From Small-Town Beginnings to Pickleball Prodigy: The Early Life of Anna Leigh Waters
Exploring the formative years and athletic journey of the world's youngest professional pickleball player
Introduction:
In episode 144 of "In Search of Excellence," host Randall Kaplan delves into the inspiring journey of Anna Leigh Waters, who ascended to the pinnacle of professional pickleball at a remarkably young age. Anna Leigh reflects on her upbringing in Clinton, North Carolina, where she spent her early years engaging in neighborhood games and gradually discovering her athletic talents. Despite initial disinterest in sports like soccer, her passion ignited over time, leading her to pursue tennis and, eventually, pickleball. She candidly shares how her family's relocation to Florida was pivotal in nurturing her athletic ambitions, setting the stage for her historic achievements in the sport.
This conversation offers a glimpse into the early experiences that shaped Anna Leigh's path to excellence, highlighting the importance of perseverance, family support, and the transformative power of embracing one's passions.
To listen to the full interview, visit the "In Search of Excellence" podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times
[1:59] Randall Kaplan: You were born in Allentown, Pennsylvania and grew up an hour outside of Raleigh (in Clinton, North Carolina). Your mom's grandfather was in the hog business and your dad was a manager of that hog business. How did that influence your life growing up?
Anna Leigh: It's kind of crazy because the first eight years of my life, the closest Target was an hour from where I lived. So it was honestly just a great place for me to grow up because it was just all the neighborhood kids and every day after school we'd get together and play like hide and go seek or Nerf guns around the entire neighborhood. That was really cool because where I live in Florida now, that really wouldn't be possible. Interesting enough, when I was about eight years old and I was playing tennis and soccer, I hadn't found pickleball yet, but my parents were like "maybe she's got some athletic ability." That's when they decided to move to Florida for me to pursue athletics. But before then, my coaches used to go up to my parents and they'd be like "is this your daughter? She's so unathletic" when I was like five and six. I was extremely unathletic.
Randall: Well that's interesting because you were born with the athletic gene - your mom played tennis in college, your dad played golf in college, your grandfather was a draft pick for the Chicago Cubs.
Randall: At one point you said you weren't very good. At what point did you realize "I actually had some real talent"?
Anna Leigh: I don't know, I just remember when I was like 5 years old and I used to play soccer, I'd just like run around the ball and I'd sit and pick flowers on the field. I used to cry to go to soccer practice - I really didn't like playing sports. I was into dance and going to school and friends. Then all of a sudden one year, my mom kept making me go to practice and then one year I was just like "wait, I actually really love this" and I kind of became addicted with sports and everything athletic. So I think it's not really that I was necessarily bad at it, I just really wasn't interested in it, so that made me bad at sports. But then all of a sudden I got really interested in it.
Anna Leigh: I think that point kind of happened when I decided to play tennis, because my mom my whole childhood was like "I don't want you to play tennis" because she played tennis and she didn't want to force me into something and force me into tennis. But when I said I wanted to play, she said okay and we'd drive like an hour to Raleigh where I used to play tennis. We'd go for like an hour lesson, sometimes maybe stay the night and do another lesson the next day. So that's when I started kind of really enjoying sports, and then I started liking soccer as well. It kind of just transformed that way.
Randall: You started playing soccer when you were 5 years old?
Anna Leigh: Yes, and then at seven or eight I decided to play tennis. But I played soccer at five, and then I didn't start playing competitive soccer until we moved to Florida. It was just like rec soccer.
Randall: But at what point did you say to yourself "okay, I'm pretty good"? Were you scoring five goals a game and everyone else zero?
Anna Leigh: No, it really wasn't like that. When I was in North Carolina, I really didn't think I was good at any sport, but my parents I think thought I was good. So when I moved to Florida, I think that's when I kind of started realizing I was, but I never - even now I think I'm good at pickleball, but I really don't think I'm good. I don't know, it's something weird in my head that I think is why I'm actually good and drive myself to play because I never think I'm good enough. So I'm always really working at things. But when I was younger and in Florida, I always thought I was going to be a professional athlete, but I didn't necessarily think I was good at the sport. It's like a weird mental thing, but I was like "I'm going to be a professional athlete, I'm going to be like Serena Williams one day" but I didn't necessarily think I was really good at that time.
Randall: You just said something that sounds absolutely crazy. You said you think you're good at pickleball?
Anna Leigh: Yeah, I think I'm good but I don't know, I...
Randall: You don't think you're great?
Anna Leigh: I don't know. I don't get the hype. I don't know. Looking at - I try not to look at stats, but when people tell me my stats I'm like "wow that's pretty cool" but then I'm like "don't think about that Anna Leigh" because I think the main thing is when athletes start to get complacent and think they're really good at something is when they get beaten or when they stop having the motivation to get better. So I think my parents have done a really good job too of keeping myself humble and being like "Keep Your Head On Track." Like anytime I play an opponent, even if it's first round, I'm nervous and I'm like "alright." I never think like "oh I got this match," you know, whereas some athletes feel that way about themselves - they think they're like the best thing that walks the Earth, but that's not me.
Randall: So at tennis and you're eight years old and your family says "alright, we're going to move to Delray Beach, FL from North Carolina" because you're a very good athlete. A lot of pressure on you at that age to say "oh gosh, I better make something"?
Anna Leigh: Yes, but also funny fact - we used to vacation at the Boca Raton Resort. I don't know if you've ever been there, but they loved it so much they were like "we just want to be on vacation all the time," which is what they felt Florida was. So I think it was kind of a mixture of both things. But my parents actually sold their house in North Carolina in a week, and they sold all their furniture in the house, which is like unheard of. And like even photos that were in the house, like the people who bought the house kept everything. So it was like insane - they were like "alright we're moving" and then the next week we were in Florida. It was crazy, like that doesn't usually happen.
Randall: Did they tell you why? Were you eight years old - "we think you have potential like in sports, we think it's better for the family, like we want to move to Florida, you'll have more potential to be around better athletes"?
Anna Leigh: They wanted that to be easier for me and me to have more access. They wanted to give me a chance kind of. They weren't banking on the fact that I was going to be good, but they wanted to give me the chance to kind of see if I would be good or not.
Randall: At this point in your life at 8 years old, what were you like as a kid?
Anna Leigh: I was very hyper and energetic. Like I always wanted to be doing something. Like I said, I love playing with neighborhood kids. I wasn't really the type of girl to just like sit in her bedroom and play with things. I did do that, but I was always like playing with the boys. Like at recess, I'd go play soccer with the boys. I was kind of a tomboy growing up. I'm a little more girly now than I was when I was younger, but I always loved playing sports and I always loved doing aggressive things. Like WWE was one of my favorite things when I was 8 years old and I'd like wrestle my dad on the bed and like put him in these headlocks and we'd fight and do all that. So I was like - and my cousin was my best friend, his name is Wright, and we used to just always play and fight and do sports outside. That was my thing.
Randall: Would your dad let you win these wrestling matches?
Anna Leigh: Yeah, I think he just wanted them to stop because I was actually doing the moves on him. Like WWE, they're not actually hurting the person, but I put him in the headlock and he'd tap out.
Randall: Who was your favorite male and female wrestler?
Anna Leigh: I really liked Roman Reigns. I think he was my favorite WWE wrestler on the male side, and then I liked the twins. I can't think of their last name, but they were these two twins, two twin girls, and one of them actually dated John Cena. So I like John Cena as well, but I think that's why I liked the twins. But then I liked Roman Reigns on the men's side.
Randall: Have you seen the Vince McMahon special?
Anna Leigh: I haven't, but my trainer knows I love WWE, or I used to love WWE, so he told me that should be my next watch.
[9:09] Randall: It's very, very good. If you're a fan, you have to watch it.
Let's move to September 2017, Hurricane Irma, which did 77.2 billion of property damage, Category 5 hurricane. Your power was knocked out for two weeks. What happened next?
Anna Leigh: So we had a dog in Florida, her name is Maggie. She just passed away a couple months ago unfortunately, but when the hurricane hit, my dad stayed with our dog because we couldn't really take her to Pennsylvania in the short amount of time that all this happened. So my mom and I flew to where my grandparents lived in Pennsylvania, which is in Allentown, which is where I was born. And we hadn't been there in a while, and I was doing my school work because I was home schooled and I did all the school work I can do for the day, and I'm kind of bored, right? Because I don't have any friends in Allentown anymore. So I'm just kind of bored and my grandfather's like "why don't you come play pickleball?"
At that time, I literally thought it was you hit a pickle like over the net with something because my mom and I played tennis. We're like "too good for pickleball" kind of at the time. We didn't really want to play.
Anna Leigh: A couple of days goes on, I refuse to play, we both do, like we refuse to play pickleball. And then finally we get to the point we're so bored that we go and play with my grandfather at the parks at like 9:00 AM one morning, and literally the first time we play, we're hooked. So we finished that session and then we're like "can we play again?" So then I think we played again at like 12:30, and then after that we're like "we want to play again." I think we played like three times the first day we ever played pickleball because we were just so addicted to it.
Randall: And then you went to Dick's Sporting Goods and looked for paddles. Did they have paddles?
Anna Leigh: So my grandfather had one good paddle from Dick's Sporting Goods, but we were just using like some crappy paddle, I don't know, some cheap paddle. And so we went to Dick's but we're like "man, these paddles are kind of expensive" and at the time they're like $65, and now you look at a nice paddle and it's like 300 bucks. So we were like, well, I think we bought one more good one and then we were like "if we continue to like it, then we'll go buy another one." So we got another good paddle and then we used the paddle so much that the good one actually broke by the time we had finished or by the time we had left Allentown. The paddle was broken and my grandfather like tried to glue it together because we had paid so much for this paddle. I think my grandfather played the broken, glued paddle for like a year or something like that. But we were just addicted, we played so much we literally broke the paddle the couple weeks we were there.
And my dad's calling us because the hurricane's over, he's like "you can come home now." We're like "no, we want to stay and play pickleball, sorry." So I think we stayed for two or three more days after we could have gone home just because we wanted to play more pickleball.
[11:49] Randall: Let's talk about the history of pickleball, which most people don't know about. Pickleball was invented in 1965 on Bainbridge Island, Washington by three friends at the summer home of Joel Pritchard, who was a neat little fact - had served as a Republican congressman from 1973 to 1985, and who, as the story goes, felt compelled to invent a new game to occupy their bored kids. Its name comes from a pickle boat, which for those who don't know - which I didn't know - is a hastily assembled rowing crew, and was a nod to the new paddle sport that they were cobbling together from parts of other sports including badminton, tennis, and even whiffle ball. Can you explain the rules of pickleball for those who don't know?
Anna Leigh: So pickleball, I kind of like to say is a mix, like you said, between badminton, ping pong and tennis. You can fit four pickleball courts on one tennis court. So when you're playing pickleball, just like tennis, you serve from one box crosscourt to the other box, but there is a kitchen line. So the serve has to go over the kitchen line. Now the kitchen - the kitchen line creates this kind of non-volley zone, which you can't step in unless the ball bounces and you also can't follow through into it.
Randall: Just to be clear, what you're saying is there's a kitchen area that I think is four feet from the net that runs parallel to the net?
Anna Leigh: Yes.
Randall: And it's a stripe just like a tennis [court], and if the ball lands in the kitchen, you can step in the kitchen, right? But if the ball doesn't land in the kitchen, your toe can't even touch the line or you lose the point?
Anna Leigh: Your paddle can't even hit the kitchen after you hit the ball or that's a fault.
Randall: So I just want to make clear what we're talking about here - there's a parallel line, and the kitchen is a space between that parallel line and the net?
Anna Leigh: Yes.
Randall: Okay, so keep going.
Anna Leigh: So after you serve, your opponent's return, you have to let bounce, which is a little interesting because in tennis you can serve and volley if you want. In pickleball, you can't serve and volley, so you have to let their second shot bounce and then you hit your third shot. And then you try to move into the net, which a lot of people when they first start playing pickleball, they think they should hit their third shot and stay back, but you should try to get to the net as quick as possible in pickleball.
So then once you're at the net, like you said, you can't step into the kitchen unless the ball bounces and you also can't follow through. So you might see us on TV hitting these like soft shots or these soft dinks over the net, and people have no idea - they're like "why don't you just hit it hard?" but you have no idea how much spin and how low it's staying over the net. So you don't want to hit that hard or else your opponent can just put that away on you. So we hit these soft shots, and then once we see the ball get a little higher over the net or a little less spin, that's when you can kind of be aggressive and hit the ball hard.
Randall: I think a lot of pickleball players, including me when you start playing, you just wail away.
Anna Leigh: I was the same way.
Randall: And then when you wail away, what you learn is the ball comes back faster than you hit it.
Anna Leigh: For sure, because someone is usually gotten - someone is at the net if you're returning a serve. You whale away, they are at the net already and they're just going to crush it back to you.
Randall: But I think when people do see the game on TV, they go "oh my gosh this is so easy, they're just lobbing the ball, lobbing the ball" but it's not.
Anna Leigh: No, it's not. It's not as easy as it looks on - everybody comes up to me after they've seen in person, they're like "wow this is way faster in person than it is on TV."
Randall: I mean like many things are a lot faster.
Anna Leigh: Yeah, it's fun, it's addictive for sure.
Randall: Very addictive, it's great. So you're homeschooled, and then what was that like? Did you feel like you were missing out on friends and the maturity and the social aspect of being around kids your own age, male and female?
Anna Leigh: So the first eight years of my life I lived in North Carolina and I went to a private school there, so that was through second grade. And then when we moved to Florida, my grandmother actually came down from Allentown to homeschool me - she was a school teacher. So third grade was my first year I started homeschooling. Funny thing, I actually hated going to school in North Carolina. I had mommy-itis so like I never wanted to be away - I'm an only child so I never wanted to be away. Anytime I went to school I just missed my mom so much.
So I think when I moved to Florida I was actually really happy that I didn't go to school because my mom was a stay-at-home mom, so I got to see her all day and we'd go play sports and play pickleball and stuff. So I absolutely loved it. But I think homeschooling really worked for me because like you said, if I hadn't been playing sports maybe I wouldn't have gotten that interaction with people. But when I was about 10, I would go play pickleball with my mom and all of her friends or all the people that play pickleball and they were older. So a lot of my best friends growing up were actually like people in their 20s to 70s, like this huge range.
I really wasn't around people my own age too much. I did play soccer so I had like my soccer friends, and they were my age, but a lot of my best friends were older. I was actually invited to - I was like 14 I think and one of my best friends was having their wedding, they were getting married and they asked me to be their flower girl. I was going to be like the oldest flower girl ever, but it just shows you how like I was so young but I had these friends who were older than me.
[17:03] Randall: So, in November 2017, two months after you came back from Pennsylvania, you played in your first tournament. I think it was the Delray Beach Gamma tournament. And funny enough, you didn’t even sign up for it.
Anna Leigh Waters: [Laughs] That’s right. We didn’t even want to play the tournament. We were just playing for fun. All the people in the Delray Beach Pickleball Club, where we started playing after moving back from Pennsylvania, kept saying, “You need to play this tournament.”
Randall: So, they convinced you?
Anna Leigh Waters: They did! They found us partners, signed us up, and we just showed up. We didn’t even know what level we really were. They signed me up for the lowest level and my mom for pro, which was where she started.
Randall: So, you started at the lowest level?
Anna Leigh Waters: Yes, I started in the lowest level. Mid-tournament, they bumped me up to 3.5 because they realized I was too good for the lowest levels.
Randall: For those who don’t know, what do those numbers mean?
Anna Leigh Waters: The numbers classify players into levels, from beginner to advanced. A 3.0 is usually a beginner level, and it goes up from there. 4.0 is intermediate, 4.5 and above is advanced.
Randall: What’s your number now?
Anna Leigh Waters: My DUPR is around a six, I think.
Randall: Got it. So, in 2018, your mom went pro and started playing doubles. Then something unexpected happened, right?
Anna Leigh Waters: Yes, a lot of our good fortune has come from things not going according to plan. My mom’s partner couldn’t make it to the Texas Open in Dallas. We already had our flights booked, so my mom asked me if I’d like to play with her.
Randall: And you said yes?
Anna Leigh Waters: Of course! We thought it would just be something fun. We ended up getting second in the tournament, losing in three games to the team that won the finals.
Randall: That’s incredible.
Anna Leigh Waters: It was! After that, my mom decided I was ready to play pro.
Randall: And then, in January or February, something big happened, right?
Anna Leigh Waters: Yes. A few months later, we beat the number one team in the world, who hadn’t been beaten in over 50 matches.
Randall: Wow. You were just 12 years old at the time, making you the youngest professional pickleball player ever.
Anna Leigh Waters: Actually, when we got silver in Texas, I was 11. So technically, I turned pro at 11.
Randall: That’s amazing. What was going through your mind at 11 years old?
Anna Leigh Waters: Honestly, I don’t think I fully understood what was happening. And I think that worked to my advantage. I had no pressure, and I was just having fun. I’d hit a great shot and laugh to myself, like, “Wow, I’m 11, and I just did that!”
Randall: So, you weren’t intimidated by older players?
Anna Leigh Waters: Not really. I felt like I was their age, even though I wasn’t. Now I’m 17, and I still play against people 10 years older than me, but it doesn’t feel like there’s an age gap when we’re on the court.
Randall: Do you think that mindset helped you succeed?
Anna Leigh Waters: Absolutely. When I was 11, I had no expectations and no pressure. I was just doing what I loved, playing with my mom, and having fun. I think that’s why I played so well.
24:24
09:12 - Anna Leigh's First Pickleball Game
11:49 - History and Rules Of Pickleball
17:09 - Anna's First Tournament 17:03 Delray Beach Open
38:56 - Anna Leigh's Parents
49:30 - How to Master Pickleball
54:13 Different Leagues in Pickleball
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