by Matty Pickles


Thousands of years ago, some distant ancestor of yours looked up to the stars and noticed that a few of them lined up in a formation that vaguely resembled a large spoon. Humans would continue this tradition across generations, except they kept getting worse and worse at it. Don’t get me wrong – The Big Dipper is great – it definitely looks like a Big Dipper. But, one can only assume that it was an exceptionally bored (and quite possibly a little bit lonely) astronomer who decided that this grouping of stars resembled a beautiful woman.

I bring this up because it is my hope that by the end of this post you—like our ancient ancestors so many years ago—will be so bored and lonely that you will resort to creating imaginary friends out of the shapes you see in the data visualizations that I am about to share with you. For example, in this one I am seeing a giant sea horse.

PPA Women’s Doubles Partnership Web

What you are looking at is not a map of the cosmos. Nor is it that one Always Sunny conspiracy theory meme. Rather, it is a network graph in which each woman who has played in a 2025 PPA Women’s Doubles Main Draw is represented by a single point. The connections between two points indicate that those individuals have played at least one tournament together, and the thickness of the line indicates how many points they earned as a team this year. You can hover over a point to display the corresponding name and highlight that player’s 2025 partnerships.

I found this visualization incredibly fascinating—not only because you can form a partnership chain that goes 12 players deep and connects #1 Anna Leigh Waters with #150 Cade Pierson1—but because it illustrates just how messy the partnership situationships are on the PPA Tour. After the recent and much discussed break-up shake-up at the top of Women’s Doubles, the partnerships of Buckner/Wang and Brascia/Brascia are the only truly exclusive partnerships among the top 30 women. To no real surprise, we can also see how the top players tend to partner with other top players, and how only a handful of black dots (often with a helpful MLP) have managed to infiltrate the main cluster.

PPA Men’s Doubles Partnership Web

Up to this point in the year we really haven’t seen any partnership exclusivity among the top men—as demonstrated by the multitude of relatively thick lines linking the various blue dots. In fact, the only truly exclusive partnership within the Top 50 is between Brandon French and Wyatt Stone.

Andrei Daescu struck gold with Alshon, Klinger, and Ben. Ben won gold with Collin, Daescu, and Tardio. CJ Klinger took home the top prize with Daescu and JW Johnson. Gabe Tardio eloped to Australia with Tyson McGuffin to pick up a quick gold in addition to the two he won with Ben. The ten PPA men’s doubles gold medals so far in 2025 have been won by seven different partnerships2. I don’t think this will be the case moving forward—Ben/Gabe, Daescu/Alshon, Hayden/Fed, The Big Ds3, and maybe even JW/Klinger seem to have settled down—but I also wouldn’t be that surprised to see more swinging.

PPA Mixed Doubles Partnership Web

In mixed we do have some monogamy among the elite. Most notably is of course Ben and Anna Leigh who show no signs of breaking up despite a pair of early season losses in 20254. Irvine/Tardio, Schneeman/McGuffin, and Wright/Kovalova round out the list of exclusive pairings within the Top 50. And then the chart transcends reality and becomes closer to a drawing your toddler might make on a restaurant children’s menu than it is to a usable data visualization. It was while I was staring at this tangled web that I wrote the fever dream of an opening paragraph to this piece.

We do still have a distinct inner circle with only a handful of black dots (representing players outside of the Top 100) breaking into the cool kids club, which is surrounded by an outer ring of hopefuls—but I’ve been staring at the web too long and I’m afraid that any further attempts to make sense of it would just be life imitating art.


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  1. Cade Pierson partnered with Shannon Pretorius who partnered with Madalina Grigoriu who partnered with Cailyn Campbell who partnered with Jalina Ingram who partnered with Lauren Hidalgo Smith who partnered with Audrey Adele Brown who partnered with Victoria DiMuzio who partnered with Vivienne David who partnered with Jackie Kawamoto who partnered with Anna Bright who partnered with Anna Leigh Waters. ↩

  2. Daescu/Alshon 3, Johns/Tardio 2, Daescu/Klinger 1, Daescu/Johns 1, Johns/Johns 1, Johnson/Klinger 1, Tardio/McGuffin 1 (Australia). ↩

  3. Dekel and Dylan have entered the merch game – will it last longer than the Girlies’ sweatshits? ↩

  4. Ben/ALW lost to Bright/Bar in the semis of the Mesa Cup in February and to JW/Jorja in the championship match of the North Carolina Open in April. ↩