When his beloved padel courts blown away by Ciaràn, sports reporter Paul Lees tries out the latest racket sport to take the world by storm
[Cue standard blues guitar riff] ♫I’ve got the blues – I got them bad – The change of the season has got me feeling sad – My lady has left me – And I’m broke as hell – But what is worse, I can’t play no padel – ‘Cause I got the … Storm Ciarán has blown my padel away blues – And if I can’t play no padel – Well, I might just blow a fuse♫
PLAYING padel, like for most people who have gravitated to this ever more popular, post-Covid come-out-of-nowhere sport, or like most people in any and every other sport, gave me 60 to 90 minutes of escape from the tribulations of everyday strife. A chance to let off some steam, to be present and empty the clutter from my mind. It was social. It was satisfying. It was sanctuary. Then the storm gone blow it all down. It will be back, as will I, but it’s temporary disappearance has left me in a funk, along with all the other 99 problems I didn’t recite in the little blues number written above.
So, in the meantime, I shall seek another outlet. Or maybe I have just found one, in a racket sport that is sweeping the nation and making the kids middle-aged folk go crazy. It all sounds familiar doesn’t it? That’s because it is.
Pickleball and padel are like two new, confident, funny and good-looking kids at your school who come from a different town and make an immediate impression. They make us curious, they make us laugh with jokes we’ve never heard before, they make us feel good. We want to hang out with them. They are a bit different though. Pickleball looks all neat and tidy, like butter doesn’t melt, mum and dad have got a few quid and it always gets its homework in on time. Padel is a bit more edgier, got a few problems at home and will happily go to the off-licence with a fake ID to get some bottles of blue WKD for a house party when the parents are away. Pickleball has its shirt tucked in, padel has it hanging out loose.
But there are also a lot of similarities too. They’re both fun, easy to pick up, energy economic, require finesse over force and are best played in doubles. It’s all about the rallies. Their sharp, upward trajectory in popularity has also run parallel with each other, but from a different source.
Pickleball comes from the ‘burbs in the US, all cheeseburger and fresh lemonade, while padel is Hispanic, Argentina and Spain primarily, coffee and churros. One is the fastest-growing sport in North America, the other in Europe. Type in pickleball vs padel in a search engine and there are a few articles that compare both games’ sudden explosion. Invented in the 60s, they are the sporting spawn from an age of idealism, free love and wanting to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. But for 50 years, they remained an outlier. Now they are played by millions, both with strong claims to being the fastest growing sports in the world. Perhaps Covid was the catalyst. The disconnect from society made us find other ways to reconnect with each other. So when the Storm took my love away, pickleball said: “Hey buddy. Keep your chin up. Wanna hang out with me for a little while?”
Like padel, again, pickleball is becoming increasingly popular in Jersey. The driving force behind it also happens to be the same man that kickstarted padel’s popularity on the Island: Tom Price. Tom is your racket sports man. A big part of the Jersey Squash and Racketball here too, when the club was in lockdown, he encouraged all the members to take to the two padel courts sitting adjacent, barely being used. Soon leagues were up and running that had around 140 players across seven divisions. Then, when Island Padel took over the facility, he formed Jersey Pickleball and turned his attentions to that instead.
“I first came across it many years ago in Scotland when I saw it getting played in my local sports centre and then never thought of it really much after that. Many years later I started to see it on YouTube a lot and, being a padel coach and manager of the squash club, I’m always interested in new racket sports, and I said: ‘I think I can make this happen in Jersey,’” says Tom.
“I went online, I communicated with some of the clubs in America about getting coached in pickleball so I could run a programme properly.”
And that is what he did, using the beginners tennis courts at St Clement. Highvern approached Tom to offer sponsorship and it has grown from there. Starting with 30 interested to be pickleball aficionados, he now has over 100 regular players.
“It’s so easy to learn. You don’t really need to have much racket experience. A little bit of hand-and-eye coordination goes a long way to learning this game. After a few sessions, they’ve got it. They don’t need any coaching any more. Tennis you’d have to be playing for six years to have as many rallies as you have in pickleball in a matter of hours.
“It’s also very sociable. You have very close contact, you have a laugh. It’s not an elite game like tennis. It comes across quirky but it’s very enjoyable and fun.”
Tom has big plans to take pickleball forward, starting with, naturally, picking a fight in a sporting sense with our eternal rivals Guernsey in a time-honoured inter-insular, along with open competitions and hosting touring clubs from the UK. But most of all, Tom wants a proper centre with proper pickleball courts, as padel has long had.
For now, he has to make do with customising short tennis and badminton courts. Not much of an issue given the similarities in dimensions but not ideal if he wants the game to grow.
For the winter months, Tom has made arrangements with Jersey Badminton Association to use their courts at New Gilson Hall and that is where I go for a bash at his Friday night club night, bringing my son Evan and his friend Calum along too. We grab some bats and a ball and, between us, have a little knock up to get used to the dynamics. But before long, the hall is filling up and a familiar face suddenly appears in Martin Forbes, the former Muratti centre-half.
“Hi Martin. Wanna join us?”
“Yeah sure … it’s Mark isn’t it?”
So close.
“Paul.”
It turns out that Martin is also a padel refugee and has lost none of his competitive spirit from his footballing days. We pair up, oldies versus youth, experience versus energy. We race into a five-nil lead.
In contrast to padel’s style, panache and high-grade rackets, plastic pickleball does lack a little something in the aesthetics. With an oversized version of one of those plastic balls you get in golf sets for toddlers and the plastic paddle-style bats, the equipment looks like something a dad might buy from Toymaster for a beach day and a futile attempt to distract little Johnny from eating sand and pulling the legs off small insects. That aside, you are immediately engaged and amused. It puts a smile on your face and what can be better than that.
Rules are both simple and unnecessarily complicated. It’s first to 11 but you can only score on your serve. But you have two chances at that because, once the first in the pair gives up their service, it then goes to their partner to serve. Only when they lose their service does it go to the other pair where they can then score points. Comprende? Ah, just Google-it. And the servers are not allowed to volley until the fifth stroke on a point. Apart from that, it’s a straightforward game of getting over the net and into the other side of the court. There is a no volley zone around the middle where you are not allowed your feet to go in – if you play a volley. But, and again, much like padel, played properly, pickleball is all about tactical close-quarter volley play, deft shots and lobs.
The youth hit back. We lose 11-9.
But we have an immediate opportunity to redeem ourselves against another middle-aged pairing and this time we show no mercy, smashing them 11-2. The youth return and, after a close fought 12-10 tie-break win, we kill their spirit with a comprehensive 11-5 battering in the decider. Time to find some real competition and at the other end of the hall are two more padel refugees, but of an altogether much higher standard. Martin teams up with Craig Masefield and I pair with Bero Bobus, who just happens to be ranked number two at padel in the whole of Great Britain for over-40s. Now we’re talking. The stakes are high, the competition fierce, shots fired at all angles, we take the first set, just, 12-10.
Unfortunately for Bobus, his partner is not as competent as what he is accustomed to and Masefield targets the weak link, running up a decent lead for our opponents. We fight back and I play a wondrous drop-shot volley that leaves Masefield floundering. But he’s spotted that my feet were in the no go zone. Hmmm. I wasn’t so sure but now is not the time to argue. However, I’ve now lost focus. It was such a good shot. The Forbes-Masefield partnership have psyched us out. They go on to take the second 11-8 and there is no time left to have a decider.
I’ve had great fun and I have enjoyed myself so much I will definitely return for more. But while pickleball can be a good friend to confide in, padel will always be my mistress and I cannot wait to get my steamy Wednesday nights back with her.
Tom, though, thinks that pickleball has the better future of the sport between the two, primarily because of its huge popularity in the US.
“Padel is a fantastic game for watching too,” he says. “For the spectator, it’s a bit like tennis. But pickleball will just keep growing and once Asia gets a hold of it there will be no stopping it. Places like Malaysia whose number one sports are badminton and table tennis. This is like a mixture of the two.”
There is big money behind it too. This year in America saw the first edition of Major League Pickleball, a competition between 12 teams and 48 athletes, with a prize money of $5million. Investors include LeBron James, Heidi Klum and Eva Longoria. There is some resistance from tennis traditionalists in the US against what they see as a fad but they are yet to have their “disco sucks” moment. Like squash in the 70s and 80s, both pickleball and padel are having their time in the sun. Let’s see if either of them wither or whether they will continue to bloom.
