Anna Leigh Waters/Catherine Parenteau secured a spot in Sunday’s final with an 11-9, 11-3 victory over Jessie Irvine/Mari Humberg.

Irvine/Humberg had never played together before this week, but they picked up impressive wins over Tyra Black/Allyce Jones and Callie Smith/Lucy Kovalova in pool play to advance to the semifinal round.

The top seeds stopped that run, though, proving to be too solid in the big moments to come away with the triumph in two games.

This week has been a challenging one for Waters/Parenteau; they fell to Jorja Johnson/Lacy Schneemann in pool play, their first loss as a partnership against a team other than Anna Bright/Rachel Rohrabacher.

Waters says that adversity helped her and Parenteau focus more on themselves and not on what’s happening on the other side of the net.

“I feel like, especially through the pool play, we’ve been worrying about different partnerships and what they’re doing. But in the end, it’s about what we’re doing and what we’re doing well and what we’re not,” she explained.

On Sunday, Waters/Parenteau will face Anna Bright/Rachel Rohrabacher.

Anna Bright/Rachel Rohrabacher claimed the second spot in the women’s doubles final with a 6-11, 11-4, 11-6 victory over Jorja Johnson/Lacy Schneemann.

Even though they hadn’t played together before this week, Johnson/Schneemann made waves with their upset victory of Anna Leigh Waters/Catherine Parenteau in pool play.

They came out firing again in Saturday’s final match, comfortably taking the opening game.

From there, though, Bright/Rohrabacher found success by changing their game plan and playing a slower brand of pickleball than we’re used to seeing from them.

“[Jorja and Lacy] have really, really good hands. They’re both uniquely very good at their bodies, which not a lot of women are, and so we just had to settle into making better decisions and playing longer points,” Bright explained. “It’s not easy because we like to play pretty spastic, but sometimes you’ve got to be willing to play some nice, boring pickleball.”

That was the key for ‘the girlies,’ as they bounced back to take Games 2 and 3 and set a Championship Sunday date with Waters/Parenteau.

Bright/Rohrabacher won the most recent meeting between the two juggernauts in Dallas with a three-game sweep, so they’ll look for a repeat performance in Southern California.