Padel Tennis – Grassroots news from the UK and beyond …

Those of you that follow the news about Padel in Spanish will no doubt be aware of Padel Pro-Tour – the new professional circuit for Padel players that caused a stir when it was launched a couple of months ago because of its confrontation with the official Federation of Padel in Spain.

For those of you that don’t follow the Spanish stuff, basically what the PPT is trying to do is increase the professionalism of Padel across the board through greater investment and more business-like management.

They will be organising a series of tournaments throughout the Padel season (20 are planned for 2006 – including at least 14 Mens and 8 womens) and the idea is to attract the worlds best players by obtaining more sponsorship for the events, more prize money for the players, more publicity and TV coverage of competitions.

So far, so good – more investment in the sport and increased publicity should help to develop the game. The biggest problem however is that the creation of the PPT divided the sport of Padel right down the middle – in particular because it seems that players that opt to participate in the tournaments of the Padel Pro-Tour will not be eligible to play in those organised by the Spanish Padel Federation….

Its not simply about politics between the two groups, as consideration has to made for the calendar of events, the players rankings etc etc – and hopefully over time these difficulties will be overcome….its clearly a positive thing to have more investment and publicity for the sport but it certainly doesn’t help anyone if the major tournaments are divided, there are two sets of international rankings, and the best players in the world can’t get to compete against one another on a regular basis.

Watch this space for updates on the professional Padel tournaments and the PPT circuit but in the meantime we should also be aware of this type of thing from the perspective of developing and promoting the sport of Padel in England and the rest of the UK. As we are effectively starting from scratch we have an excellent opportunity to develop a strong and effective framework for the organisation of the sport both in terms of tournaments at the grassroots level and maybe leading eventually to a more professional circuit. Who knows…its early days at the moment but its clearly important that everyone is pushing in the same direction to help get the sport off the ground….if you’ve any ideas feel free to express them here