Name: Meet this pro pickleball player earning six figures at 16 years old
Uploaded: 2023-03-30
Duration: 8 min 40 s
Description: Anna Leigh Waters is the top female pickleball player at 16 after becoming a professional player at 12. Waters won eight triple crowns in 2022 and is coached by her mother Leigh Waters, who is also her doubles partner. According to her rep, she now earns a high-six-figure salary and is sponsored by Fila, Paddletek, and Carvana among others.

Anna Leigh Waters is the top female pickleball player at 16 after becoming a professional player at 12. Waters won eight triple crowns in 2022 and is coached by her mother Leigh Waters, who is also her doubles partner. According to her rep, she now earns a high-six-figure salary and is sponsored by Fila, Paddletek, and Carvana among others. 

Meet this pro pickleball player earning six figures at 16 years old

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Anna Leigh Waters is the top female pickleball player at 16 after becoming a professional player at 12.

Teen pickleball player Anna Leigh Waters earns six figures

At the beginning of the year. This was my first ever triple crown at the end of the year. This is actually my eighth triple crown of 2022. This is the biggest trophy I have ever received. I'm Anna Lee Waters. I'm 16 years old and I'm the number one female professional pickle ball player. Mhm. Pickle ball has become so popular because anyone can play, any age can play and any skill level can play. You can have fun, you can be competitive. It's just a sport for everyone with the first pick in the 2023 major league pick a ball draft. The new Jersey fives select Anna Lee Waters so good everywhere on the court. There is no weakness in this young lady, Anna Lee was unquestionably the number one pick I think for everybody in the draft, people are picking men and women and to have a number one pick that was a female player and to have more women's picks in the top 10 than men was really remarkable and says something about pickle ball. She is a young phenom ranked number one in the world, both in singles, mixed doubles and women's doubles. She is the most dominant player in the game at the tournament of champions. I won the most or had the most points in that tournament. I was ranked the number one women's singles player at 14 years old. I feel like the achievement that I'm most proud of didn't actually happen this year. It happened in 2019 when I won nationals with my mom. I remember after we won the match, she like jumped and then she started like running around the court and I was like chasing her, like wanting to hug her and like celebrate with her waters and waters. It was our first huge tournament that we went together. I think I had an out of body experience. We had reached a goal that, you know, that we had set because I never thought of pickleball as a job. But at the same time, like, I guess it kind of is, it's a very fun job, especially this year. A lot of big companies have gotten into the sport. I've also seen a big growth in like celebrity pickleball. I've had a lot of sponsorship opportunities. I have an agent now. I am so young and to, you know, learn as many things as I'm learning and, you know, be a part of sponsorship deals and learning about contracts. Sometimes I'll see like the checks that come in and I'm like, save it. I'm saving, I'm put in the bank. I try not to spend my money. You see someone like Michael Jordan who can like design their own shoe and then I'm sponsored by. So I'm kind of designing a shoe with them. It's just kind of cool that I can be kind of grouped into like an athlete that's making their own shoe, which, which is amazing. Annie and I started playing pickle ball at the exact same day, the exact same second, we evacuated our home in Florida due to a hurricane and we went to visit my father who lived in Pennsylvania and he asked us, you know, do you want to go play pickle ball? And at first we were kind of like, no, because we didn't know what it was. And I was pretty young. I think I was 10. So we thought it was an older person sport, but we went and from the moment we stepped on the court, we were, we were hooked. First time I hit the ball, I was like in love with the sport. We played like three times a day for like two weeks straight while we were up there. From when I first started playing, I played with my grandfather and my mom and I can still play with my grandfather and my mom. It's fun, but it's also embarrassing. Uh, as I got older and older, obviously, I got worse and worse and as she got older, she got better and better. Unfortunately, at the previous national tournament Lee was injured. So when Anna Lee was going into a finals match, she had nobody to warm her up. So I actually warmed her up. I really don't know the outcome of the success of the warm up, but she won. So I guess I did something right. Anna Lee and I play a few times a week. Some of that is playing, some of that is drilling, watching Annaly compete. She's feisty. She's an animal. She's an absolute beast on the court. I'm a full time student, but I am also a full time professional pickleball player. So hopefully I'm gonna make a career out of this. You got that right on his mic. Can you send it to me? Yeah, when I'm home, I usually play pickle ball five days a week. I usually drill like two times a week and then I'll play games three times a week. If I'm drilling, it's around two hours. And if I'm playing games, it can be anywhere from like 2 to 3 hours. And I'm usually in the gym five days a week as well. I would say average in a day, I'm working out like four hours and even on my off days, I'm doing either some kind of cardio or walking. She started off as a soccer player and tennis player converted, I think at 11 and she learned the game went pro at 12 lightning quick hands. Great court awareness, great court coverage. I have a lot of different skill sets from different sports for soccer. It was, it's definitely like the footwork and the fast sprinting and the lateral movement and stuff for tennis. It's definitely the form. The form is very similar if you watch tennis and pickle ball. But there is a big difference between like strategy and pickleball and tennis. So I had to learn that Anna Lee and I had come from tennis and the minute I stepped on the court, I just wanted to hit the ball hard and everybody kept telling us like you're not playing correctly. This isn't how you play. You have to hit soft, you have to hit these dinks. But it's just what came so true to, to me and Anna Lee was this power game. So we just continued with our game. And the next thing you know, we were winning national championships at the pro level and we were known for our aggressive style of play. A lot of people ask the question like, how do you guys play on the court together? Isn't it hard that she's your mom and that she's your daughter is in the dynamic. Weird. But I feel like for us it's the opposite. Like we have this mother daughter intuition where we know where the other one's gonna be on the court. And if we miss a shot, we know the other person is not going to be mad at us. So we just feel like you know, we can play how we want to play. We don't have to worry about disappointing our partner because no matter what happens on the court, we're a family and that's what families do. They stick together. I travel with not only my mom but also my dad win or lose. Me and my family always go out to eat and I have a really special bond with my grandmom. She's been home schooling me from third grade on, I'm in 11th grade. Even before I started playing pickleball, I was home schooling and it just really worked out because I couldn't travel and do all the things that I'm doing with pickleball right now becoming a professional athlete. I am so proud of Anna Lee. Her coaches and her other sports have always told us what an athlete she was and what potential she had. But you still don't necessarily go to like, oh professional athletes. This is probably a very futuristic goal, but I want to play pickle ball in the Olympics one day I grew up watching the Olympics and I think it would be really cool to represent my country. And I also want to see pickleball grow like in other countries. I also want to see pickle ball grow in like high schools and get younger kids involved. And that's something that I'm working on now. So in the beginning of this year, one of my goals was to get a triple crown and I ended up getting eight this year, which was amazing. If I've accomplished the goal, there's still something better you can do. So I feel like next year I'm gonna try to get nine triple crowns, uh, which would be, might be difficult, but I'm gonna try to do it. I'm just really, you know, enjoying the ride and I wanna keep going as long as I can. Uh When we came home, we decided we were going to get a ping pong table. I think we played about two weeks before Anna Lee got so good that nobody wanted to play with her anymore. And I don't think we've played ping pong since.