William Ostling, coach at The Padel Club in Cheltenham, praised the UK Padel Convention held last week in Gloucester, saying, “it’s definitely going to help raise the sport.”
“It is one of the biggest conventions padel has had in Northern Europe, outside of Spain, but bringing in loads of external companies like, we’ve got Cork 22 here, but we’ve got Playtomic coming in from Spain, we’ve got Match Eye coming from Sweden.
“We’ve got a lot of other padel UK operators coming in as well, so we’ve got about 750 people coming into the club, so honestly, it’s definitely the biggest networking event padel’s had in the UK, which is really exciting.” Said Ostling.
Padel is a quickly growing sport in the UK, with over 400,000 players across the nation, according to the LTA, so a convention of this nature implies the sport is here to stay.
“This is a great opportunity for people who are starting a padel club to meet people who build courts, who build clubs, who’ve been in the industry for many years, so it’s definitely going to help rise the sport, bringing these people in together, who are so enthusiastic about the sport, so I think it’ll be huge moving forward and having these conventions, bringing people together, it’s just going to grow even faster I think.” Mentioned Ostling.
Although padel is said to have been invented in 1968 in Acapulco, Mexico, it has been a non-stop growing sport in Europe over the last couple of years.
“They say there’s a padel club opening every two and a half hours around the world, that’s a new club every two and a half hours, which is absolutely ridiculous, so the UK.
“I’ve been there myself where in 2020, 2021, 2022 there wasn’t many padel courts, I remember I’m in Manchester myself, so you had The Padel Club open in 2022, we were the only ones really in Manchester, you had Derby and Huddersfield, now you’ve got I think about 30 odd clubs in Manchester, and it’s going to go absolutely crazy here in the UK, but yeah it’s really exciting,” Ostling said.
Cheltenham recently welcomed its first padel club, following in the steps of its neighbouring city, Gloucester.
“In September here in Cheltenham, we opened [the club] and Gloucester just a year before that. We’ve said even sort of going back to the growth is at the moment we’ve got 28 courts as a company, this time next year we’re looking to have 100 courts in just 12 months’ time. This time last year, we only had about 4 courts, so it’s going absolutely crazy; hopefully, 100 next year.” Said Ostling.
Padel is definitely here to stay. Anyone can pop up to the new padel club in either location and receive a free taster session to see what the fuss is all about.
