I stepped foot on a paddle tennis court for the first time in 2022. I was visiting my brother in Philadelphia and he drove us just outside the city limits to a multi-purpose fitness center called PADELphia.
As a tennis purist who first picked up a racket in 1995 and was generally not keen on other racket sports – including America’s latest obsession (pickleball) – I didn’t have great expectations for this game that was described to me as a cross between tennis and squash. But it was my little brother’s only wish. And it turns out he knew something I didn’t: Padel is electrifying.
My first observation was that entering a padel court feels different to entering any court in the racket sports family. There is no chain link fence, which is practically synonymous with a public tennis court. It is enclosed, but not as claustrophobic as a squash court. A padel court is surrounded by four glass walls, which gives less of a stuffy, suffocating feeling and more of an open, airy one.
Importantly, the entrances to the court remain open. You enter a padel court through one of the two enclosed openings on either side of the net, which allow more than just players in. The open doors allow players to rush outside the center of the court to retrieve a ball that has bounced over the glass walls and try to keep the point alive.
For a tennis player, the game is pretty easy to learn. The scoring is the same and the shots are pretty similar. While I didn’t have to chase overhead balls flying outside the PADELphia court, I was able to string together challenging points from my first game. I was hooked. After our 90-minute court time was up, we were able to add another 30 minutes before the next reservation arrived.
While my tennis experience gave me a head start, it is far from a prerequisite for the average person to enjoy the game. In fact, the most difficult aspects of tennis (the serve and generating topspin) are irrelevant to padel, as the serve is from below and the racket has no strings.
“It’s easy to learn,” confirmed Los Angeles-based tennis and padel coach Daniel Wulff. “It’s definitely easier than tennis. The learning curve is faster. There are no strings, so it’s very easy to interpret how to hit the ball.”
Daniel Wulff teaches tennis and padel in Los Angeles. Aaron Bencid
Wulff, who grew up playing competitive tennis in Venezuela, was introduced to padel in 2017 while living in Mallorca, off the Spanish coast. “I found a job at a padel center and started playing,” he said, adding that the courts were constantly “full.” After his stay in Mallorca, he moved to LA, where the sport was virtually unknown at the time, and took his newfound skills to the next level.
Fast forward seven years to 2024. Padel coaching is his main source of income, working mainly with wealthy clients who have built private tennis courts in their backyards.
For years, you had to know someone to play in LA, Wulff said. That’s changing recently with the opening of The Padel Courts, a two-court club in East Hollywood, and Taktika Padel, a four-court club at the LA Galaxy facility in Carson.
You don’t necessarily need to know anyone; you just need money – and the patience to negotiate LA traffic. Booking a court at The Padel Courts costs $50 per half hour. That’s $150 for a quality 90-minute session, or about $38 per person if you divide the court by four. Taktika is cheaper, maxing out at $13 per hour per person, but is 23 miles from my apartment.
It’s not worth it, even for me, a padel-loving resident of Santa Monica. Tennis and pickleball are less fun but more accessible. I can ride my bike to public courts and walk through the chain-link fence for free – and that’s a big problem for padel.
The obstacles preventing the breakthrough of padel sport in the USA
As I’ve learned firsthand, playing padel in the US is difficult. In LA, where I live, I have limited court options. When I lived in Brooklyn last fall, Padel Haus Dumbo was within walking distance and I could pay $60 an hour (per person) during peak hours to play on one of the four immaculate indoor courts. So a 90-minute session cost me about $90. There’s a reason this sport is so popular among wealthy individuals.
Unlike pickleball, where you can set up your own court on virtually any flat surface with a portable net and tape to mark the lines, padel requires a facility.
The sport, whose origins date back to the 1960s and are linked to a Mexican businessman who set up a court in his holiday home, was originally reserved for the wealthy.
“It started in 1969 in Acapulco with Enrique Corcuera,” said Christ Ishoo, co-founder of venture capital firm EEP Capital, which invests specifically in the padel market. “He made it so that it became a high society sport in Mexico. It was never a sport for the masses, so it never really took off.” Until Argentine friends of Corcuera “took it to Argentina and from Argentina to Spain.”
Spain and Argentina have “without a doubt” had the best players in the world over the past 30 years, Ishoo added.
Christ Ishoo is co-founder of EEP Capital and owner of LA Beat. Courtesy of Christ Ishoo
It’s no coincidence that the world’s best players come from countries where the courts and programs are accessible. With no junior padel programs in the United States, there is no American superstar yet, although Ishoo believes this is essential for the sport to succeed: “For this to work in the United States, I need star quality.”
While access to the playing fields in the US is still generally restricted, there is one exception: Miami. The game has become so big in the south Florida city that Ishoo is looking for other investment opportunities.
“It’s oversaturated,” he said. “I’d rather be in Charlotte than Miami because they’ve already built their community there. They’ve been there for seven years, so you have to do something really special to be successful in Miami.”
Why Miami? Ishoo points to the demographic development: “Right now it’s a Latino sport. In public it’s a Latino sport. This sport is played by everyone, but we have to be accessible to everyone – and that’s not the case today.”
The future of padel in America
Ishoo, who first played the sport in Sweden in 2013 and has been building courts across Europe since then, moved to the U.S. in 2019 to continue growing the game. He’s all in, predicting there will be 10,000 courts in the U.S. “in about 10 years.” He firmly believes a key to growth will be the inclusion of youth programs: “How can we get the kids involved? Because that’s what’s going to create the superstars of the future.”
He is also trying to raise awareness for the Pro Padel League (PPL), the first of its kind in North America. Ishoo is the owner of the LA Beat, one of the 10 professional teams that compete from April, when the season starts, to November, when the season culminates with the PPL Cup final.
In order to attract the attention of viewers, the league, which is only in its second season, needs to become more “American,” according to Ishoo.
“You have to have a ring,” he said, adding that you also have to be creative to attract viewers. “How can we think differently? How can we do this in a way that excites people? It’s too quiet. It’s too much in the shadow of tennis.”
Wulff takes part in a Pro-Am padel tournament in the Hamptons. Courtesy of Daniel Wulff
Like the author, Ishoo experienced a special passion for the sport when he first picked up a paddle.
“I played and what a beautiful sport. It’s athletic, sexy and fast,” he recalled. “As humans, we want to be good at things and that makes you feel good very quickly.”
Wulff, a master of racket sports, perhaps recognizes the magic of padel better than anyone else.
“It’s like tennis in four dimensions. You have an afterlife: in tennis, if the ball passes you, it’s over; in padel, the ball can come back. A new world opens up,” he said.
But is the game’s magic enough to create a movement in the U.S.? He’s not as convinced as Ishoo, especially given the competition from a giant like Pickleball.
“For me, pickleball is in the DNA of Americans. It’s cheap or free in most places and the court is smaller so you don’t have to move around as much,” Wulff said. “It’s not as sexy, but it gets people going, it gets people playing and it gets people saving money. How can you beat that?”
