna Bright and Kate Fahey sent 80.3 per cent of their shots towards Jorja Johnson as St Louis ended New Jersey’s 25-game unbeaten women’s doubles run.
- The tactic worked because St Louis controlled the type of ball Johnson received and maintained the pattern even when other attacking options appeared.
- The result exposed a pressure point in the Waters-Johnson partnership and helped move St Louis level with New Jersey at the top of the MLP standings.
Anna Bright and Kate Fahey made little attempt to conceal their intentions against Anna Leigh Waters and Jorja Johnson. From the opening exchanges of Sunday’s Major League Pickleball Mid-Season Tournament final, the St Louis pair directed almost everything towards Johnson.
The pattern continued regardless of the score or the opportunities available elsewhere. Waters waited across the kitchen, moving towards the middle when she could and searching for a ball she could reach without leaving too much space behind her. Few arrived.
By the end of the game, Bright and Fahey had sent 80.3 per cent of their shots to Johnson and only 19.7 per cent to Waters. They won 11-6, ending the New Jersey partnership’s 25-game unbeaten start to the MLP season and giving St Louis control of a final it would sweep 3-0.
The official tournament report confirmed that the victory started a complete St Louis sweep and delivered the first Mid-Season Tournament title in franchise history.
“It was pretty obvious what we were doing,” Bright said afterwards. “But it worked.”
That was undeniable. The more interesting question is exactly what St Louis had exposed.
This was not the discovery of a technical flaw in Waters’ game. Bright and Fahey did not overpower her, draw her into an uncomfortable exchange or find some previously hidden weakness in her defence. They decided that the safest way to face the world’s best female player was to remove her from as many rallies as possible, then trusted themselves to withstand whatever Johnson produced.
It was less a blueprint for defeating Waters than a sustained examination of the partnership built around her.
Refusing the obvious ball
Freeze-outs have always been part of doubles pickleball. Teams routinely direct play towards the weaker opponent or away from the player most capable of ending a rally. The principle is simple. Applying it against two elite professionals, without sacrificing ball quality or losing patience, is considerably harder.
Johnson is not an opponent most teams would willingly target. She entered the final as one half of the only undefeated women’s partnership in MLP and remains among the sport’s most destructive players. A loose dink can be accelerated immediately, while repeated targeting can provide an opponent with the rhythm and information needed to adjust.
St Louis therefore needed to control not only where the ball went, but also the kind of ball Johnson received. Bright and Fahey repeatedly gave her deeper, less attackable dinks, limiting her opportunities to take the ball out of the air and forcing her to generate the pace when she wanted to accelerate.
The volume gradually became part of the pressure. Johnson knew that the next ball was likely to be hers, followed by the one after that. There was little chance to step out of the exchange, reset mentally and allow Waters to assume control of the rally.
Maintaining the pattern required Bright and Fahey to reject attacking options that would ordinarily have looked inviting. Waters’ reputation alone can influence an opponent’s decisions, encouraging players either to avoid her nervously or challenge her unnecessarily. St Louis did neither. Their targeting was deliberate, controlled and largely unaffected by the outcome of any single rally.
Bright described the approach as requiring discipline, patience and “a lack of pride”. The purpose was not to prove that she and Fahey could beat Waters in direct exchanges. It was to make those exchanges rare enough that Waters could not shape the game.
New Jersey’s dependable advantage disappears
The effect reached beyond one women’s doubles result because of the way New Jersey’s team had functioned throughout the season.
Waters and Johnson’s 25-0 record had given the Fives an almost guaranteed opening point. Their consistency allowed New Jersey to enter men’s and mixed doubles with control of the match, while opponents knew that losing either of the next two games could leave them facing elimination.
That dependable advantage had been central to New Jersey’s sustained success throughout the MLP season. It disappeared in Grand Rapids.
Once Bright and Fahey had taken the opening game, the pressure passed immediately to the rest of the New Jersey line-up. Hayden Patriquin and Gabe Tardio then defeated Will Howells and Noe Khlif 11-3 in men’s doubles before Bright returned alongside Patriquin to beat Waters and Khlif 11-8, completing the sweep.
The women’s game did not decide every rally that followed, but it altered the terms of the final. New Jersey’s most reliable source of control had failed for the first time all season, and St Louis never allowed them to recover it.
The problem Waters could not solve alone
Waters attempted to increase her influence by moving towards the middle and looking for interceptions, but every movement created another calculation. Taking more court could bring her into one exchange while opening space elsewhere or disrupting Johnson’s positioning. An aggressive poach might solve the immediate problem without changing the pattern behind it.
St Louis made those decisions accumulate.
Any player asked to handle four out of every five shots against Bright and Fahey would face severe strain. Johnson was required to make repeated judgements about when to remain patient, when to accelerate and where to redirect the ball, all while knowing that Waters, the most decisive player on the court, could not easily assume the workload for her.
That does not reduce Johnson to a weak link. She is an elite player who had gone unbeaten across 25 women’s doubles games. St Louis simply identified her as the point through which the partnership could be placed under maximum pressure.
There is an important difference between attacking a poor player and forcing an outstanding one to carry an unreasonable share of the match. The first is an obvious tactic. The second requires far greater control to sustain.
Why St Louis could execute it
Other teams can copy the percentages. Reproducing the conditions behind them will be harder.
Bright and Fahey entered the final with the second-best women’s record in the league. They possessed the defensive stability to remain in rallies when Johnson attacked and enough control at the kitchen to keep returning the ball to their chosen area. Most importantly, both players accepted that the plan would occasionally require them to pass up an attractive offensive opportunity.
One Johnson winner did not change their judgement. Neither did a successful Waters intervention. St Louis were prepared to lose occasional rallies while protecting the pattern that they believed would win the game.
The freeze-out succeeded because it operated as a system rather than a preference. It placed a specific demand on Johnson, limited Waters’ opportunities to intervene and relied on Bright and Fahey having the patience to repeat it for as long as necessary.
The performance added another layer to the tactical importance of Bright, whose influence on MLP matches already extends into the league’s growing use of DreamBreaker specialists.
Her reward in Grand Rapids extended beyond the opening point. The victory secured the first Mid-Season Tournament title in St Louis history, stretched the Shock’s winning sequence to 15 matches and moved them level with New Jersey on 93 standings points. St Louis also hold the better regular-season win rate, giving them the tiebreaker if the standings remain level.
The Fives had swept the Shock in their previous meeting on 31 May. Six weeks later, St Louis reversed that score and left Grand Rapids with a credible claim to be the strongest team in the league.
A blueprint with limits
It would be premature to declare that Waters has been solved. St Louis showed how one exceptional pairing could defeat a particular Waters partnership on one afternoon. New Jersey will study the positioning, consider how to involve Waters earlier and look for ways Johnson can disrupt the targeting before it settles into a reliable pattern.
Future opponents must still execute the plan. Knowing where the ball should go is very different from keeping it there against two players capable of punishing small errors.
The final nevertheless changed the starting point for every team preparing to face New Jersey. Opponents no longer need to begin with the forbidding question of whether they can outplay Waters directly. They can ask whether Johnson can withstand an extreme share of the workload, whether Waters can take more court without unbalancing the pair, and whether they possess the control and patience to keep applying pressure when easier options appear.
For 25 women’s doubles games, nobody found satisfactory answers.
St Louis did. Waters remained on the court throughout, but Bright and Fahey made sure that, for most of the game, she could do very little about it.
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-ChiefChris 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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