Ben Johns

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• Top 6 Pickleball Players of All Time

  Currently #1 · score 0

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• Anna Leigh Waters

  Anna Leigh Waters turned professional at age 12, making her the youngest professional pickleball player ever, and climbed to the world number one ranking by 15 — a ranking she has since held simultaneously in women's singles, doubles, and mixed doubles, a feat no other player has matched at her age. As of January 2026, she had won 181 career gold medals and a record 39 career Triple Crowns, both the most of any player in professional pickleball, male or female, and she holds the PPA Tour's women's singles record with an 89-match win streak. Her career win rate stands at 93.6 percent across more than 872 matches, sustained largely by playing doubles alongside her mother, Leigh Waters, and mixed doubles for a stretch alongside Ben Johns during his own record-setting 16-title run with her. Her combination of 181 career gold medals and her record 39 Triple Crowns, achieved before turning 20, has made Waters widely regarded as the greatest women's pickleball player in the sport's history.

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• Tyson McGuffin

  Tyson McGuffin played tennis at Scottsdale Community College and briefly cracked the ATP's top 1,500 before switching to pickleball in 2015 and turning professional just six months later, a rapid transition that let him become one of the sport's first true stars. He has won five Grand Slam championships and two U.S. Open titles, including a 2019 singles-and-doubles sweep at that event, plus four National Championships and two career Triple Crowns — one of them at the 2023 Tournament of Champions — putting him behind only Ben Johns among men for career Triple Crowns. Across 110 professional tournaments and 668 career matches, McGuffin has posted a 62.1 percent win rate, and while singles has become tougher for him against the sport's younger generation, he remains ranked in the top 10-15 in both men's doubles and mixed doubles. His combination of two career Triple Crowns and his foundational role helping establish the credibility of pickleball's earliest professional tours has made McGuffin one of the most significant figures in the sport's transition to full professional status.

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• Catherine Parenteau

  Catherine Parenteau played Division I college tennis, first recruited by the University of Arkansas before transferring to Michigan State, and was introduced to pickleball in October 2016 by her former tennis coach, Simone Jardim — just six months before she was already competing in, and winning the 5.0 mixed bracket at, the US Open. She has since won 53 career PPA Tour gold medals, two career Triple Crowns, three US Open titles, and two National Championships, ranking her as the second most decorated woman in professional pickleball behind only Anna Leigh Waters. Parenteau also captains the LA Mad Drops in Major League Pickleball's team format, helping lead the franchise to an MLP Championship title alongside her individual PPA Tour career. Her combination of 53 career gold medals and her rapid rise from a six-months-in US Open bracket win to the sport's second-most decorated woman has made Parenteau one of the most significant players in pickleball's professional era.

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• Riley Newman

  Riley Newman, from Whidbey Island, Washington, has won roughly 20 PPA Tour gold medals and 5 Major championships across an 85-medal career, reaching the world number one men's doubles ranking along the way. He won the 2021 national mixed doubles championship partnered with his sister Lindsey Newman, and the 2021 men's doubles championship the same year, splitting his doubles career between family partnerships and top-ranked pairings with players like Matt Wright and AJ Koller. Across 110 professional tournaments and 545 career matches, Newman has posted a 63.9 percent win rate, sustained specifically through doubles and mixed doubles play rather than singles competition. His combination of a former world number one doubles ranking and his 2021 national titles alongside his sister has made Newman one of the most decorated doubles specialists in professional pickleball history.

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• Christian Alshon

  Christian Alshon, nicknamed the "Tweener King" for his signature trick shots, was once the No. 1 ranked U.S. tennis player in both the boys' 16s and 18s age divisions before winning a Division III NCAA tennis championship at the University of Chicago and switching to pickleball in June 2021. He's since climbed into the top 3 in men's singles, men's doubles, and mixed doubles on the PPA Tour, backed by gold medals at the PPA Cape Coral Open and CIBC Texas Open singles events, including back-to-back singles titles in 2025. Alshon became the first player in Major League Pickleball history to win championships at both the Challenger and Premier levels, and he was the first overall pick in the 2024 MLP Draft, going on to play for the Texas Ranchers with a career win rate of 69.0 percent across 87 professional tournaments. His combination of a rare junior-tennis-to-pickleball transition and his unprecedented Challenger-and-Premier MLP championship double has made Alshon one of the sport's most distinctive rising stars.

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More in Sports

• Robert Killian

  Robert Killian, a former U.S. Army Green Beret with more than 12 years of active service, won the Spartan Race World Championship in 2015 despite having just four races of OCR experience at the time, then won it again in 2019 for two career Spartan World titles. His path to obstacle racing ran through elite military and endurance competition rather than combat sports: he was a high school track star and collegiate runner who won the military division of the Ironman World Championship in Kona in 2009, was named Army Athlete of the Year in 2010, and won the grueling 68-hour Best Ranger Competition in 2016. At World's Toughest Mudder, Killian won the event three times and placed second overall (and first American) at the 2017 edition, completing 105 miles in 24 hours, one of the highest single-event distance totals recorded in the format's history. His combination of two Spartan World Championships and his background as a Best Ranger Competition champion and military Ironman world champion has made Killian one of the most distinctively credentialed competitors in obstacle course racing's history.

• Lindsay Webster

  Lindsay Webster won her first Spartan Race World Championship in 2017, then added titles in 2018, 2021, and 2022 — the 2022 win making her the first-ever four-time Spartan World Champion, male or female, at the time she achieved it. Along the way she set the sport's record for most consecutive Spartan wins with 17 in a row, and her 2021 title came alongside partner Ryan Atkins, who won the men's championship the same year in Abu Dhabi. Her combination of strong trail running speed and reliable execution on OCR's more technically demanding upper-body obstacles gave her a genuinely complete competitive profile that sustained her dominance across changing eras of the sport's growth. Her combination of a record four Spartan World Championships and her 17-race consecutive win streak has made Webster, by most accounts, the most decorated woman in obstacle course racing history.

• Hunter McIntyre

  Hunter McIntyre is a six-time obstacle course racing world champion by his own team's count, having first entered the sport almost by accident — he and a group of friends had loosely talked about doing a Spartan Race together, and he ended up the only one who actually finished it. He went on to become a three-time Hyrox World Champion as well, extending his competitive dominance into that separate hybrid fitness-racing discipline and becoming one of the few athletes to hold major titles in both OCR and Hyrox simultaneously. His path to elite athletic performance ran through bodybuilding and strength training before OCR, giving him a physical profile built for heavy carrying and climbing obstacles that distinguished him from more purely running-focused competitors, and his outspoken public persona helped introduce the sport to broader fitness audiences. His combination of six OCR world championships and his separate three-time Hyrox World Championship has made McIntyre one of the most recognizable and commercially significant figures across obstacle and hybrid fitness racing.

• Amelia Boone

  Amelia Boone, nicknamed "the Queen of Pain," won World's Toughest Mudder three times — in 2012, 2014, and 2015 — with her 2014 title coming just eight weeks after major knee surgery, a comeback timeline that became one of the defining stories of her career. She competed at an elite level while working full-time as a practicing corporate attorney, a combination that gave obstacle course racing a distinctive public profile well beyond its core competitive community during her prime. After shifting focus toward ultrarunning in 2016, Boone suffered a femoral stress fracture that put her on crutches for three months, then a cascading series of additional injuries — a sacral stress fracture, a fully displaced second metatarsal, and three separate heel stress fractures — totaling six bone stress injuries across three years. Her combination of three World's Toughest Mudder titles, including one won eight weeks post-surgery, and her later public account of recovering from six separate bone stress injuries has made Boone one of the most significant and candidly documented figures in obstacle racing's history.

• Ryan Atkins

  Ryan Atkins won the 2016 OCR World Championship in the 3km distance and later took the 2023 OCR World Championship Male 15K title, a span of major championships nearly a decade apart that reflects an unusually long competitive prime for the sport. He won the 2021 Spartan World Championship alongside partner Lindsay Webster, giving the Guelph, Ontario-based couple simultaneous titles in the same event and making them one of OCR's most publicly recognized competitive pairings before Webster went on to become the sport's most decorated woman. His background as a competitive adventure racer before focusing on obstacle course racing gave him a multi-discipline endurance foundation, and the OCR World Championships specifically returned to his home region of Collingwood, Ontario during his competitive prime, reflecting the sport's continued growth in the areas where its top athletes trained. His combination of OCR World Championships seven years apart and his 2021 Spartan World Championship alongside Lindsay Webster has made Atkins one of the most historically significant men's competitors in the sport.