Anna Leigh Waters and the Pickleball Slam’s New Identity
At the Pickleball Slam, anna leigh waters is more than a headline name. She is the first player in the event’s four editions to arrive without first building a career as a tennis star, and that changes the feel of the night before the first ball is struck. In Hollywood, Florida, the fourth Slam brings a different kind of spotlight to a sport still trying to define its own center of gravity.
Why does Anna Leigh Waters matter to this event?
The answer is simple: this time, the event is not built entirely around tennis conversion stories. Waters, still only 19, enters as what many in the sport view as its leading figure. She has won 181 gold medals and 39 triple crowns, and she holds the PPA Tour world No. 1 ranking in singles, doubles, and mixed. In January, she became the first pickleball athlete to sign with Nike.
That matters because the Pickleball Slam has long leaned on recognizable tennis names to draw attention. The event awards a $1 million prize, is broadcast live on, and has featured Grand Slam champions including Andre Agassi, Steffi Graf, John McEnroe, Maria Sharapova, Michael Chang, and Andy Roddick. This year, Waters is the first player on the court whose reputation was made entirely in pickleball.
In a phone interview Saturday, Waters called that shift “huge. ” She added, “The Pickleball Slam is a big event. Pickle is in the name, so it’s kind of cool that we have finally, a legit, like, full-bred pickleball player. ”
What does the 2025 matchup reveal about pickleball’s growth?
The lineup says a great deal about how the sport is changing. Waters will partner with former WTA Tour world No. 5 Eugenie Bouchard against one-time ATP Tour world No. 4 James Blake and eight-time Grand Slam champion Agassi. Before the doubles match, two singles contests will set the stage. The format still borrows energy from tennis, but the balance is shifting.
Jon Venison, a sports executive and co-creator of the Pickleball Slam at GSE Worldwide, which is producing the event with Horizon Sports & Experiences, said email that Waters’ role alongside three former tennis professionals is “a clear sign that the sport is now producing its own stars and continuing to evolve on its own terms. ”
That evolution reflects a wider pattern. Tennis and pickleball have not always coexisted easily. Tennis clubs across the United States have converted courts to pickleball courts, while both sports have grown at the amateur level. Yet tennis still leads in spectatorship. In February, the USTA announced that tennis participation in the United States had increased by 1. 6 million in 2025 to a new high of 27. 3 million total players, growth of 54 percent since 2019. Pickleball remains one of the fastest-growing sports in the country.
How do players and organizers describe the shift?
Waters has already seen the event from the other side. She said it was “really cool” to watch former pro tennis players play pickleball and compete against each other in a sport that is similar to tennis but not the same. But she also made the case for a new kind of authority on the court.
“I do think that adding a professional pickleball player into the mix hopefully makes it more entertaining, ” Waters said. “Because you’ll see a little bit more nuance of the game than people who are really good at tennis playing pickleball. ”
The point is not just entertainment. It is legitimacy. For an exhibition built around star power, the presence of anna leigh waters gives the event a different claim: that pickleball now has elite players who are not simply visitors from another sport. The prize money, the live broadcast, and the past reliance on tennis legends all remain part of the story, but so does a quieter transition toward a pickleball identity of its own.
By the time the crowd settles into the arena, the familiar names may still do some of the work. Yet the most revealing part of the night may be the one Waters described in plain terms: a “full-bred pickleball player” standing inside a marquee event that once seemed to need tennis to explain itself. Now the question is whether the sport can keep making room for its own stars without losing the audience that tennis helped bring in.
