Tag: padel

Have you not heard of squash?

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Spotted on a local Facebook feed this morning:

What? No. That’s simply not right.

You know that I’m not the biggest fan of padel. But that’s neither here nor there in this instance.
Because I’m not really into squash either, but I do know enough about it to know that hitting the wall is very much part of the game there. It’s pretty much the entire way of playing the game.

Ask Google about padel and it says:

Padel is often described as a cross between tennis and squash. It’s played on a court similar to tennis but smaller and enclosed by walls, which are used as part of the game like in squash.

“Squash”, you say?
“Walls”? Hmm.

It’s hardly subtle stuff. The clues really are all there.

What makes this even funnier (for me, but then I’m still recovering from that meeting) is that ironically, Bredasdorp (where this padel tank is) is very much an Afrikaans speaking area (83.1% first language), and the Afrikaans word for squash is Muurbal, which literally translates as “wall ball”.
I actually only worked this out this a few years back when driving past the Bredasdorp Muurbalklub, and they’d cut the trees back.

See?

I’m just waiting for Miskey’s to open their 10-pin bowling business: “the only sport where rolling a ball is actually part of the plan!”. Although I’m sure that the Bredasdorp Rolbalklub (yes, seriously) would have something to say about that.

Padel – elitist in the UK as well

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I mentioned here that padel is a bit of an elitist sport in South Africa.

Well, just look:

Apparently it’s also a bit of an elitist sport in the UK, as well.

According to the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA), there are currently around 800 padel courts in Britain, but over 400,000 players.
Research by Ray Algar, an expert on the economics of sport and exercise, shows that the average off-peak court hire in the UK is about £30, but peak time prices can reach £80 at some venues.

Thirty quid isn’t far off what a court costs in SA, and while the cost of living here is much lower (meaning that in real terms, padel is more expensive here than there), eighty pounds (basically R2000) an hour is completely ridiculous.

The rise of the racquet sport – usually played in doubles on an enclosed court where balls can be played off the walls – has been helped by influencers and celebrity players such as Stormzy.

I think that Stormzy was the guy who got a lot of the middle-class, white South Africans into padel as well. It’s a perhaps surprising crossover between tax advisory services and accountancy during the day, and then banging out freestyle rhymes over classic grime beats in the evening while playing shit tennis in a fish tank, but it does happen.

The plan in the UK is to open more courts:

As the organisation that looks after padel in the UK, the LTA has launched a new five-year strategy that aims to work with local authorities to build more courts.

See? And the aim here is getting a more diverse cohort involved in the sport. But this has never really worked with polo, and I can’t see it happening with padel in the near future, either.

There are far better options: You can book a 5-a-side court for less than a padel court here, you can spread the cost ten ways instead of four, and all you need is a R200 football instead of four plastic bats whose costs stretch into five figures.

You might not get the inter-game spreadsheet banter that you crave, but it’s still a decent workout.

It’s fine. Padel won’t be around forever, and then it’s only a matter of time until the next elitist fad comes around. And whatever that might be will eventually be “ruined” by letting “common people” have a go at it as well. So I guess the padelers should enjoy it while they can.

The end is naai

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Always wanted to use that phrase (which will mean a lot more to local readers than to anyone elsewhere). But yes, its death knell is sounding, it has one foot in the grave, it is moribund and it is clearly no longer pining for the fjords.

What is it?

Padel. Padel is what it is.

About two years ago, some sage bloke wrote a rather witty and perhaps not ever so kind piece about the this sport, which ended with the lines:

Thankfully, it won’t be around for long.
Please remember to recycle your bat on the way out.

And golly gosh, it seems like he was right. The time has come and the fad has passed.

The Daily Maverick told us last week of the upcoming complete over-saturation of the padel market and the inevitable crash that will… er… inevitably follow. Because there are lessons to be learned from those who came before SA:

Trends come and go, and a look at international markets may hold some clues for eager padel investors. In Sweden, which was once a padel pioneer, the market is now struggling with oversaturation. As a result, Swedish giant We Are Padel is applying for corporate restructuring and may have to close half of its 80 venues.

South Africa is following exactly the same trajectory as Sweden did, and look what’s happening here now:

Although the early adopters of padel were cashing in, paying off their courts within a year thanks to their 70% occupancy rates, things have shifted. Most South African padel courts now operate at just 30% to 50% occupancy, according to Roger Barrow, general manager of the Padel Building Company.

And with fewer people playing – and therefore paying – and even more courts appearing:

Virgin Active Padel Club, already home to 65 courts, plans to push that number to nearly 100 by mid-2025

it’s surely only a matter of time before the bottom drops out of the market.

Oh no.

Hey, and to add to those woes, there’s the sudden appearance of Pickleball.

Looks like you came to the wrong neighbourhood, motherfunster.

Pickleball is another sport that shit tennis players can try to play to help them forget just how bad they are at tennis.
But I won’t be joining them because (contrary to popular belief) I’m not an septuagenarian living in a Florida retirement complex.

Yet.

Anyway, Pickleball is seen as “a market disruptor” (for translation, see this post), and probably the only thing that will keep local Padel players from defecting is the fact that Pickleball is crazily accessible to many more of the economic demographics, unlike the rather elite and aloof Padel, which for starters, has to be played in a huge aquarium.

Either way, though. It’s clear that the end is indeed naai, Padel naaiers.

Hate to say I told you so.

Not for me, volume 7: Padel

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I’ve never been into trendy things that are trendy because they’re trendy.

Trendy things that are trendy because they are good or useful – sure. Solar power would be a great example of that, right now.
But if you are just doing something trendy solely to be trendy – well, that’s not for me.

Step forward padel: the latest trendy thing to hit the monied white people of South Africa.
In Cape Town, you may have seen Mountain Biking fill this niche. And then there were E-Bikes.
Remember the Tim Noakes Cookbook?
How about Hot Yoga?
Fedoras.
EMS BodyTec fitness.
Crapft Beer (or Gin).
There are many, many examples.

Padel is a cross between beach bats, tennis, pickleball and squash, and it is EVER so trendy right now. And it’s almost exclusively in that demographic that I have mentioned above.

I have friends who play padel. But it’s not for me. And I feel that that decision was vindicated when I saw the (hastily built, always full) local courts being used by at least two gentlemen wearing fedoras.
Case rested. That’s not sporting gear, that’s trendy for the sake of being trendy gear.

They’d probably ridden there on their E-Bikes.

And then I was served this ball-achingly awful ad on Facebook for Padel bats padels, which just sums up the whole thing:

So many issues here.

seventy-Four different Examples of Capitalisation. Never a good Start.

Released on 23 February, but “designed to celebrate the holiday season”? Which holiday season, exactly? Shrove Tuesday?
And “a little pre-taste of the summer collection”? Mate – this is the Southern Hemisphere. On the 23rd February, summer is less than a week from being over.
How pre-taste do you want this? 9 months?

Variate is a noun, not a verb.

“wintery Smoke Pine Greens” – absolutely ideal for a little pre-taste of the summer collection.

As an aside: never smoke a pine, by the way:

“When considering total emissions, particulate matter from smoldering pine wood and needles was by far the most mutagenic of the samples assessed, and thus potentially more carcinogenic.”

Mutagenicity and Lung Toxicity of Smoldering vs. Flaming Emissions from Various Biomass Fuels: Implications for Health Effects from Wildland Fires

And then the weird elevation of “a papaya smoothie” as some sort of aspirational goal for the hue of sporting equipment.

But after that, well, they’re just taking the piss, aren’t they?

Our Collection continues to draw its inspiration from Sci-Fi movies translating the current world we’re living in, where people spend their time between the physical world and the virtual metaverse.

I don’t even know what that means.

I love a good Sci-Fi movie translating the current world (we’re living in).

But no, the people you are trying to appeal to are spending their time between the padel court and the next occasion they go to the padel court. This intermediate time is spent in the physical world, describing their last padel game and arranging their next one.

No-one is spending any time in the virtual metaverse, because:

the “metaverse” is a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal, and immersive virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual reality and augmented reality headsets.

And no, I don’t know if you can play padel there.

As with many of these fads, padel will last for a while (durations of these things vary) while shrewd individuals and companies pivot and invest to make a quick (and big) buck (e.g. Osaka’s [above] domain is actually osakahockey dot co dot za, but that old curved wooden stick staple is nowhere near as trendy and money-spinning as padel) and will then die out.

But with the equipment (padel, racquet, ugh… whatever) starting at a few thousand Rands for a bit of moulded plastic:

…it’s clearly for the few, not the many.

Thankfully, it won’t be around for long.

Please remember to recycle your bat on the way out.