Anna Leigh Waters, the Soccer Prodigy Who Pickleball Stole

The greatest pickleball player in the world was a soccer prodigy with pro potential. Then another sport came calling, and it was too loud to ignore.

“When I write this story, people are going to read it and think you're embellishing or exaggerating. What would you say to those people?” I asked Clem McAuley, retired professional soccer player and Anna Leigh Waters' former coach at AC Delray Rush.

“I'm so glad you brought up that it would be easy to think I'm embellishing,” he said with a chuckle.

“I played professionally in Ireland. I've played with and coached and been around top-class players. I have never, ever met someone so professional. She practiced like it was the World Cup final. If you know Anna Leigh, what you see on the pickleball court is exactly what she was like on the soccer field from 12 years of age. There was no such thing as losing. Everything was about winning, competing, and always knowing, 'I want to be the best on the field.'”

If she returned to soccer right now, he added, she'd only need six months to land a pro tryout.

He's not joking. I believe him.

Anna Leigh Waters was a child prodigy. Like LeBron or Tiger before her, she's lived up to the hype, and then some.

Anna Leigh chose pickleball, but she could have been a star in any sport. She could play for any Division I NCAA women's soccer program. Even now, she has the potential to be a professional soccer player. A really, really good one.

Initially I assumed that was hyperbole; the most you could honestly claim was that the face of pickleball had once been a pretty good soccer player. Anything beyond that is a reach. Either wishful thinking, or a delusion propagated by the Kool-Aid-drinking, pickleball-obsessed who see the recognition of Anna Leigh as not just a great pickleballer, but a great athlete, as proof our sport is a serious one.

I was mistaken.

The Greatest of All Time: Past, Present, and Future

Anna Leigh Waters (Anna Leigh or ALW) is a freak athlete. Pickleball fans know this. Outsiders doubt it.

Pickleball doesn't look athletic, not to the casual viewer. The top 50 rankings are filled with tennis retirees and former college athletes who weren't quite cut out for the pro ranks of whatever sport they came from. From the outside, Waters' success looks like the obvious result of dropping an upper-percentile athlete into a nascent sport.

Honestly, it's not an unfair assessment. But it doesn't mean Anna Leigh isn't a prolific athlete. It just means we have a little less evidence to point to when we argue that she is. So let's consider the full body of evidence.

At 12, she turned pro. At 19, she has 205 gold medals, 45 Triple Crowns (gold in singles, doubles and mixed doubles at a single tournament), and sustained more than two years without losing a singles match on the PPA Tour. She’s a US Open Champion many times over, with back-to-back Triple Crowns there in 2021 and 2022.

In Major League Pickleball, Anna Leigh was the No. 1 overall pick in the 2023 draft and has racked up three event titles for the New Jersey 5s - the 2024 Mid-Season Tournament and Super Sunday belts in Columbus, Austin, and New York in 2026. The season-long MLP crown is the one trophy that has eluded her and the 5s, falling short in the final in both 2024 and 2025. 

She's the first pickleball athlete to sign with Nike. She was named to the TIME100 Most Influential People in Sports. She's the winningest player in pickleball history and the unquestioned face of the sport.

Leading pickleball analyst, and GM for MLP California Black Bears, Erik Tice puts it plainly, "At the young age of 19, Waters has clearly established herself as the most dominant woman in pickleball history."

Pickleball GOAT? Undoubtedly. And she's still got another decade or two to go.

If you happen to be in the market, you can shop Anna Leigh Waters' signature paddle, the Franklin C45 Aurelius here.

The Soccer Star That Was, And Maybe Still Is?

Anna Leigh Waters Shows off a Soccer Trophy, Takes on Defenders

Before becoming an inevitable force in America's fastest growing sport, Anna Leigh Waters was something else entirely: a soccer kid.

Not “played soccer growing up” like any decent athlete in their youth. Actually good. Two-points-per-game good. Score-from-anywhere good.

As a recreational data scientist and proud recipient of an A- in pre-calc, I've carefully analyzed the statistics from her U15 season and concluded the following: Anna Leigh Waters was an absolute points machine.

In her 2020–21 season with the U15 AC Delray Rush 2006 Girls Elite, Anna Leigh produced 46 goals and 31 assists in 38 outings, averaging 2.03 points per game. In a sport where nil-nil scoresheets are common, even one point per game is considered extremely efficient.

Manchester City didn't buy striker Erling Haaland because he's tall, blond, and looks like he was grown in a Norwegian laboratory. They bought the young star because he produced 1.2 points per game in the Bundesliga.

French club PSG paid €180 million for Kylian Mbappé in 2017, making him the most expensive teenager in soccer history and the second-most expensive player ever. Mbappé tallied 40 points in 44 matches for Monaco the season prior, just shy of a point per game.

I'm not comparing Florida youth soccer to European football. I'm making the point that two points-per-game is elite. ALW had 77 total points in 38 games. The next player on the team had 28. She didn’t just lead the team, she was the team's attacking economy.

That team won the SFUYSA U15 Fall '20 Championship, placed second in the 2020–21 Florida State Premier League, won the Palm Beach Gardens U15 Gold Tournament, and won the SFUYSA U15 2020–21 playoff championship.

McAuley wasn’t shy in offering that this team substantially outperformed its predecessors. AC Delray Rush Girls Elite is not a Florida powerhouse. But the years in which Anna Leigh wore number 10 for the club, they were.

ALW was clearly the star. McAuley credits the strength of their roster to how easy it was to attract top talent with Anna Leigh on the team. They began scheduling games around her pickleball to avoid stepping on the pitch without their most valuable asset. And when she was on the pitch, the competition strategized accordingly.

McAuley noted that most teams structured their game plans around neutralizing Anna Leigh. Opponents permanently marked her all game, their efforts largely futile.

“The other teams were scheming against her. They would create game plans to strategize against her and take her out of the game by marking her constantly,” explained Stephan von Lattorff, who served as Director of Coaching at AC Delray Rush during Anna Leigh's time with the club.

She was so impactful that the roster, the schedule, and usually both teams’ game plans were built around her. Oh, and she was a year younger than everyone else. In addition to playing with the boys, she played up a year for the girls. McAuley's assessment of all this was not subtle.

“I think if she'd stayed with soccer, she would have played with the National Team,” he said. “No problem.”

In his mind, Waters could have been the kind of midfielder you see in a World Cup or Olympic cycle, right in the middle of the field, controlling games with the same intensity she now brings to pickleball.

McAuley remembers his first time seeing the 12-year-old Anna Leigh in action.

“From the first training session, I was like, wow,” he told The Dink. “She stood out like a sore thumb… She’d push everybody at practice. Just different. Just a tremendous professional even at 12 years of age.”

He used to call her “Grumpy.” Not because she was difficult, but because she always had the face. Winning, losing, playing well, playing badly – same expression, same edge, same slightly terrifying refusal to accept anything below her standard. “The killer instinct, I call it,” said McAuley.

Anna Leigh usually played attacking midfield, because that’s where she could have the most influence on the game. She wasn’t just a “prolific finisher.”

“As much as she scored a bazillion goals, she was always elite at winning the ball back and distributing the ball.”

And there's proof. Lots of it. Countless video highlights showcase ALW’s abilities as a set-piece specialist, speedy striker, in-the-box finisher, midfield maestro, and natural box-to-box force.

Take this highlight for example. It shows more than a free-kick goal or an easy breakaway. Waters shows for the ball, exhibits an elite first touch and turn, distributes to a teammate, executes a perfect overlapping run, takes a touch into space with a defender on her hip, and shoots from distance with enough velocity to power through the goalkeeper's hands and into the back of the net. Goal.

Or this one. You only give certain players license to shoot on a set piece, let alone from that distance. Those players are usually the good ones.

Earlier in the game, a flawless penalty. Calm under pressure. You don't know how small the goal feels until you've experienced a penalty shot first-hand.

While not the best footage, we had to include the hat trick (goals at 0:45, 2:19, and 4:30). You get the sense that her teammates were always looking to find her; they were pretty comfortable doing so.

Von Lattorff echoed McAuley’s assessment. If she hadn’t left the pitch for pickleball, “She would definitely have potential to be a top professional player and have potential to play on the National Team,” he offered casually.  

McAuley went further: “I have maybe seen one other player, and that was a U20 national team player of Brazil… she was maybe on her [Anna Leigh’s] level. But I have not seen a better soccer player on the female side, for sure...In terms of her determination and intelligence, and how much she stood out physically," he told The Dink. "I mean, she was just athletically, both in her strength and her endurance, a force of nature.”

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Opportunities Came Calling

That’s high praise. One can only assume that a player of that caliber would have attracted interest from top clubs, college programs, and maybe even pro organizations?

That’s exactly what happened.

Leigh Waters, Anna Leigh’s mother, is a storied pro pickleballer with plenty of her own medals, often won alongside her daughter as doubles partners. She now coaches Anna Leigh, and is frequently visible courtside whispering strategy in her daughter’s ear.

She told The Dink that at last year’s PPA North Carolina Open, someone walked up to Anna Leigh and handed her an envelope. “The soccer coach wanted me to give you this,” he told her. Inside it were recruiting materials for the University of North Carolina’s women’s soccer team, Leigh told me.

Anna Leigh & Leigh Waters Talk Strategy on the PPA Tour

"Over the years, top clubs in the area would say, 'Clem, you can take over if you can bring her with you’,” Clem recalled, explaining that he was offered more than a handful of coaching jobs thanks to his star player. “Every team was chasing her."

Anna Leigh left AC Delray for a half-season to play for Weston FC, one of the more established clubs in South Florida. At tryouts, one of the directors approached Leigh and told her that Anna Leigh would make the club, but she'd be playing up a year. Conflicts with her pickleball schedule caused Anna Leigh to move back to AC Delray shortly after.

Then came the FIFA-endorsed Danone Nations Cup. According to Leigh, Anna Leigh was selected for a team chosen to represent the United States in Spain. The family ultimately didn't go. “We didn’t end up going because it was right around COVID.”

Von Lattorff recalled an opportunity to play in Germany, routed through Rush's broader network: a program in Kaiserslautern, with a U17/U19 girls' pathway tied to a women's second-division professional club, that could eventually lead to the first team. Waters' family was curious, but not exactly eager to ship a 15-year-old overseas.

Anna Leigh Waters at the World Cup and holding soccer trophy. Posted to her Instagram.

At 14, Anna Leigh was selected for an invitational featuring the top players in South Florida. McAuley drove across the state to Naples to watch her compete against the area’s best talent. After the game, he was approached by a representative from the Orlando Pride, a professional club in the National Women’s Soccer League.

“She’s a very talented player,” he told McAuley before asking, “What would it take to get her up to Orlando to go to trials?”

The Waters weren’t interested. Anna Leigh’s dad, Stephen Waters, Leigh and McAuley recognized that her talent would continue to open doors; they weren’t in a rush to walk through any of them.

Leigh recalls being approached by a man at the USA Pickleball National Championships in 2021 in Palm Springs who claimed to be a scout for the US Women’s National Team. He told her that Anna Leigh’s name was on a list of young talent for him to investigate, but “all of a sudden,” it wasn’t on the list anymore. He told Leigh that he “couldn’t figure out what happened to her,” until he “heard about pickleball.”

Leigh is careful about that one, admitting he could have been full of it, but even as folklore, it fits the pattern: soccer people had Anna Leigh on their radar.

Not Just Good. Different.

Retired professionals labeling her the best prospect they’ve ever seen. Endless highlights. Absurd stats. Interest from premier soccer organizations. Check, check, check and check.

Her profile – prolific scorer, high assist volume, heavy usage, multi-sport background – lines up with the traits that travel across sports: spatial processing, first-step quickness, balance, anticipation, body control, and the ability to make fast decisions under pressure. They're also exactly what make her so devastating in pickleball.

Kaitlyn Kerr, a former Duke Women's Soccer All-American, now a pickleball pro and Major League Pickleball emcee, sees the same thing.

Leigh isn’t surprised by the high praise, particularly when it comes to her daughter’s work ethic and drive. The common phrase she heard was, “that’s something you can’t teach.”

“I started hearing it when she was young from her soccer and tennis coaches and at first I was like ‘whatever.’ But then I kept hearing it. No matter what sport or whatever coach, those same things would come up.”

As Waters got older, her desire to improve only increased. “I mean, we could not miss a practice. We had to go to the girls’ practice and then stay for the boys’ practice. And she’s giving 110% in the second practice. She always wanted to get better. She always wanted to have a shooting lesson or foot skills lesson or do drills on her own. Just very, very self-driven, and a perfectionist.”

Anna Leigh was playing with the boys regularly. At first, they questioned it. “Why’s she here?” Before long, it was, “Where’s Anna Leigh?”

In absence of a physical advantage, ALW relied on her high IQ to compete with the boys. “It’s more physical, so she had to solve the game with intelligence… she could hang with them physically, but she wasn’t dominating, so she had to play smarter. That was good for her game.”

Anna Leigh is an athletic specimen. On the pickleball court, her strength, speed and endurance are readily apparent, as evidenced by her 45 Triple Crowns. But even one Triple Crown requires far more than just physical attributes to win, in a single day, three matches across three different events against the best in the world. Her athleticism makes her world-class, her intelligence and mindset make her an anomaly.

“She was just…intelligently, like way above everybody else. She would see spaces that other people didn’t see,” von Lattorff said, before later reiterating: “She is one of the smartest athletes I’ve ever seen.”

McAuley repeated: she practiced like it was the World Cup Final, every session. She always wanted to train. It didn’t matter if it was 6am or 10pm. During COVID, McAuley and ALW would sneak in early-morning and late-night training sessions. This was not a kid casually juggling two sports. This was a professional athlete before anyone knew what to call her.

“She was my captain on the field…we'd have a code,” McAuley explained. “I would shout ‘De Bruyne’ (Referencing Manchester City legend Kevin De Bruyne) and she would switch to the right wing, get a ball, bang, bang, pass through people, bang. And then we'd say another name, she'd go to the left wing, you know? It was just unbelievable.”

Combine unwavering drive and high IQ with her natural athleticism, and you’ve got the ingredients for a world-class athlete. That’s exactly what we’re witnessing in pickleball.

But everyone around her thinks it could have been whatever sport she chose.

“She could be a scratch golfer,” claimed McAuley. “If she concentrated on tennis, she would have been at Wimbledon. If she concentrated on soccer, she would have been on the National Team.”

As von Lattorff put it, “she’s a one-in-a-million athlete.”

But could she play for the National Team? Could she play pro, or even D1? We may never know, but Kerr believes her potential is simply too great to overlook.

“If Anna Leigh genuinely decided to lace up the cleats again, her athletic ceiling is so high that you simply couldn't bet against her,” she said.

This question isn't new, by the way. It surfaces in the pickleball zeitgeist every so often—most recently on an episode of PicklePod, when co-host Zane Navratil floated it to guests Hayden Patriquin and Gabe Tardio. Navratil waved it off with a joke: “What was she like, 12 years old, when she stopped?”

Until I started reporting this, my answer wasn't much different.

Two years ago she sat to my right and told Navratil and me, as her mother nodded along, that she hadn't completely closed the door on college soccer. “I thought about maybe, after pickleball, trying to play soccer in college, because I loved soccer so much,” she said during a guest appearance on PicklePod, pickleball's voted #1 podcast four years in a row.

Pickleball to Soccer. Too Little, Too Late?

Is it too late for Waters' soccer hopes? If you actually think about it, not really.

Sports history is full of sliding doors. Jordan played baseball. Deion played baseball. Bo Jackson played everything. But pickleball's version is even stranger, because Anna Leigh didn't merely switch sports and become good. She switched sports and became the new sport's gravitational center.

Waters is pickleball's current world No. 1 and has been nothing short of dominant across every format for years. She's 19 years old. She's big, strong, and fast, with a world-class sports IQ and a true competitor's appetite for pressure.

McAuley remembers a quarterfinal where Waters missed a penalty and fell apart afterward. He told her they wouldn't have even been in that position without her. She didn't want to hear it. She kept insisting she'd lost the game. The rain came down, everyone else left, and she was still on the field, processing one missed kick like a personal indictment. That's probably unhealthy in normal people. In elite athletes, apparently, it's called wiring.

Certainly she would need time to transition. To train and catch up. According to McAuley and von Lattorff, six months, to be exact. But as long as she took genuine interest in soccer again, Anna Leigh’s supporting cast thinks the rest is merely detail.

When Anna Leigh decides she’s interested in something, she becomes obsessed. “She is obsessive like that,” says Leigh of her daughter. “She only ever played one video game. It was Fortnite, and she did get obsessive about it. Like, she doesn't play it anymore. But, when she did play it, it was all the time, and she wanted to get better and better...If there's something she loves, she goes 110%.”

“To this day?” I asked.

And what organization, collegiate or pro, wouldn't want to roster the GOAT (of any sport); a social media influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers; a Nike athlete (that endorsement might actually be one of the few complications), who would arrive with a built-in PR campaign that most athletic departments and three-letter sports entities would kill for? Anna Leigh Waters could, and maybe should, be the most sought-after soccer recruit in the country. Even if it's a (very) long shot.

That's why I give this whole idea a 3% chance of actually happening instead of less than 1%. Bear with me while we have a little fun here.

This is an era where the WNBA's Caitlin Clark sells out stadiums they upgraded to from the half-empty venues her team played in the previous season. Where Netflix's Drive to Survive elevates F1 to a global phenomenon (the PPA Tour attempted their own version). Where media, content, PR and storylines are lightning in a bottle.

The PPA Tour and Major League Pickleball would benefit from the greatest marketing campaign of all time, so long as they could guarantee Waters' return inside 36-ish months. The US Soccer Federation and the NWSL, too. But not just them. How would her sponsors Nike and Franklin value a media opportunity like this? The headlines would wright themselves. Brand awareness on steroids.

The most plausible scenario, however unlikely, is a few bold, savvy marketers inside these organizations structure a partnership that brings the NWSL, US Soccer Federation, PPA Tour, Nike and Franklin together. Anna Leigh Waters gets a massive check to chase her first love and childhood dream. For 36 months, all parties benefit from consistent, compelling, hotly debated storylines and narratives. Unquantifiable levels of earned media for everyone involved.

Worst case scenario? Anna Leigh is back on the pickleball court in a couple years with over a decade of dominance left in the tank, and 10s of millions of dollars worth of PR for her brief side quest. Barring serious injury, of course.

Okay, let's come back down to Earth.

Why She Left Soccer Behind

Maybe her words from two years ago aren't enough to convince you she'd seriously consider a switch, so we presented a scenario to her mom.

If Anna Leigh's dream school offered a full ride, a few million dollars, and a guaranteed roster spot—and if Nike, Franklin, and the PPA all signed off—would she play a year of college soccer?

“Ha! If all of that other stuff could be sorted out, she would maybe slightly consider it,” Leigh said.

So you're saying there's a chance! Soccer was, by all accounts, Anna Leigh's first love. Why did she stop playing?

By around 15, the overlap had become impossible. Pickleball was growing. Sponsorships were starting. There was real money on the table, even if it wasn't yet the machine it would become. She loved soccer, but it's a team sport, and missing practices and games for pickleball started to feel like letting people down.

Pickleball meant a professional future that was already arriving. Leigh remembers laying out the pros and cons, and at one point—while the US Women's National Team's pay fight was in the news—telling Anna Leigh something that sounded absurd but was probably true: she was already earning more in pickleball than some National Team players were making in soccer.

Still, Leigh says she never wanted to take the sport away. “Soccer is your love,” she remembers telling her. “I would never take that away from you.”

But the risk of injury was too much to ignore. Waters was already struggling with persistent knee issues. Being far and away the best player on the field invited crosshairs. Hard tackles were all too common, and Leigh recalls one game in particular when Anna Leigh was tackled from behind. They left straight from that game to fly to Indian Wells for a pickleball tournament.

It was during that trip to Indian Wells that Anna Leigh walked into the kitchen of their Airbnb and told her parents she'd decided. They called McAuley minutes later.

She was done playing soccer.

How Good Was She? How Good IS She?

If she ever did make the switch, every sports-media account in America would post it. Half would make the same kitchen-violation joke. The other half would ask if it's even legal. Soccer Twitter would get mad. Pickleball Twitter would get defensive. College-sports Twitter would argue about eligibility. ESPN would book a segment. The Dink would write 11 newsletters.

And then, after all the noise, you'd still be left with the actual question: can Anna Leigh Waters play?

The honest answer is that it's probably unknowable unless someone gives her a serious environment and a few months to train. But the evidence says this much: she wasn't a cute crossover athlete who scored a few goals before finding pickleball. She was a dominant youth player on a competitive club, with college interest and reported pro opportunities on the table—and then she became the best player in the world in another sport before most athletes finish college.

The more people you talk to, the less it sounds like a bit. Her coach believes she had National Team potential. Her club's director of coaching thinks a few months of real training could get her back to an elite level. And her mother says soccer is where the obsession first showed itself. Anna Leigh didn't drift away from the game so much as make a deliberate choice, once pickleball, injuries, and reality all started pointing in the same direction.

None of this proves Anna Leigh Waters would have become a soccer star.

It proves the question is no longer ridiculous, and that somewhere, in an alternate timeline from the one that closed in an Indian Wells kitchen, it's a lot more interesting than we thought.

Editor's Note: I can't imagine this article will put the discussion to rest. Something tells me it will only fuel further debate. If you want updates as we find out more, drop your email below and we'll keep you up to speed.

Check out our conversation with Anna Leigh's former coach below. Clem McAuley joined PicklePod to reflect on his time coaching ALW, and tell us directy: how good was she?