leaderstats is not a valid member of Player?

So, I'm making a simple overhead GUI that shows the stats of the player. I'm having trouble with this specific line and I don't know why. It's very simple yet confusing. Here's the line:

if plr:WaitForChild("leaderstats").Stage.Value == 1 then

The error I'm getting is:

leaderstats is not a valid member of Player

FYI, I placed this in a LocalScript in StarterPlayerScripts. The 2 ways I defined plr were game.Players.LocalPlayer and script:FindFirstAncestorWhichIsA("Player"). These gave the same error. Can anyone help?

Thank you. Your help is greatly appreciated.