A Retrospective Look At The 2025-26 SDA Pro Doubles Tour by Rob Dinerman
The 2025-26 SDA pro doubles tour featured several brand-new sites, a record number of first-time partnerships making their way into the winner’s circle, an exciting back-and-forth season-long rivalry among the top-tier women’s teams — and, most historically significantly, the wire-to-wire undefeated performance of Chris Callis and Sam Khalifa, who won all seven of the tour stops that they entered. In so doing, they made off with all of the tour’s major championships, put permanently in their rear-view mirror a 2024-25 campaign that had been ravaged by illness and injury, extricated themselves from several perilous predicaments and became the first team to go through an entire season without losing a single match in the eight years since Manek Mathur and Damien Mudge accomplished the feat in 2017-18. Unfortunately Mudge, the SDA’s “all-time leading scorer” with more than 170 ranking-tournament wins, incurred what proved to be a career-ending knee injury in the last match of that season, although he did make a most welcome appearance in the gallery at the Kellner Cup final this past spring. But Callis — who actually was eight for eight, having also partnered Zac Alexander to victory in the Diamond State Open at the Wilmington Country Club — and Khalifa exited the season in full health and with great momentum (as well as the SDA Doubles Team of the Year Award), and should be a formidable opponent for years to come. They have now won 31 consecutive matches, and the last time they lost a match that was played to completion — there were a few mid-tournament and mid-match defaults in 2024-25 — was way back in February 2024 at the hands of James Stout and Scott Arnold in the final round of that season’s David C. Johnson Jr. Memorial tournament in Brooklyn Heights.
A DRAMATIC BEGINNING
The men’s season began in dramatic fashion right from the opening bell when each of the first three tournaments — the R&TC Challenger in Manhattan, the Securian Financial Minnesota Open and the Maryland Club Open Challenger — was won by first-time-ever partners, namely Adham Madi/Marwan Tarek, Josh Hughes/Matthew Henderson and John Russell/Colin West respectively. Indeed, Tarek was playing not only in his first doubles tournament with Madi, but in his first doubles tournament, PERIOD! A former British Junior Open (in 2018) and Intercollegiate Individuals champion (in 2020) who capped off his Harvard college squash career by winning the deciding match in the 2023 national-team-championship finals, Tarek, however, had never even PLAYED doubles until this past summer, when as a summer guest at the Racquet & Tennis Club, he was introduced to the game by Madi and progressed at an incredibly fast rate from one month to the next. Trailing twenty-teens Columbia teammates James Wyatt and Rahul Sehrawat 10-4 in the fifth game of their quarterfinal match, Tarek and Madi rescued that game 15-13 and then beat Abhi Agarwal and Yash Bhargava in the semis and George Crowne (Tarek’s Harvard classmate/teammate) and William Kuhn in the final. They thereby became the first all-Egyptian team to win an SDA tournament in the Association’s 25-year history and subsequently backed up this achievement by winning the prestigious early-November Silver Racquets Invitational as well. Some months later Tarek’s company transferred him to Singapore for the next two years, but he made an impressive impact during his brief time on the SDA tour this past autumn and no doubt will be a significant factor when he returns as well.
In Minnesota one week later, Hughes and Henderson toppled both No. 1 seeds (and 2024 Canadian National Doubles champions) Adam Bews and Kyle Martino in the semis and Ashley Davies and Cam Pilley in the final. Then in Baltimore in early October, West and Russell wound up having to play five-gamers from the quarterfinals onwards, beating Matt Jenson and Mark Price, 15-13 in the fifth; saving a fourth-game match-ball against them in their semi with Bhargava and Lucas Rousselet; and winning the fifth game of their final against Madi and Kush Kumar with a four-point closing run from 11-10.
Two of the 2024-25 Big Three (which consisted of Stout/Arnold, Alexander/James Bamber and Khalifa/Callis) entered the fray at the Racquet Club of St. Louis. Both semifinals (Khalifa/Callis over Daelum Mawji/Charles Culhane and Bews/Martino over Alexander/Bamber) went the full five games. It was known by then that Bews would be returning to his native Scotland in November, and winning the St. Louis final would have enabled him to end his outstanding 11-year SDA career in a blaze of glory. But instead he suffered a right-calf muscle pull on the eighth point of the final that was so severe that he was unable to continue.
At the Big Apple Open in late October, hosted as always by the New York Athletic Club (NYAC) at the foot of Central Park, Khalifa and Callis again advanced to the finals, where they edged top seeds Stout and Arnold in one of the most captivating finishes in the nearly quarter-century history of this tournament. Leading two games to one but trailing 6-2 in the fourth game, Khalifa and Callis launched a gradual but steady rally that eventually tied the score at 8-all, after which it was point-for-point throughout a furious but fruitless battle to assert control that, almost inevitably, went all the way to 14-all. That (ultimately final) game took 22 exhausting minutes to complete, ending on a Khalifa backhand cross-drop volley from mid-court into the front-right nick. Arnold was so near the front wall on the last shot that, had it done anything but dead-roll out, he would have been able to return it. Immediately afterwards both he and Khalifa dropped their racquets to the floor, one out of frustration, the other out of relief.
At the Onwentsia Open in suburban Chicago one week later, after both semifinals — Russell/Martino over Andrew Muran/Thijs Van der Pluijm and Clinton Leeuw/Jaymie Haycocks (overcoming a two games to love deficit) against Bhargava and Rousselet — had again gone the five-game limit, Russell and Martino prevailed in four games, in the immediate aftermath of which Leeuw and Haycocks, pro-shop colleagues at the NYAC and partners for three-plus successful seasons — highlighted by three SDA tournament wins, including the 2025 U.S. National Doubles crown, which they won by rallying from 2-0, 11-5 down in the final against Russell and Steve Scharff — amicably decided to seek other partners, just as Alexander and Bamber had done after their early-season loss in St. Louis.
The men’s tour then moved to Toronto, which actually hosted both a full-ranking event (the Bentley Cup at the Cambridge Club) and a Challenger (at the Badminton & Racquet Club) on the same mid-November weekend. There were three matches that ended with a simultaneous-match-ball 15-14 fifth game, including the Challenger final, in which Matthew Dukarm hit front-court winners on each of the last two points to propel himself and first-time partner Georges Brozozski-Ryan to victory over Dylan Deverill and Elliott Hunt. Notwithstanding all that commotion in other parts of the draws, the Nos. 1 and 2 seeded Bentley Cup teams — Stout/Arnold and Khalifa/Callis — moved confidently through their respective halves, winning their semifinal matches 3-0, following which Stout and Arnold won the first game of the final but were held to single figures in each of the next three, unable to cope with Callis’s consistency or Khalifa’s prolific shot-making.
In the Sleepy Hollow Open just before Thanksgiving, former PSA veterans Pilley and Alexander paired up for the first time in a run to the winner’s circle that was topped off by a four-game final over Mawji and Culhane, following which, as noted, Alexander successfully teamed up with Callis in the last men’s event of the autumn in Wilmington, defeating Stout and Arnold in four games in the final.
The four women’s Autumn 2025 SDA tournaments were won by four different player pairings. In the season-opening mid-September Philadelphia Open, Lauren West, one of the pros at the host Germantown Cricket Club, and Gina Stoker — who had come within an unconverted fourth-game match-ball of defeating Kayley Leonard and Maria Elena Ubina in this event one year earlier — this time reversed that result in a 3-0 final, winning each of the first two games 15-14. Stoker then teamed up with Nikki Todd in a successful title defense of the Maryland Club Open crown they had won in 2024. Their route through the draw culminated in a four-game final over Leonard and Line Hansen, who then reached her second consecutive SDA final a few weeks later at the NYC Open at the University Club of New York, where she and Meredeth Quick had an impressive four-game semifinal win over Stoker and West before losing to Leonard and Todd, semis victors over Jackie Moss and Jess Davis.
A BAKER’S DOZEN
In the last women’s SDA event of the fall, Leonard and Ubina avenged their eight-week-old Philadelphia Open loss to West and Stoker in riveting fashion after trailing 1-0, 14-12 and later down quadruple-game-ball in the third game as well. Leonard and Ubina actually faced a total of 13 game-balls against them through the match’s first three games, since, after taking an 8-1 lead in the opening game, they then lost 12 straight points, eventually falling behind 14-9 before tying the game at 14-all. West responded with a forehand drive to perfect length down the right wall to rescue that game, but Leonard and Ubina, as mentioned, won all the key points at the end of the second and third and then raced off to leads of 5-1 and 10-2 against their increasingly dispirited opponents in the close-out 15-4 fourth.
When the SDA tour resumed in mid-January following a month-long Christmas/New Year’s Day hiatus, Leonard and Ubina similarly staged a noteworthy final-round rally at the University Club of Boston after trailing Stoker and Todd by the daunting score of 2-0, 7-1. At that juncture a pair of Ubina winners kicked off a game-ending 14-4 spurt that gave her and Leonard a degree of momentum that they never relinquished during the two games that followed. The men’s final also had a determinative inflection moment, but it did not occur until 13-all in the fifth game. Indeed Khalifa and Callis were fortunate to even be in a FOURTH game (much less a fifth), having survived quintuple-game-ball against them in the first game and been convincingly out-played in both the 15-7 second and the 15-11 third by Stout and Arnold, the defending 2025 MFS Boston Pro-Am champions, who were playing with more energy and aggression during that stretch. However Khalifa and Callis were able to reverse that trend in the fourth game and maintained a one- or two-point lead through most of the fifth to 13-11 before a Khalifa tin and a floor-hugging Arnold serve-return winner tied the score. Khalifa then pulled off the shot of the match — and probably the shot of the entire tournament — by knifing a severely-angled backhand volley that dead-rolled out of the front-right nick, an extraordinary salvo that he punctuated with a celebratory bellow. Then, at 14-13, he hit another backhand cross-drop that a lunging Arnold this time retrieved, but by then he was so stretched-out that he was unable to do anything more than scoop the ball slowly back at himself for a clear stroke call.
Both the men’s and women’s tours then moved on to the North American Open in Greenwich, where the women’s final was to a remarkable degree a mirror image of the Boston final between the same two teams 15 days earlier. This time it was Leonard and Ubina who won the first two games and later earned leads of 8-3 and 14-12 (triple-match-point) in the fifth game as well. But Todd then ended a long point with a forehand cross-court volley into the front-left nick, preceding a Stoker counter-drop winner after she made an excellent return of a Leonard straight-drop.
WAR OF WILLS
There were 21 hits on the subsequent simultaneous-championship-point, the first EIGHTEEN of which consisted of Todd and the left-handed Leonard hitting high forehand cross-courts at each other as the packed gallery watched this war of wills in morbid fascination. It was very much as if they were the only two players on the court, enmeshed in a deep-court sides game in which the rule was that one must hit the ball above the front-wall service line and beyond the floor’s service line. Neither was giving the other an opening to shoot and neither was going to take any chances by trying a risky shot. When Leonard finally broke the all-cross-courts string by hitting a ball down the left wall, Stoker’s response elicited a short Leonard cross-court that gave Todd, who had established front-court position in front of Ubina, a chance to hit a forehand straight-drop shot that clung too closely to the right wall for a diving Ubina to return. The Boston/Greenwich events confirmed the degree to which those two teams (neither of whom lost a game en route to their Greenwich summit) had established themselves as the two best teams on the SDA women’s tour.
In both the men’s North American Open final and the one at Heights Casino a few weeks later, it became clear once again which the best team on the men’s SDA tour had become. Khalifa and Callis earned competitive but convincing final-round wins over Pilley and Alexander in Connecticut and over Pilley and Hughes (five-game semis winners over Alexander and Arnold) in Brooklyn Heights. They then missed several of the late-winter/early-spring events, during which Haycocks won the U.S. National Doubles with Madi (with a 15-13 fourth-game final over Martino and Davies) and the Tompkins Cup (hosted by the venerable Racquet Club of Philadelphia) with Russell (via a 3-0 final over Muran and Sergio Martin); the young tandem of Mawji and Culhane triumphed in Denver and Cleveland (with final-round victories over Greg Crane/Ryan Mullaney and Hughes/Henderson respectively); and Marcus Sim Wei Jie and Henry Parkhurst got a default-win in their harshly abbreviated Creek Challenge Cup final against Leeuw and Travis Judson when Judson ruptured his right quadriceps tendon (14 months after incurring the same injury to his left leg) on the fourth point of the first game.
Scheduling conflicts had prevented Stout from playing in the North American Open (which he and Arnold had won in 2025) or trying for what would have been a sixth consecutive Johnson title — but they were back in action at the mid-April biennial Kellner Cup (whose $65,000 purse was the largest this past season), where they had been runners-up both 2022 (to Callis and Mathur) and 2024 (to Callis and Khalifa). There would be a rematch of that latter final in this 2026 edition as well, but only after both teams survived treacherous semis. Stout and Arnold, seeking the only major SDA championship that has eluded them during their extremely successful five-year partnership, were pressed to 9-all in the fifth game by Mawji and Culhane before the veteran pair ran off the final six points — and Khalifa and Callis fell behind Hughes and Pilley 1-0, 8-0, their aspirations for an undefeated season looking more remote with every passing point, before staging remarkable rallies in both that game (which they wound up winning 15-12) and the close-out fourth with a match-ending 8-1 run that surmounted an 11-7 deficit.
The two finalists (and top two seeds) then engaged each other in what represented the first Kellner Cup final-round rematch in the quarter-century since Mudge and Gary Waite out-played Willie Hosey and Jamie Bentley the first two times this tournament was held in 2000 and 2001, when it was an annual event before becoming biennial after the 2006 edition. But, unlike the 2024 final, in which Khalifa and Callis, leading 2-1, 13-8, barely escaped with that game 15-13 — when an exhausted Khalifa’s forehand reverse-corner from the back wall slowly and mesmerizingly drifted into no-man’s-land, creating just enough momentary confusion between his opponents as to who should retrieve it for neither of them to react in time to prevent the ball from taking a second bounce.— this time Callis and Khalifa seized control early with a seven-point first-game streak from 6-7 to 13-7, arm-fought their way from 10-11 to 14-11 in the pivotal second and broke open the third with runs of 7-0 (from 0-2 to 7-2) and later 6-1 (from 7-4 to 13-5) on their way to the 15-7 finale, which came when Khalifa rifled a backhand cross-court down the middle that neither of his opponents saw coming to clinch his team’s undefeated season.
In the several weeks that followed, Mawji and Culhane prevailed in the Buffalo Club Open — with a 15-13, 14 and 13 final-round win over Hughes and Henderson in which Culhane smashed forehand serve-return winners down the right wall to end both the first and close-out third games — and there was a pair of Challenger events. These were held at the Cynwyd Club in late April — where David Letourneau and Chris Longman defeated Canadians Nick Trail and Alex Spafford in the men’s final and Palacios and Madeline Perry captured the first-ever SDA women’s Challenger tournament — and the NYAC on Mother’s Day Weekend, during which Leeuw, the head pro of the host club, and his first-time partner Martin emerged victorious from five-gamers in both the semifinal and final rounds against Sehrawat/Wyatt and Crowne/Chris Sachvie respectively. Six weeks later the men’s season concluded on the third weekend in June at the inaugural de Ramel Cup in Newport, where Mawji and Culhane earned a four-game final-round victory over first-time partners (and fellow left-handers) Stout — who played the right wall for the first time in his nearly 20-year SDA career — and Muran.
The four post-North American Open events on the women’s schedule were each won by a different pairing, just had been the case with the first four events of the season. Stoker and West out-lasted Leonard and Ubina 3-2 in the final round of the U.S. National Doubles, following which Stoker and Todd won a straight-game final in Denver over Hansen and Kelsey Engman, whose semifinal match with former Trinity College teammates Lujan Palacios and Lily Taylor-French was briefly interrupted when a fire alarm went off between the fourth and fifth games. In the inaugural Palm Beach Open — one of seven sites added to the SDA calendar in 2025-26, the others being the tour stops in Minnesota, Toronto, Long Island, Rhode Island and two in Philadelphia, namely at the Racquet Club of Philadelphia and the Cynwyd Club — Leonard and Ubina avenged their seven-week-old U.S. Nationals loss with a 3-0 final over Stoker and West, who also lost two weeks later in the final round of the LocalWorld LA Open to Rachel Mashek and Olivia Walsh. Their five-game victory marked the only time in this past season’s 10 women’s SDA tour stops — counting the Canadian National Doubles, where Todd and Moss successfully defended their 2025 title — that neither Leonard, Ubina, Stoker, Todd or West made it to the winner’s circle.
SUMMATION
The Leonard/Ubina pair, by far the longest-lasting active team on the women’s tour, had a record of 3-3 in finals, having won in Brooklyn, Boston and West Palm Beach, while losing in Germantown, Greenwich and at the U.S. Nationals. Leonard, who got to the finals of every event she entered, also won the NYC Open with Todd, lost the Baltimore final with Hansen and teamed with her fiancé TJ Dembinski to annex the U.S. Mixed Doubles on the same University Club of Boston court where she and Ubina had staged their memorable comeback victory two months earlier against Todd and Stoker. Stoker’s four tournament wins — two each with Todd and West — tied Leonard for tops on the 2025-26 women’s tour. Todd was a double SDA award winner — having been voted both the Player of the Year and (with Stoker) Team of the Year — as was Khalifa on the men’s tour.
Of the 23 men’s events, Khalifa and Callis, as noted, went seven for seven (with Callis, as noted, being eight for eight with his additional win with Alexander in Wilmington). The only other multiple-tournament-winning duo was Mawji and Culhane with their Denver/Cleveland/Buffalo/Newport quartet. Strikingly, each of the remaining dozen ranking tournaments was won by a different pair of players, although Russell was a triple-winner (in Baltimore with Colin West, at Onwentsia with Martino and in the Tompkins Cup with Haycocks, who also won the U.S. National Doubles with Madi). The latter, who was this year’s recipient of the Most Improved Player Award, was a double-tournament-winner as well (by virtue of having won the R&TC Challenger with Tarek), as was Alexander, who triumphed with his Aussie compatriot Pilley at Sleepy Hollow and with Callis in Delaware.
The six events on the men’s Challenger tour, which is for players ranked out of the top 15 and was sponsored by Cache_Seven, an e-commerce platform and community that connects outdoor adventurers with professional guides to discover, research and purchase recommended gear, were won by the theoretical maximum 12 different players — Madi and Tarek at the Racquet & Tennis Club, Russell and Colin West at the Maryland Club, Brozowski-Ryan and Dukarm at the Badminton & Racquet Club, Cole Osborne (who also won the Canadian Mixed Doubles with Hollie Naughton) and Griffin Manley at the Pittsburgh Golf Club, Letourneau and Longman at the Cynwyd Club and Martin and Leeuw at the NYAC — thereby completely living up to the Challenger tour’s mission as the entryway for players to build their rankings. Of this sextet of Challenger champions, all but one were first-time partners (Letourneau and Longman had teamed up once before), as were 2025-26 SDA tournament winners Hughes/Henderson (Minnesota) and Alexander/Pilley (Sleepy Hollow) — seven in all, an unprecedented figure for one season in SDA annals.
Stout and Arnold, who had won a tour-leading four tournaments in 2024-25, advanced to the final round of all five SDA events they entered this past season, only to be denied each time by Callis and his partners Khalifa (four times) and Alexander (once). Those five players filled the top-five ranking positions (with Khalifa at No. 1), as did (sequentially) Leonard, Todd, Ubina, Stoker and West on the women’s tour. These established veterans should all be back in force next season, but so should the many players and teams who left an impressive imprint on this past season as well.