🏓 Meet the 18-Year-Old Pickleball Player Making $2M/Yr

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A quick recap from my trip to Eugene, OR:

• It’s a hard place to get to

• Why is the stadium so far from campus?

• The Gophers are not a good football team (failed to cover a 25.5-point spread)

• Good bus infrastructure

My official stadium game day review is live now.

In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: Meet the 18-Year-Old Pickleball Player Making $2M/Yr

📉 Biggest Loser: The Utah Jazz Just Lost Over $16 Million (On Purpose)

🏆 Winner’s Circle: Inside the Most High-Tech Hockey Rink Ever Created

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🗞 The Big Story

How does an 18-year-old pickleball player make more money than the top 8 WNBA players combined?

Anna Leigh Waters: Meet Anna Leigh Waters. In 2017, when she was just 10 years old, she started playing what she remembers calling “an old-person sport.” Still, after a couple of games, she was hooked, and within a year, she was already playing in pro-level tournaments with her mom.

And as pickleball’s popularity exploded in 2021 and 2022, Waters found herself ranked as the sport’s top female player at just 14 years old, a position that proved incredibly lucrative.

For starters, Waters’ United Pickleball Association contract alone nets her more than $2 million per year, which is more than the combined salaries of the top 8 WNBA players:

1. Jackie Young (LV): $252,450

2. Emma Meesseman (NY): $249,244

3. Kelsey Mitchell (IND): $249,244

4. Jewell Lloyd (NY): $245,508

5. Kahleah Cooper (PHX): $245,059

6. Arike Ogunbowale (DAL): $241,984

7. Satou Sabally (PHX): $215,000

8. Alyssa Thomas (PHX): $215,000

Total: $1,913,489

But that’s not even the craziest part.

Endorsements: Because Waters’ position as the top female star in Pickleball has also opened her up to off-court endorsements with some of the biggest brands in the world, helping her earn what her agent has described as an additional “mid-seven-figures” annually.

• Delta

• DoorDash

• RXBar

• Ulta Beauty

• Fila

And with her apparel and paddle deals set to expire at the end of this year, it’s likely that her annual earnings could increase even more in 2026.

Rob Schaefer actually has a really good breakdown about what Waters is working on next to continue her dominance both on and off the court. Go check it out now in the Sports Business Journal.

📉 Biggest Loser

The Utah Jazz just lost over $16 million… on purpose, but it could end up being one of the smartest things they’ve ever done.

Local Media Rights: Traditionally, NBA teams have sold their local media rights to regional sports networks for incredibly high annual fees. However, as people have continued to cancel cable, these RSNs have started to go out of business, leaving some teams broadcasting games on local channels for free or (to generate revenue) inventing ways to stream them.

That’s why, for the first time ever this season, 29 out of 30 NBA teams will be broadcasting their local games through their own direct-to-consumer streaming apps, which range in price from $14.99 per month to over $300 per year.

Early Adopters: The first teams to move to these streaming apps were the Suns and the Jazz; however, at the time, it seemed ridiculous for them to be giving up over $30 million each in reported annual rights fees from RSNs. Especially when you consider the fact that the Jazz only gained back about $16 million through advertising and subscriptions in their first year.

But now, with data showing that 30% of the NBA’s local broadcast audience comes from DTC streaming (a number expected to reach 50% eventually), it seems the NBA might be scheming up something much bigger here.

The Real Goal: As Tom Friend points out in the Sports Business Journal, it’s actually Adam Silver’s ultimate goal to bundle all of these local streaming apps together and sell them as one package to a streaming platform like Amazon, YouTube or Apple, essentially creating the NBA version of an NFL Sunday Ticket, allowing fans to watch “any game, at any time, regardless of geography.”

And given the fact that the NFL just sold Sunday Ticket’s rights for $2 billion per year, the NBA might actually be onto something here…

🏆 Winner’s Circle

This is the most high-tech hockey rink ever created, but not for the reason you might think.

NHL Rink Water Usage: If you’ve ever been to a hockey game before, you might have thought to yourself:

How much water do NHL teams use to make all of this ice? 

Well, the answer is: a lot. That’s because an NHL rink contains 17,000 square feet of ice, and at an average thickness of about 1 inch, that’s over 12,000 gallons of water that’s required to make ice from scratch.

For context, that’s the equivalent of an entire month of water for 10 US households, meaning it often takes arena staff up to 20 hours to flood just one rink, even at a rate of 600 gallons per hour.

A Better Way: While it is true that most NHL teams will only fully replace their ice once or twice per year, that still doesn’t account for the constant resurfacing and patching that takes place over the course of the season, resulting in a single professional rink using over 120,000 gallons of water per year.

And even though most NHL teams just have all of this water piped in directly from the city supply, when the Seattle Kraken built their new $1.15 billion arena in 2021, they decided to source their water a little differently.

Kraken’s Creative System: It’s no secret that Seattle gets a lot of rain, over 39 inches per year to be exact, which naturally led the designers of Climate Pledge Arena to think, what if they could collect all of that water to use for their rink?

So they installed a 15,000-gallon underground tank to collect rain runoff from the arena’s 160,000 square foot roof. This water is then sent through a filtration system and used to flood the rink or resurface the ice throughout the season. Meanwhile, all of this is tracked by an automated system that alerts arena staff when the tank is running low.

However, given that the arena could collect a million gallons of water per year from rainfall alone, I’m not sure they have to worry about running out of free water anytime soon.

⏱️ In Other News

• Is Jake Paul going to… die?

• An exclusive look inside the NHL’s ‘Situation Room’

• Kamala Harris, future WNBA commissioner?

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👋🏻 Happy Friday!

I’ll be spending my day at the University of St. Thomas’s brand-new, $250 million hockey rink (hopefully) learning how to drive a Zamboni.

Wish me luck!