Padel Tennis – Grassroots news from the UK and beyond …

Padel is typically a game that is played in doubles, with four players of more or less the same standard. However, if players fail to turn up or get injured, sometimes you may be forced to play a game of padel singles and soon you realise that playing one-on-one changes the game quite a bit, requiring different skills and naturally more physical effort.

However, although it can technically be done, playing singles on a standard padel court is not ideal because the speed of the game combined with a court that's quite a bit smaller than a tennis court means its quite difficult to cover enough ground to be able to return balls.

To overcome this problem some clubs in Spain (e.g. ATP in Madrid) have introduced modified padel courts for singles which are effectively 'squeezed courts', a little narrower than a standard 20m x 10m padel court. The line markings on the singles courts are the same but because you will still be covering more court yourself this is inevitably going to be a more physically demanding game of padel.

This seems to be quite a new phenomenon and maybe it will spread further afield – it certainly offers padel players greater flexibility and may serve as an ideal training tool for players who are looking to develop skills, strength and fitness all in one go.