Anna Leigh Waters leads mid-year women’s pickleball rankings as doubles shapes order

Anna Leigh Waters stayed No. 1 in the mid-year women’s rankings, and the bigger story was not the familiar name at the top. It was the way the list once again treated doubles as the real currency of the women’s game, with singles only tangentially factored in.

Pickleball.com published the update on May 13, 2026, after the PPA Finals and with 10 PPA tournaments in the books, putting the tour halfway through the 2026 calendar year. That timing mattered because the rankings were not a decorative midseason snapshot. They sat inside a system that updates after every tournament and uses two different measures: the 52-week ranking, which counts each player’s best 16 results from the previous 52 weeks, and The Race, which counts only current-season points and decides who gets into the season-ending PPA Finals.

That structure explains why doubles keeps steering the conversation. On the PPA Tour, ranking points depend on event tier, with Worlds worth 3000 points, Slams 2000, Cups 1500, Opens 1000, and Challengers 125 to 500. In The Race, the top 8 qualify in singles and mixed doubles, while the top 16 qualify in men’s and women’s doubles. The math makes one thing plain: sustained doubles performance drives the hierarchy more than isolated singles results ever will.

The trend reached beyond one rankings piece. The Kitchen’s April 2026 women’s list also weighted women’s doubles more heavily than mixed doubles, using a roughly 70-30 split that put partnership play front and center. That list, too, had Waters at No. 1, and it pointed to the same conclusion the mid-year update did: women’s pickleball is being measured by how well a player holds shape with a partner, not just how dangerous she looks alone on a back court.

For retreat programming, that is the part worth copying. If the top tier is being sorted by doubles results, then weekend training should reflect it: more partner-based reps, more communication under pressure, more work on patterns that repeat with a different teammate at your side. The women’s rankings are not just telling the story of Waters at the top. They are showing where the sport is already moving, and the movement is toward doubles specialists who can make a pairing feel stable before the score gets tight.