Singles is worth 15% of the World Pickleball Rankings. WPM rebuilt the rankings from the tour’s own discipline-by-discipline points to see what that does to Hunter Johnson, Christopher Haworth, Kate Fahey and Andie Dikosavljevic, and what it would take to change it.
The short answer: Yes, singles is undervalued, by about ten percentage points. The men’s world top 12 is the men’s doubles top 12 in a different order, while only four of the top 12 singles players make it. Hunter Johnson has just won singles titles in consecutive weeks and is 14th. My verdict: move singles to 25%, take the points from gender doubles, and give out singles byes on the singles ranking.
On Sunday 25 October at Kai Tak Arena, Hunter Johnson beat Tama Shimabukuro 11-4, 6-11, 11-7 to win the men’s singles at the Hang Seng Bank Hong Kong Slam. A week earlier he had won the Australia title. “We’re probably going to meet each other a ton more times, hopefully in the finals,” he said of the 15-year-old, according to pickleball.com.
Hong Kong was a PPA Asia 1500 event, so the title earned Johnson 1,500 singles points. Once the tour’s formula is applied, those become 225 points in the World Pickleball Rankings. A player who lost a men’s doubles semi-final at the same event left with 375. Winning the whole thing, it turns out, is worth about three-fifths of losing halfway through the other one.
On Monday’s list Johnson is world No. 14. Christopher Haworth, the No. 1 in men’s singles, is 16th. The PPA saw this coming. Its own explainer describes a player who “could reach the championship match every week in men’s singles but struggle to make deep runs in doubles and mixed”, who would “sit in the teens in the World Pickleball Ranking”. It was offered as a hypothetical. It now has two names.
A quick word on the method
The official rankings publish one number per player. The pickleball.com Current Seed tables give each player’s points in singles, gender doubles and mixed: their best 14 results in each discipline over 52 weeks, with the four Majors always counting. I took the week of 26 October 2026, covering 27 October 2025 to 26 October 2026, and joined the two. Then I recalculated 50% doubles + 35% mixed + 15% singles for the top 45 men and top 45 women. It matched the official total for all 90 to the decimal point, so the inputs are the tour’s own. After that I changed only the weights. The model treats players’ schedules as fixed, which they would not be if the weights changed, so read it as a weather forecast rather than a verdict.
Who does the 15% actually rank?
It ranks doubles players. Before checking, I assumed it would favour all-rounders. The men’s WPR top 12 (Ben Johns, Hayden Patriquin, Gabriel Tardio, Federico Staksrud, Christian Alshon, JW Johnson, Andrei Daescu, Shimabukuro, CJ Klinger, Eric Oncins, Noe Khlif, Dylan Frazier) is exactly the same 12 names as the men’s doubles top 12. Twelve out of twelve. On the women’s side, ten of the top 12 in doubles are in the WPR top 12.
Singles gets four of 12 in each. The four women are Anna Leigh Waters, Fahey, Kaitlyn Christian and Catherine Parenteau. The four men are Staksrud, Shimabukuro, Alshon and Khlif. The rest of the singles elite are spread down the list: Johnson 14th, Haworth 16th, Roscoe Bellamy 21st and John Lucian Goins 32nd. Zane Ford, the No. 10 singles player, is 66th.
The scale explains why. Haworth leads men’s singles with 17,500 points, which are worth 2,625 to him. Tardio leads men’s doubles with 21,500, which are worth 10,750. Patriquin is world No. 2 with 14,450 points, none of them from singles. Anna Bright is women’s No. 2 with no singles points either. Johns, with 42 career PPA singles titles by the tour’s own count, has 2,500 singles points over the 52 weeks, which supply 2% of his total. He is world No. 1.
What happens if you change the weights?
I ran four versions: the official 50/35/15; a 40/35/25 that moves ten points from gender doubles to singles; equal thirds; and a “prize-money” weighting based on the tour’s Gold-contract purse at Majors, which I come back to below.
| Player | Singles rank | Official 50/35/15 | WPM 40/35/25 | Equal thirds | Prize money 48/40/12 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anna Leigh Waters | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Kate Fahey | 2 | 8 | 5 | 3 | 8 |
| Kaitlyn Christian | 3 | 10 | 9 | 8 | 12 |
| Brooke Buckner | 4 | 18 | 12 | 10 | 18 |
| Andie Dikosavljevic | 10 | 39 | 31 | 25 | 40 |
| Christopher Haworth | 1 | 16 | 11 | 8 | 17 |
| Hunter Johnson | 2 | 14 | 9 | 9 | 14 |
| Federico Staksrud | 3 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 5 |
| Hayden Patriquin | unranked | 2 | 2 | 3 | 2 |
| Gabriel Tardio | 114 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 3 |
WPM model, World Pickleball Rankings week of 26 October 2026. Ranks are WPR positions after reweighting the official discipline points. Tardio has 225 singles points; Patriquin has none.
Waters is No. 1 under every weighting, and her lead over Bright grows from 4,463 points to 7,583 under equal thirds. She leads women’s doubles jointly and leads mixed and singles outright, so no formula can touch her. Staksrud also does well under every reform. He is third in men’s singles and fourth in doubles, the complete player the system says it wants, and it currently undervalues him too.
The losers are the doubles specialists. Tardio drops from third to fifth under equal thirds, and Klinger from ninth to 14th. Patriquin falls only to third, because 17,000 mixed points can make up for a lot.
The finding that surprised me most is this. Under 40/35/25, none of the 16 PPA Finals places changes. Johnson moves to ninth and Haworth to 11th, but the eight men and eight women stay the same. To get Haworth into the top eight with doubles and mixed kept in their current 10:7 ratio, singles has to be worth 31%. Christian needs 34% and Johnson about 40%. Johnson is 1,764 points behind Shimabukuro in eighth. At 450 points for a Worlds singles title, that is nearly four world titles, in a season that has one.
Isn’t 15% already generous?
Yes, measured by money. The PPA’s published Gold-contract table pays a winner $90,000 in gender doubles, $76,000 in mixed and $23,000 in singles at Majors and Worlds. Singles is 12.2% of that $189,000. Weight the rankings by the purse and singles goes down, and Haworth drops to 17th. If 15% is robbery, the cheque is grand larceny.
The second argument is philosophical, and the tour makes it openly. Connor Pardoe, the PPA chief executive, said at the launch on 5 August: “Greatness isn’t one-dimensional.” The same release says the system “rewards complete players: the ones who show up and compete everywhere, in every format.” PPA Tour Asia’s rankings guide puts it more bluntly: “A player needs results in more than one discipline to reach the top.”
The third argument is the one I take most seriously, because 15% is not nothing. Without her singles points, Fahey’s 8,332.5 would fall to 5,752.5, below Tina Pisnik’s 6,015, and she would lose the last women’s Finals place. Shimabukuro’s 1,110 singles points are the only thing keeping him ahead of Klinger. Singles already decides who gets two of the 16 seats.
I accept all of that, and it is why I’m arguing for 25 rather than equal thirds. But the money argument proves less than it seems. Prize money reflects what the tour chooses to pay, which reflects what it chooses to value. Using it to justify the weighting is circular. And “complete players” is a good thing to reward, but it isn’t what a world No. 1 ranking claims to measure.
What did tennis decide, and why does it matter here?
Tennis faced the same choice and went the other way. The ATP published its first computer rankings on 23 August 1973 and, by its own history, “ranked doubles players for the first time on 1 March 1976”. The two lists stayed separate. The “best of 14” rule the PPA now uses is one the ATP introduced in 1990.
The ATP’s founders were clear about what their ranking was for. “We did not want the computer to be used as a way to incentivise a player to enter any particular tournament,” the first ATP president, Cliff Drysdale, recalled in the ATP’s 50th-anniversary history. “In other words, to purely be a way to rank players according to ability. Nothing more.” Dennis Spencer, who took over the rankings in December 1975, remembered that “there was controversy initially about what they were for.”
The World Pickleball Rankings were built as an incentive, and the PPA says so: they reward players who “show up and compete everywhere”. That is a legitimate aim for a tour. But it also explains why Patriquin and Bright put nothing into singles. The formula tells them it isn’t worth their legs. This is the main weakness in my own model. Change the weights and the schedules change too. But it cuts both ways: at 15% the tour isn’t just measuring singles’ low status, it is helping to create it.
Where it really bites: byes and the Finals
A ranking that orders players is one thing. A ranking that decides who plays when is another. The overall WPR decides entry, byes and the eight Finals places, and one of the PPA’s routes to a tour contract is cracking the WPR top 50, so it affects livelihoods as well. At the Arizona Open, as we reported in September, Haworth was the No. 1 singles seed and started in the round of 64, while Johns, seeded 22nd, got a bye to the round of 16.
At the Finals, every qualifier plays all three disciplines. On Monday’s list, six of the 16 would-be qualifiers have 225 singles points or fewer. Patriquin, Bright, Hurricane Tyra Black and Rachel Rohrabacher have none. Haworth and Johnson, the top two men in singles, would not qualify. The tour would be crowning a singles champion at an event designed to leave out its best singles players.
Is singles the global door?
In the women’s game it is. The women’s singles top 12 includes five non-Americans: Chao Yi Wang of Taiwan, Judit Castillo of Spain, Parenteau of Canada, and Dikosavljevic and Sahra Dennehy of Australia. The women’s doubles top 12 includes two, Parenteau and Slovenia’s Pisnik. Dikosavljevic has just won the Australia Pickleball Cup and Hong Kong in consecutive weeks, her 18th international PPA Tour title. She conceded 40 points in 12 games in Hong Kong. She is ranked 39th.
The men’s game doesn’t follow that pattern. There are four non-Americans in the singles top 12 and five in doubles, including Bolivia’s Tardio and Romania’s Daescu. But the women’s numbers make the point. A tour expanding into Asia and Australia needs a route for a player who arrives without a regular partner, and singles is that route. At 15%, the formula marks it down.
The verdict
Singles is undervalued. Not drastically, and not for the reason singles fans usually give, but by about ten points. Moving it to 25% puts Fahey fifth, Haworth 11th, Johnson ninth and Dikosavljevic 31st. It changes none of the Finals places and still leaves the doubles players in charge, which the money says they should be. The second change matters more than the percentage: award singles byes on the singles Current Seed, so the No. 1 singles seed never again starts in the round of 64. And if the Finals is going to crown a singles champion, the tour should at least notice when the top two men in singles are watching.
The World Championships start at Brookhaven Country Club in Farmers Branch, Texas, on 2 November, with 3,000 points for each title. The men’s singles winner there will take home 450 WPR points, less than a losing semi-finalist in mixed (525) and well short of one in doubles (750). That is what 15% buys. Johnson has 1,764 points to make up and one Worlds to do it in. He will be counting in 15s.
Photo: PPA Tour Asia
