How to Install a Padel Court

Video Transcript

Steve Riley: Hello my name is Steve Riley and I’m here today to talk to you about Padel tennis, but before I start doing that, Padel tennis, I will just give you a little bit of a background about what we’ve done.

I’ve been building, managing and developing public tennis and sports centres for the last 25 years. Over those last 25 years we’ve learned lots of ways of optimising what we do for the benefit of the community, and in recent years we’ve actually developed five a side football, netball, and now in recent years, we’re going into Padel.

So today I wanted to talk to you about how to get the right Padel facility for your venue.

So first of all you’ve got to decide what facility you want. How many courts? On a tennis court you can actually only get one padle court, but if you extend it to the side you’ll be able to put two on.

A Padel tennis court is 20 meters by 10, and the tennis court is 30 meters by 15. So that’s one option you can consider.

When you’re working with committees if you’re a club, then you will need to convince the committee whether it’s worthwhile.

Padel tennis is the fastest growing sport in the world, definitely the fastest growing racket sport in the world. In Spain there are 20,000 Padel tennis courts and in the UK at the moment, there’s around 100. So the governing body of Padel in Britain is the LTA, and they anticipate that there will be around 500 courts in the next four years in the UK.

So now I wanted to talk about the different options to build your Padel facility. The first option would be to put it on an existing court, with no work required at all. This is where you would put an exhibition court, it comes and you erect the court on a tennis court, providing the tennis court is quite level. If it’s not level, this is not an option you can take, but if you decide to go down that route, it’s a great way of showing the members of a Padel court or the committee, how it works, and after a period of time, you can move the court to another location or it can be moved to another venue completely. So that’s option one.

Option two is where you have an existing tennis court and you’ve decided you want a Padel court. Maybe you’ve extended the court to the side by a few meters, which will cost a little bit extra, but that’s an option. In that situation you could build two Padel courts on one tennis court or just have one Padel court on one tennis court. You will actually have to excavate the court to put a foundation, because the foundation would take the weight of the Padel court. That’s called a ring beam. It’s generally 450 by 450, so 45 centimetres by 45 centimetres with reinforced concrete, and that takes the weight of the court. So that’s a permanent structure within that court, then you have to excavate the base and make sure that the court is level, to take the carpet, because all Padel courts play on artificial grass with sand filled.

Option three is where you’ve got a new piece of land and you can decide where you want to put the court and you need to rebuild a court from scratch, excavate, take away the soil, put the base coarse of stone, put the wearing course of tarmac and another layer of tarmac underneath. Then on top you put the carpet and also there’s a ring beam.

Those are the three options you’ve got. All the courts come with six meter lights, so you would need to get planning permission to do that, which would take anything from six to 12 weeks.

At Regents Park we have actually put one court in already and we’re in the middle of putting our second court. If you have the choice to put in two courts, I would always recommend two courts. If you have one court and it gets busy, you can’t really have more a social sort of feel because you need two courts to generate that sort of social interaction with everybody and you can have 12 players playing it, or eight players playing and four people waiting, which creates a good atmosphere.

We’ve got a partnership in the UK with Measure Set which are the leading manufacturers in Spain, in fact the world, and there are many different types of courts.

You have a panoramic court which has got a completely see-through back wall which enables a lot of spectators to watch. Then you’ve got the standard court which has uprights on glass panels, and then the third type is a portable one which you can put, as we mentioned before, on any tennis court that’s flat, and it can be taken down after a period of time, and that’s the sort of court that’s used for exhibition matches for the World Padel Tour. So we have a system whereby you can book remotely, you can come and play your Padel game and leave. It’s very coded safe, and there’s a lot of social distance between all the players, so it’s a great game post lockdown.

Mariana: Hello, my name is Mariana and I was born in Argentina. I had the fortune of seeing Padel growing and booming in Argentina. So nice it’s a social sport where everyone in the family can play and that is what happens. Everyone goes to these Padel days, to these Padel clubs and everyone enjoys themselves.

Steve Riley: Please click on the link and see all our services and we can arrange to do a site visit to give you the best option to maximize the use of the Padel court that hopefully you will install using our services. We do everything from a to z, which would be spec the court, get planning permission, install the right court, do the ground works, do the ring beams, market it and do coach training at the same time. So we can train your attendance coach to deliver Padel at your facility using the latest coaching methods.