Former University of Alabama water skier Anna Gay competing in The World Games Birmingham – Alabama NewsCenter

Anna Gay is a championship caliber trick water skier, and she has the hardware to prove it.

“I’ve won three world championship titles. I’ve broken two world records,” the former University of Alabama athlete said. “I’ve won nine world championship titles all together, including juniors, and I won two masters championship titles.”

And she’s won quite a few professional titles. She became the third woman to amass 10,000 points while claiming her first pro world title when she was 15.

“That was kind of a shock, which is crazy,” the 22-year-old said. “From there on out, I went into the following season winning every single professional title.”

Gay hopes to add a championship to her resume during The World Games 2022. Competition will be July 14-15 at Oak Mountain State Park.

A native of Winter Garden, Florida, Gay seems to have been born to water ski. Her parents, Russell and Jane Gay, were professional water skiers and they wasted no time making their children – Anna, 12-year-old sister Ella and University of Alabama sophomore water skier Ryan – comfortable in and on the water.

“Once we were born, we were pretty much set in the boat right from the beginning,” Anna said. “They had a car seat hooked up to the boat so we would ride in the boat from when we were super young. We would learn to swim when we could crawl, essentially.

“We have a pool so as soon as we could move, we learned how to do survival swim lessons,” Gay said. “Really, when we learned how to walk and started taking interest in skiing, that’s kind of when we learned.”

The 5-foot-2 Gay grew up living alongside a lake in Winter Garden. “My water ski site was right in my backyard,” she said.

The former Crimson Tide water skier started “tricking” when she was about 5 and began competing at age 6. “You can slalom or trick or whatever from a really young age,” she said. “I started doing both slalom and trick.”

Gay attended Alabama for its nursing program and its water ski program, one of the top three in the country. She completed three semesters of nursing school and then had to drop out for medical reasons.

“I actually graduated with a degree in human environmental science and a nutrition minor,” she said. “I got my real estate license last summer.”

Gay is currently working in real estate, and in March bought a house that she’s renting out as an Airbnb. She has plans to go back this fall to get her master’s degree in marketing at the University of Alabama.

But that comes after she bids for success at The World Games – 20 seconds at a time.

“You want to do every trick well and you only get 20 seconds to do it,” Gay said. “You want every trick to be done perfectly and within that 20 seconds.”

Her simple aim is to be upright when she completes her trick.

“My goal is always to go out and stand up,” she said. “At the end of the day for me, that’s the best I can do. I’m leaving it up to the judges at that point to decide if all the tricks that I did were (worthy of) credit. If they’re not credit, you get scored zero.

“My goal every time, it’s just to go out and just try and stand up after that,” Gay continued. “It’s all up to the judges on how they score me and how much I’m tricking overall. But for me, going out and standing up, I would be happy with that.”