The short answer: Katerina Stewart and Bobbi Oshiro reached the USA Pickleball Nationals semifinals in singles, mixed doubles and women’s doubles together. Friday’s 20 professional quarterfinals produced eight three-game matches and five recoveries from an opening-game defeat. The women’s singles top four all advanced; the men’s doubles semifinal seeds were 1, 13, 14 and 15. San Diego is not one uniform procession for the favourites.
Katerina Stewart and Richard Livornese Jr. lost the first game of their mixed doubles quarterfinal 11–2. They won the next two 11–2, 11–3. By the end of Friday, Stewart was through in three events at the Oceanview USA Pickleball National Championships. So was her women’s doubles partner, Bobbi Oshiro.
The opening game was not a verdict. Nor was Friday a medal ceremony.
At Barnes Tennis Center in San Diego, the two women each retained three routes to a national title heading into Saturday’s professional semifinals. They shared one of those routes, in women’s doubles, and could still meet as opponents in the singles final. That is a possibility, not a pairing already earned: Seone Mendez and Domenika Turkovic stood between them and that match.
There is a temptation, with another championship week attracting attention in Texas, to treat Nationals as the event happening somewhere else. The official results carried by VS Sports make a stronger case than that. There are distinct contests here: established partnerships, a concentrated all-round challenge from Stewart and Oshiro, and a men’s doubles draw whose remaining seed numbers look nothing like the women’s singles board.
It deserves to be read on its own terms.
What did Friday actually settle?
Twenty professional quarterfinals were completed across the five main disciplines: four each in men’s singles, women’s singles, men’s doubles, women’s doubles and mixed doubles. Eight required a third game. Five were won by a player or pair who had lost the opener.
Three of the four mixed quarterfinals went to a decider; three of the four women’s doubles quarterfinals did too. Men’s doubles and men’s singles contributed one each. All four women’s singles matches finished in two games.
Saturday’s professional semifinals were still to come.
All three mixed doubles deciders were won by the pair who lost game one; only one of the three women’s doubles deciders followed that pattern. A deciding game and a comeback are not synonyms. The other opening-game recovery belonged to Camron in men’s singles.
The distinction matters because “the favourites held” is only half an account. In women’s singles, the top four seeds did all reach the semifinals. In men’s doubles, only one top-four seed remained. One event can contain both patterns without either cancelling the other out.
Stewart and Oshiro: partners in one draw, rivals in another
Stewart’s mixed recovery came against Emilia Schmidt and Robert Slutsky. With Livornese, she turned that 2–11 start into an 11–2, 11–3 finish. Oshiro and Randy Blanco had a tighter route against Brandon Lane and Glauka Carvajal Lane: they lost the first game 11–8, then won 11–9, 12–10.
The two women also advanced together in women’s doubles, beating Emily Cederquist and Leah Tauber 11–6, 9–11, 11–9. Neither the mixed results nor that doubles score supports a tale of an effortless day. Both three-event campaigns were intact, but several individual games could not have been much closer.
Their singles quarterfinals both finished in two games. Oshiro beat Amanda Hendry 11–5, 11–4. Stewart beat Trang Huynh 11–5, 12–10. The second game of Stewart’s match was the only one of the eight women’s singles quarterfinal games to go beyond eleven.
There is relevant history behind the pairing. At the APP Louisville Open in October, Stewart and Oshiro won their first APP women’s doubles gold as a team, beating Turkovic and Carvajal Lane 11–2, 11–9.
“Bobbi’s an O.G.,” Stewart said in the APP’s published Louisville report. “She’s trusted me from the beginning of my pickleball career, so it’s really sweet to get a gold with her.”
That explains why their shared run is more than two singles names coinciding on a doubles card. It is an established partnership arriving with a recent title.
They have also met with singles gold at stake. Stewart beat Oshiro 11–0, 11–7 in the APP Detroit final in August. Stewart’s comment then was revealing: “It’s always fun playing against Bobbi. We have a good idea of how we both play, so it’s just a matter of who could impose their game better.”
Saturday still had to establish whether they would meet again.
The singles seeds held. Their histories are less tidy
Mendez beat Amber Policare 11–3, 11–3 and Turkovic beat Roos Van Reek 11–3, 11–6 to complete the women’s semifinal field. The board paired fourth-seeded Mendez with No. 1 Stewart, and No. 2 Turkovic with No. 3 Oshiro.
The neat seed order does not make Stewart’s route a formality. Turkovic beat her in three games for the Louisville singles title in October. The APP’s report records Turkovic losing the opener 11–9, then winning 11–4, 11–7. If Friday showed the top four separating themselves from the quarterfinal field, recent results still give reasons not to confuse the No. 1 label with ownership of the trophy.
The men’s singles draw retained seeds 1, 2, 4 and 6. Top seed Ronan Camron recovered from a 3–11 opening game against Patrick Kawka to win the next two 11–7, 11–7. Fourth seed Ryler DeHeart beat Naveen Beasley 11–1, 11–2, the most one-sided men’s singles quarterfinal by combined score.
That set up Camron against DeHeart. In the other semifinal, No. 2 Dusty Boyer was due to face No. 6 Andre Millet. Boyer beat Max Green 11–5, 11–9; Millet beat Tristan Dussault 11–1, 12–10.
Camron beat Boyer for gold in both the Detroit and Louisville singles finals. That makes a further meeting an identifiable possibility, but not an entitlement. DeHeart and Millet had earned the opportunity to make that history irrelevant to the final here.
Men’s doubles: strange seeds, familiar standard-bearers
The semifinal board read No. 13 Naveen Beasley and Dusty Boyer against No. 1 Jack Munro and Livornese; No. 15 Jay Devilliers and Harsh Mehta against No. 14 Zack Card and Jayden Broderick.
Beasley and Boyer beat Thomas Yu and Max Manthou 11–8, 11–9. Devilliers and Mehta beat Jae Centonze and Brandon Lane 11–1, 9–11, 11–3. Card and Broderick beat Andre Mick and Tristan Dussault 11–8, 11–7.
Munro and Livornese beat Patrick Kawka and Ryler DeHeart 11–4, 11–3. They were the highest-seeded survivors and the only pair in that quartet to concede fewer than ten points in their quarterfinal.
Their status also has a recent competitive foundation. The APP’s Louisville report records their seventh consecutive men’s doubles gold together on that tour, earned in October.
“Sometimes we come into the day and maybe we feel a certain way,” Livornese said in that report. “Maybe it’s nerves or low energy, but that’s not our story. We get to choose how we react to that, and I thought we did a good job of that today.”
It is a useful reminder not to mistake a seed number for the work required to justify it. Munro and Livornese had the pedigree. Saturday’s opponents still had a match to play.
Doubles depth makes the three-title chase harder
In women’s doubles, Schmidt and Jillian Braverman beat Averry Chew and Tia Elpusan 11–6, 8–11, 11–4. Turkovic and Carvajal Lane beat Nicola Schoeman and Shelby Bates 11–3, 11–4. Vivian Glozman and Van Reek recovered to beat Christine Maddox and Amanda Hendry 6–11, 11–4, 12–10.
The semifinals paired No. 2 Stewart/Oshiro with No. 3 Schmidt/Braverman, and No. 4 Turkovic/Carvajal Lane with No. 8 Glozman/Van Reek. Three quarterfinal deciders describe a contested round, not a forecast that the next one must follow the same script.
Mixed doubles offered another contrast. Munro and Van Reek beat Broderick and Braverman 11–1, 11–4, the only straight-games victory among the four quarterfinals. Maddox and Manthou recovered against Ronan Camron and Glozman, winning 5–11, 11–7, 11–4.
The top four mixed seeds all remained: Stewart/Livornese against Manthou/Maddox, and Munro/Van Reek against Blanco/Oshiro. For Stewart and Oshiro, a third title route means another set of opponents and another partnership to negotiate. Three live chances are not three medals already in the bag.
Why Barnes matters beyond this pro board
The official Nationals site places the championships at Barnes from 31 October to 8 November, returning to San Diego for a second consecutive year. The broader event includes juniors, wheelchair players and age divisions alongside these five professional draws. That breadth is part of the identity of Nationals.
Competitor Kirk Beitz put the attachment plainly in Steve Price’s CBS8 report from Barnes: “It’s nationals, you gotta get dressed up. I mean it’s the biggest event of the year.”
That is a participant’s judgement, not a universal ranking of tournaments. It is also a better account of why people compete here than treating every championship as a proxy argument about another tour.
Saturday’s job was concrete: turn semifinal places into opportunities to play for gold. Stewart and Oshiro had three routes each. Munro and Livornese carried a recent record that made their No. 1 seeding intelligible. The other men’s doubles semifinalists had numbers on the draw that invited attention, not dismissal.
Twenty quarterfinals had established all of that. They had crowned nobody.
Archive: Katerina Stewart at the 2026 Humana APP Louisville Open, 17 October 2026. Photo: Connor Cunningham / Association of Pickleball Players (APP).
