TAMPA — Victoria Parker didn’t grow up around pool tables. She didn’t hustle anyone in a dive bar. She didn’t spend her teen or college years chalking cues in random smoke-filled billiards halls.
Instead, in her early 20s, Parker dusted off an old Coca-Cola cue stick her brother had given her and started going to bars simply to get out of her apartment.
That was barely four years ago. Last month in Las Vegas, the 26-year-old New Tampa resident pocketed the 2026 American Poolplayers Association (APA) 8-Ball Classic Pool Championship, going 9-0 in a co-ed division to claim the title and a $15,000 first-place check.
Just one rack away from elimination, Parker abandoned her plan to simply enjoy the moment and have fun.
“I was sitting in my chair, and I was like, ‘Wait a minute. We need to turn this around. … I made it this far, and I want to win.’”
The celebration in Las Vegas included dozens of local Tampa Bay APA players who had traveled out for their own tournament or just to cheer Parker on. Among them was pool legend Jeanette Lee — The Black Widow when she ruled the sport throughout the 1990s and early 2000s — who lives in the Tampa area.
The night before the final, Lee gave Parker the choice of wearing one of her red or black jerseys for the final. “Pick which one you like best,” Lee told her. “Then go out there and win it all.”
“She gave me the confidence walking into that final room, knowing I looked good, I looked professional, I looked the part,” said Parker, who wore the red jersey. “That really helped a lot.”
After Parker returned to Tampa, Lee signed the jersey. “Pretty awesome,” she said.
Lee is a part-owner of the growing APA along with Anthony and Stephanie Spano. In just over five years of ownership, the Spanos have grown the league from 95 teams to 318 in Hillsborough County. It has sent hundreds of teams and individuals to Vegas for championships.
Parker is their first champion.
“It’s amazing,” Anthony Spano said. “It’s a big moment.”
It was a quick ascension to the top for Parker, who only got serious about pool in the last year.
Before that the Hudson High and USF grad was just messing around, escaping a bad living situation to shoot pool at nearby bars like Paddy Wagon Irish Pub and Peabody’s Restaurant, Bar and Billiards, where she also had previously worked.
“It really saved me during that time,” she said.
She was talked into joining a few teams in the bustling Tampa Bay APA league, starting with a 9-ball team and later gravitating to the preferred 8-ball game. Though she had never played 9-ball, she won her first league match and ended up on a team last year that finished ninth in the world in Las Vegas.
But Parker barely played in Vegas.
“I only played 2-3 matches, and other people on the team played six or seven. That must mean I’m not one of the stronger players,” she said. “So I told myself next time I go to Vegas, I want to play more games. I need to get better.”
She found her edge in fellow league player Kain Ricker, a top-rated skill-level seven shooter who agreed to train her. She asked him point-blank: “I want to go to Vegas and win a championship. Can you help me?” He said yes.
Parker says hundreds of hours of work followed, from drills to defensive positioning to pressure matches. In the week before the Las Vegas tournament alone, she logged 6-7 hours a day on weekend sessions at Brewlands Bar & Billiards in Clearwater, then 2-4 hours a night during the week.
“It was like Olympic training,” Spano said. “She just kept saying ‘I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it.’”
She entered the tournament as a skill-level four, ran her bracket clean and was moved up to skill-level five mid-tournament after officials noticed her dominance — in particular, her very first shot of the tournament when she sunk the eight ball on the break. It was the kind of break you might expect from someone nicknamed T-Pain, which goes back to her high school softball days when she was known as Tori and hit seven homeruns, 12 triples and 18 doubles her last two prep seasons.
In the final, she faced Arkansas’ Shelby Sutton. Because Parker was now rated higher, she had to play with a handicap — she had to get to four wins before Sutton got to three.
That appeared to be a daunting task once Sutton took a 2-1 lead. But Parker regained her footing with a high-pressure bank shot that broke out the eight ball in a game four win. And in the final game, she converted a tricky combo that all but capped the three-rack rally to close out the win.
“By the time I got to the eight ball in the final rack, I wasn’t nervous at all,” she said. “I told myself, ‘You did it. You’re a champion.’ And I got down with all the confidence in the world, and I tapped that ball in.”
Wearing a bright smile, she did half a fist-pump with her right hand and slapped her hip with the left. In less than a year after she had started taking the game seriously, Parker had her first big championship.
Prior to the tournament, she was insistent she was heading to Vegas to win, so much so that her mother was concerned she was putting all her billiard balls in one basket.
“She didn’t want me to go out there and get my heart broken,” Parker said. “I told her, you know when I go out there and I win it all, I’m going to look directly in the camera, and I’m going to say, ‘Hey, Mom and Dad, I told you so.’”
Parker made good on her promise, giving her parents, who were watching her play for the first time, a shoutout on the livestream.
As for the winnings? Parker, who is an instructional designer at HCA Healthcare — building training courses for doctors and nurses — laughed at the idea of a splurge.
“I have a super boring answer,” she said. A chunk will go towards student loans. She bought gifts for her brother and sister. And when her parents get back from their current cross-country RV adventure, they’ll get a nice dinner out.
The rest may go to further trips. Parker said she plans to keep competing, with an eye on the U.S. Amateur Championship. She isn’t quitting her day job. But she’s not done yet.
“I think the biggest thing is that I kept my word to myself,” Parker said. “I told myself I was going to do this. And the fact that it has unraveled that way, and I did follow through, it’s changed my mindset about not just pool, but a lot of things in life. There’s no telling what else I can do.”