SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. — Professional athletes aren’t supposed to lose to 12-year-olds. But most 12-year-olds weren’t like Anna Leigh Waters in 2019.
Waters was in middle school when she turned pro in pickleball and quickly showed that she was headed for big things, to the shock of her much older opponents.
“When I was younger, I didn’t really understand it, but a lot of people were treating me poorly on the court or would get pretty upset [and] call me names,” Waters told NBC News. “But now that I’m older, I realize the feelings they must have been going through losing to a 12-year-old. I could see how that could get people to maybe do things that they characteristically wouldn’t do.”
Seven years since her debut, Waters, 19, is the No. 1-ranked female singles and doubles player in the world and widely considered the greatest to ever compete.
“It’s her, and there’s not really an argument that it could be anyone else,” Professional Pickleball Association CEO Connor Pardoe said at this weekend’s finals. “She wins everything. She’s virtually unbeatable.”
Pardoe is referring to Waters’ 194 career gold medals on the tour. And her 44 triple crowns for claiming gold in singles, women’s doubles and mixed doubles at a single tournament. Both are records, regardless of gender.
Waters isn’t dominating only on the court. Sports Business Journal estimated she was making more than seven figures before she signed lucrative multiyear deals this year with Franklin Sports and Nike — becoming the first pickleball player to sign with the latter sports behemoth.
Her latest triumph was winning the PPA women’s and mixed doubles championships Sunday in this Southern California beach city, where she arrived earlier in the week wearing head-to-toe Nike. The company recently made her signature shoes, but they remained in a backpack because she was saving those for actual matches. She said the apparel and footwear deal “happened so fast.”
“I remember signing the contract. I said to my mom: ‘How is this even real? Did I actually just do that?’” she said.
In fact, not much of her life feels real, she said, considering she fell into pickleball at 10 years old after having learned to play with her grandfather and his retired friends, all in their 70s and 80s.
Waters grew up in Clinton, North Carolina, until she was 8. In 2015, she and her family — her mother, Leigh, and father, Stephen — moved to Delray Beach, Florida. Needing to evacuate the area with Hurricane Irma approaching in 2017, they temporarily moved in with Leigh’s father in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
To take their minds off the situation back home, the family picked up paddles — and then never put them down. Two or three times a day for the next two weeks, they all got out there with the retirees. What stood out the most, they said, was seeing three generations competing at relatively similar levels. It’s nearly impossible in other sports, including the often-compared tennis, with much larger rackets and courts.
After they returned to Florida, they found a pickleball club, “and the rest is history,” Waters said.
Her mother loved it so much that she quit her job as a lawyer to pursue it full-time. That experience helped Leigh, a former college tennis player at the University of South Carolina, to quickly transition into professional pickleball. Within a couple of years, she was the No. 1-ranked singles female player in the country.
When her partner in a doubles tournament unexpectedly had to drop out in 2019, she called on her daughter — at 12 — to step in. They would go on to dominate pickleball tournaments together, claiming multiple league titles as a mother-daughter pair.
“The coolest thing in my life was getting to play with her, getting to sort of be friends and teammates,” Leigh said. “We had that mother-daughter intuition on the court. We knew what each other was doing; we knew where each other was going to be on the court. And I think that really helped us be a successful No. 1 team. The memories that we created on the court together are really special.”
Leigh tore an ACL at the 2022 nationals, essentially ending her competitive playing career at age 43. Wanting to stay in pickleball and continue working with Anna Leigh, she became her daughter’s coach and has led her to the most successful career in the sport.
“I love her as my coach because I feel like she knows exactly what I need in every moment,” Waters said. “Not only is she maybe the smartest strategic mind in the game, she also is my mom, so she knows how I respond to coaching and what coaching to give me.”
Ben Johns, 27, a longtime doubles partner of Waters who is considered perhaps the best-ever male pickleball player, said that watching Anna Leigh play, “there’s not much she can’t do well.”
He describes her as a well-rounded player who is more aggressive than the average pro.
“She’s able to attack from a lot of different areas on the court, which makes her dangerous in any different position,” Johns said. “So when you’re playing against her or with her, you can see the pressure that she applies to other players. That is really the name of the game.”
You could see that in the semifinals of the mixed doubles tournament Saturday.
After Johns and Waters took a late lead against the No. 2-ranked team of Anna Bright and Hayden Patriquin, Bright hit a deep, looping shot that hit the back line. It would have been a huge point that could have swung the result the other way, yet Waters remained calm in the moment. She backpedaled, spun and hit a hard backhand shot that Patriquin returned into the net.
“Oh. My. Gosh,” the commentator said on the broadcast before repeating it again. “Oh. My. Gosh.”
Johns and Waters won moments later to advance to the championship.
Aside from the PPA, Waters has also participated in outside events like the Ares Pickleball Slam 4, where she and former tennis star-turned-pickleball player Genie Bouchard faced tennis legends Andre Agassi and James Blake in a “Battle of the Sexes” format in April.
Agassi, who has eight Grand Slam tennis titles, said on “The Kitchen Pickleball” podcast that Waters is “one of the great competitors I’ve ever seen in sports, period.”
Leigh Waters said those experiences are why she doesn’t regret having allowed her daughter to turn professional before she even became a teenager.
“I had a cardboard cutout of Andre in my basement when I was growing up playing junior tennis,” she joked. “He was an idol of mine. So now [Anna Leigh is] hanging out with Andre and Steffi” Graf.
Hanging out with celebrities is great, Waters said, but she has one major bucket list item she wants to eventually check off: competing in the Olympics.
“I always grew up watching the Olympics, and I always looked forward to maybe competing one day for the United States,” Waters said. “At that time, it was tennis or soccer. But to compete in an Olympic sport and maybe be a part of the reason why it’s an Olympic sport, I think would be even more special.”
Pickleball isn’t part of the 2028 Games in Los Angeles. The new sports are flag football, squash, baseball, softball, cricket and lacrosse.
Adding pickleball in the future, however, seems possible based on its growing popularity.
According to the 2026 Sports & Fitness Industry Association Participation Report, it was the fastest-growing sport for the fifth consecutive year. More than 25 million people played pickleball in 2025, up 479% since 2020.
That growing interest has been monumental for the success of the pro tour.
“Revenues are way more, more people are playing, more people are watching, TV is now getting introduced to the game,” Pardoe said. “This weekend we’re on Fox national. Last weekend we were on CBS. So I think the game, it’s really professionalized. It’s really changed.”
“It’s been fun to see big sponsors like Carvana and others come into the sport, gambling coming into the sport, and seeing these players really be able to make careers out of this,” he said.
Pardoe said that when the league started in 2019, Waters was paid $1,000 for winning a gold medal event.
“This year I’ll pay her over 2½ million dollars.”
He didn’t hesitate when he was asked about the importance of marketing a superstar like Waters. She’s the total package when it comes to performance on and off the court.
“Having Anna Leigh is a dream come true,” he said. “When you think about having to start a professional tour, a professional sport, the first thing that people say to you is: ‘Well, who are your stars? Who are the best people that are playing?’ And the fact that we have someone like Anna Leigh, who is so young and so dominant and interesting and fun to follow and charismatic ... I met her when she was 12 years old, and you instantly knew she had it.”
Waters was homeschooled all through high school, and at this moment, she has no plans to attend college. She says she’ll consider it after she retires from the sport, though that could literally be in decades.
Her goals right now are simple: maintain her No. 1 overall pickleball ranking for as long as possible, help grow the sport and continue to build her empire off the court.
Maybe one day she’ll even aim to move out of her parents’ house. But when you’re traveling 30 to 40 weeks a year, it really doesn’t make much sense to put down roots.
And this could be just the start.
“I feel like sometimes I’ve lived a full life, and I’m only 19,” she said. “Because I turned pro at such a young age, I’ve experienced in my pickleball career what a lot of people would experience at 30-something. But I’m 19, and I’ve had almost a 10-year career at this point. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, though.”
