At the Veolia Pickleball National Championships, the PPA Tour's season-ending title event in Cary, North Carolina, the top-seeded mixed doubles pair of Anna Leigh Waters and Ben Johns lost from a game up in the semifinals to the third-seeded brother-and-sister pair of Jorja Johnson and JW Johnson. The match was played on the Saturday night of September 5. Waters and Johns, who have sat at the top of the women's and men's games respectively, had been overwhelming this matchup 22-2. Having the rug pulled out from under them is worth examining for anyone thinking about how Japan develops its mixed doubles.
The Johnson siblings edged out a pair with a 22-2 record against them
A comeback after dropping the first game
Waters and Johns took the first game 11-4, the start the odds suggested. But the Johnsons took the second 11-9 and closed out the third 11-6 to turn the best-of-three around. Pulling the match into their own rhythm from a losing position, they sent Waters and Johns out at the semifinal stage for the first time this season.
Two straight years beating the same pair in Cary
This is the second year running that the Johnson siblings have beaten them in Cary, after April 2025. Same venue, same faces, and this time the round carried more weight as a semifinal. There is an accumulation behind the scoreline that cannot be written off as a stylistic matchup.
Why Waters and Johns have been so hard to beat
The top man and the top woman on the same side of the court
Waters has kept winning on the women’s side for years, and Johns has been called the GOAT of the men’s game. Either one alone is a handful; put them together and both the court they cover and the precision of their exchanges jump. And that 22-2 mark is their head-to-head record against none other than the Johnson siblings. From the siblings’ side it reads 2-22 against a clearly stronger pair, and because they edged that pair in a three-game match, this win is being called an upset.
| Game | Score | Pair that took it |
|---|---|---|
| Game 1 | 4-11 | Waters / Johns |
| Game 2 | 11-9 | The Johnson siblings |
| Game 3 | 11-6 | The Johnson siblings |
How the No. 3 seed got past a stronger pair
The siblings have practiced side by side for years, so switching between the front and back of the court and closing in on the net come without hesitation. The push from a venue close to home mattered too, and being able to reset after trailing in the first game came down to a pair who can say what they need on court in a few words.
How the players and the tour described the match
“The crowd showed up every time” — Jorja’s words
Jorja Johnson credited the crowd for the win: “I think it was the fans. They really came out every single time and got loud for us.” Her sense that the room was on their side reads as the fuel behind the comeback.
JW said the opposition had “no weaknesses”
Asked where the Waters/Johns pair they had just beaten was vulnerable, her brother JW Johnson praised them instead — “no weaknesses at all” — and explained the win this way: “We just played our A game and never strayed from the strategy.” The read is not that they forced open a flawless opponent, but that they held their own shape to the end. The tour and local reporting treated the match as the first semifinal Waters had lost this season, and noted that her shot at a triple crown at the season opener was gone.
What Japanese players and fans can take from this result
Sibling and family pairs: a strength Japan can build too
It matters that the pair who beat a stronger team were siblings rather than big names thrown together. That same JW Johnson is playing men’s doubles with 10-year-old Tama Shimabukuro as he heads into a new season in which the top pairs have been shuffled wholesale (Shimabukuro pairs with JW Johnson as the PPA's new season reshuffles the top duos). Against a trend of reshuffling partners around individual talent, this mixed doubles event showed that the unspoken timing of a pair who have hit together for years still tells in the closing moments. Even in Japan, where locking in a regular practice partner is hard, keeping the same pair together for years within a family or a club is a realistic option for anyone working with limited resources.
Mixed doubles is where the pecking order moves fastest
In mixed doubles, where a man and a woman cover alternating sides, one split-second decision can swing the flow, and the less decorated side keeps a path to the win. Just as 15-year-old Shimabukuro took gold in mixed doubles in Shenzhen (15-year-old Shimabukuro takes mixed gold in Shenzhen, one step from a triple after two years with a paddle), this is the event where young players and newcomers can vault up the order in one go. Given that Japan’s national team reached the world’s final four at the World Cup, there is real sense in aiming development at mixed doubles, where the room to grow is widest.
Bright and Patriquin took the final
The siblings lost three straight games in the final
The Johnson siblings carried their semifinal momentum into the final but fell to Anna Bright and Hayden Patriquin 11-9, 11-3, 11-7, stopping short of the title. For Bright and Patriquin it was a second crown as a pair, after Mesa in February 2026. Beating the champions, it turned out, does not hand you the top of the podium.
The faces at the top keep changing
With the top seed out and a different pair lifting the trophy, this event compressed the state of mixed doubles into a single results sheet: nothing about the order is fixed. Look at Waters alone and she had just won the MLP team competition, settling a two-year score (New Jersey 5s win their first MLP title, and Waters gets her revenge two years on), so a slip on the individual tour and a team title now sit side by side in the same stretch of the calendar. The stronger the player, the harder a clean sweep has become.
| Round | Winner | Loser | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Semifinals | The Johnson siblings | Waters / Johns | 4-11, 11-9, 11-6 |
| Final | Bright / Patriquin | The Johnson siblings | 11-9, 11-3, 11-7 |
How to follow PPA Tour results
Where to watch and check results
The Veolia National Championships is a PPA Tour event, and scores and highlights can be followed on the official site and the video stream. Overseas mixed doubles offers plenty that Japanese players can take home as is: how a pair rebuilds after dropping an early game, the timing of the closing step at the net. In an upset there is something to learn not only from the winners but from how slowly the beaten champions adjusted.
The match to watch next
The first thing to follow is how Waters and Johns regroup at their next event. Whether this loss was a one-off or the first sign that the mixed doubles map is shifting will become clear the next time these pairs meet. Worth watching too is whether the Johnson siblings can turn a semifinal upset into a title. As a concrete step you can take yourself, watch the mixed doubles from the semifinals on at the next PPA event and compare them while tracking how the score moves. In matches that turn around, the swing is always marked in the opening points of the second game.
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