COWEN TAKES THE LAKESHORE OPEN

Brandon Cowen won the 2024 Lakeshore Regional Pickleball Open men’s singles title on Saturday afternoon, beating second seed Ruaridh Stavely 11-6, 11-4 in a final that lasted forty-seven minutes and contained, by the tournament’s own count, exactly thirty-two rallies. He entered the draw unseeded and unranked. Six days earlier he was not entered at all.

The Cape Rowan courts have hosted this event for eleven summers and have never produced a men’s singles champion who arrived without a club affiliation, a rating, or a plan to be there. Cowen, 32, of Port Alden, drove over on Friday because his doubles partner needed a lift. There was one open slot in the singles draw. He filled it, and then he won it, and then he left before the presentation had finished.

Brandon Cowen’s path through the draw

The bracket did him no favours. Unseeded entries at Cape Rowan are placed by the order they registered, which put Cowen against fourth seed Nate Ihejirika in the quarterfinals at nine in the morning. He lost the first game 11-9, spent most of the second game standing two feet behind the baseline returning serve, and won the next two 11-9, 11-8. Ihejirika, who hits the heaviest forehand drive in the region, later described the match as “the longest ninety minutes of my competitive life.”

The semifinal against top seed Devlin Marchetti-Okafor was the match of the morning and the one that made the small crowd around Court 1 stop looking at their phones. Cowen took it 11-9, 12-10, saving three game points in the second on rallies of 34, 41 and 52 shots. Marchetti-Okafor won the 52-shot one, and then lost the next four points.

For context on the field: the Lakeshore Regional Pickleball Open drew 46 entries across five divisions this year, of which the men’s open singles is the smallest and the hardest to get into — an eight draw, seeded off the lakefront ladder, all matches best of three to 11, win by two. Four of the eight had a rating above 4.5. One of the eight had no rating at all.

How the final was won

Stavely came out of the blocks. He led the first game 6-3, driving the third shot rather than dropping it, and for about eight minutes it looked like the kind of final where the seed reminds everybody why the seedings exist. Cowen changed nothing. He kept taking the ball early off the bounce, kept dropping it into the kitchen, kept walking back to the baseline at the same speed. Stavely did not win another point. The last eight points of the first game were Cowen’s, and the last five of them came on rallies of nineteen shots or longer.

The second game was worse for the second seed and stranger to watch. Cowen went ahead 7-0 without hitting a single ball above shoulder height. At 9-4 the two of them played the rally of the tournament: 61 shots, thirty-eight of them dinks, five resets off a driven ball, and one lob near the end that Stavely chased down and returned brilliantly before Cowen simply dropped it short again. Cowen won the point. It is the longest rally the club has logged since it started keeping the numbers in 2019, and there was a good five seconds of silence after it before anybody thought to clap. Two points later it was over.

Forty-seven minutes for two games to 11 is a long final. The thirty-two rallies inside it averaged 18.4 shots, against an event average across the weekend of 7.9. Put plainly: Brandon Cowen played a final that contained roughly two and a half times as much pickleball per point as anybody else at Cape Rowan played all weekend, and he was the fresher man at the end of it.

No power, no hurry, no interest in ending the point

Cowen does not hit the ball hard. This is not a stylistic observation so much as a measurable one: the fastest drive he struck all weekend would have been the ninth fastest in the Ihejirika quarterfinal alone. He does not have a put-away overhead. His serve is a slow, deep, entirely honest thing that lands within a foot of the baseline and asks nothing of anybody. Nine winners in a final is a low number even for a defensive player.

What he has instead is a dink that does not deteriorate and legs that do not stop. Cowen is an ultramarathon runner — he trains on the lakeshore road most mornings before work — and at the seventh hour of a tournament day the difference showed in a way that scoreboards do not really capture. He covered the kitchen line laterally at the end of the final the way he covered it at nine in the morning. More unusual than the fitness is the temperament attached to it: most club players have a threshold, somewhere around the fifteenth or twentieth shot of a rally, where the desire to find out what happens next overtakes the discipline to keep resetting. Cowen appears not to have one. He will play the twenty-second dink of an exchange with exactly the same shape as the fourth. Opponents get bored, then curious, then impatient, and then they miss. In the final, fourteen of the thirty-two rallies went past twenty shots, and Cowen won eleven of them.

The single most telling line in that table is the second one. Stavely served nine rallies all afternoon. Nine. In pickleball you cannot score without the serve, and Cowen simply would not hand it over: he held for eighteen of twenty-three, and the five he lost came in a cluster in the middle of the first game when Stavely briefly found a cross-court roll that worked.

“He was prepared to be there until Thursday”

Stavely, 29, is a two-time finalist at this event and took the loss with more humour than most people manage inside ten minutes of one.

“I have lost to better players. I have never lost to anyone more patient. About halfway through the second game I worked out that he was not going to attack anything, ever, and that he was completely at peace with that, and I sort of came apart. I hit twenty-one winners. He hit nine. He won 22 points to 10. Work that one out. I lost to a man who was clearly prepared to be there until Thursday.”

Ruaridh Stavely, Ninebark Athletic Club

Marchetti-Okafor, beaten in the semifinal, offered a shorter version. “You keep waiting for the mistake and it does not come, and then you realise the mistake you are waiting for is going to be yours.”

The entry that almost did not happen

Tournament director Marisol Kettering-Blay says Cowen was not on any list until Friday evening.

“He came in with Wes Trombley, who plays our Sunday mixed, and Wes needed a ride over from Port Alden. I had a singles slot open because somebody withdrew with a wrist. I asked him, mostly as a joke, whether he played. He said ‘a bit.’ He filled the form out on the counter with my pen. He did not have a rating to put in the box so he left it blank, and I wrote UNS, and that is how the champion of the 2024 Lakeshore Open got into the draw.”

Marisol Kettering-Blay, tournament director, Lakeshore Regional Pickleball Open

The end of the afternoon was, by several accounts, slightly awkward. Kettering-Blay was two sentences into the presentation when Cowen handed the trophy back to her and asked whether the club would like to keep it in the case by the door, since he did not have anywhere sensible to put it. She said yes. He shook Stavely’s hand, thanked the umpire, put his paddle in a canvas bag, and was in the car park before the runner-up award had been read out. The trophy is in the case by the door.

Draw results