A wide, eye-level, live-action photograph of professional pickleball players Anna Bright (left) and Rachel Rohrabacher (right) celebrating a win on a pickleball court. They are embracing in a tight, joyful hug, both wearing white visors and dark-colored athletic tank tops and skirts. Bright, on the left, holds a black pickleball paddle in their left hand, while Rohrabacher, on the right, holds a black paddle in their right hand. Both players have their heads tilted back in laughter, expressing pure exhilaration. The background is a dense, sunlit grandstand packed with hundreds of spectators, creating a vibrant, high-stakes atmosphere for the tournament. — Anna Bright (L) and Rachel Rohrabacher. Credit: PPA

“A stud.” That’s how one pickleball pro describes Rachel Rohrabacher, an elite player who lives in Tampa.

Travis Rettenmaier says sometimes he practices against Rohrabacher when she travels to St. Petersburg.

“Rachel will come over here and she’s a force to be reckoned with. She’ll scream in my face even in practice. And we’ll josh it up a little bit, but she’s a fiery competitor,” Rettenmaier told CreativeLoafing Tampa Bay. “I always admired that about her, so, yeah, we certainly have our tangos back and forth.”

Rohrabacher is ranked the No. 7 women’s doubles player in the world and is ranked No. 7 in mixed doubles. She’s on the Brooklyn Pickleball Team, which is competing at the Major League Pickleball St. Petersburg competition all this week at the new facility, St. Pete Athletic.

“I was born and raised in Tampa. I began playing tennis at a young age, so I played junior tennis in the area, my whole life,” Rohrabacher previously said. As an undergrad she played tennis at the University of South Carolina, but afterward she says, “I came back here, to the Tampa area, and I began playing pickleball here, and I did my Master’s through USF.”

According to the PPA Tour website, she hopes to one day use that Master’s in social work to become a therapist.

Rohrabacher won the MLP Most Improved Player award in 2023 and 2024, which she described as an incredible accomplishment because of all the ways she’s leveled up over that time period. “It’s so validating,” she added.

But even more than her accomplishments in MLP, Rohrabacher is known for her success on the PPA Tour. In case you aren’t one of the hundreds of thousands of people who watched the new pickleball docuseries “Partners” (streaming on Prime Video and the PPA Tour YouTube channel) here’s how the last 15 months have changed things for Rohrabacher and the top of the women’s doubles rankings.

In early 2025, Rohrabacher and her women’s doubles partner Anna Bright were the clear-cut second-best team in the world. Once in a while, “The Girlies” even beat the best: Anna Leigh Waters and Catherine Parenteau.

“[Bright and I] are such good friends on and off the court,” Rohrabacher told me in December 2024, pointing to the trust she and Bright shared. “It helps us communicate with each other, good and bad. We both know what we need on the court, and it just really works for us. And we’re also a similar type of competitor. We like to be loud. We like to be super intense.”

But Waters was sick of losing, even infrequently. In April 2025 she asked Bright to become her new doubles partner. That left Rohrabacher without a partner.

But the breakup of The Girlies “shocked” her. In Partners, she said, “trying to navigate it properly when I’m still trying to understand how I feel about it, that’s what made it chaotic for me.”

She paired up with Parenteau for a while. Now she’s having some success alongside Parris Todd—in May, the duo wrapped up the season with a silver medal at the PPA Finals. Rohrabacher also won silver in mixed doubles alongside Christian Alshon.

Tickets to watch Rohrabacher and other athletes play at MLP St. Pete happening this week, Wednesday-Sunday, June 17-21 at St. Pete Athletic are still available and start at $52.

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This article appears in June 18 – 24, 2026.