Anna Leigh Waters/Ben Johns are through to Championship Sunday in mixed doubles after a 10-12, 11-7, 11-7 victory over No. 4 seeds Rachel Rohrabacher/Christian Alshon.

Rohrabacher/Alshon are teaming up for the first time this week, but they found success against the top seeds with a combination of well-placed lobs from Rohrabacher and off-pace speedups from Alshon that nearly helped them pull off the upset.

Johns gave some insight into how he and Waters adjusted to the warm South Florida conditions after dropping the opening game.

“I think it’s the hottest day so far this week, so I felt like the ball was softening up a lot in Game 1. I feel like we made a couple of errors leaving the ball short, and when the ball’s soft, you really don’t want to be doing that because it’s hard to put the ball away, so if you’re going to miss, you should be missing far,” he explained. “In Games 2 and 3, we were also attacking a little bit more because again with the soft ball, the counters don’t come back quite so hard, so you can be on top of the next shot.”

All four players from this semifinal will be back in action later Saturday afternoon in gender doubles.

Catch all of the day’s remaining matches on Pickleballtv.