First pickleball, now padel: Why ‘social’ sports are growing in popularity

Bill Stamile was walking along a beach in Argentina in 1992 when he first saw a young family playing a sport that looked like a combination of tennis, squash and badminton — but wasn’t quite any of the three.

“They were playing to keep the ball alive and they were all having fun and it was fairly easy for them to play,” Stamile remembers thinking. 

Played on a specially-designed court, “padel” is typically played in doubles, with perforated racquets and a low-hanging net running through the middle of the court. The walls of a padel court aren’t off limits, meaning once the padel ball hits a wall, players can still hit it over making for exciting plays.

Eager to bring the sport back to his home in Canada, Stamile said he and his brother, Angelo, built the country’s very first padel court in Calgary later that year, made of wood and “basically, almost chicken wire.”

But while the sport exploded in popularity in other parts of the world including South America, Europe and even the United Arab Emirates, it has struggled to gain traction in Canada — until just the last five years.

Now, it’s seeing more demand than Canada’s courts can handle, with new padel infrastructure being built out in cities across the country including Toronto, Edmonton, Montreal and Vancouver.

The key to padel’s recent success? 

“Like with pickleball when it started, it’s a social sport,” says Ann Pegoraro, director of the International Institute for Sport Business and Leadership at the University of Guelph.

“It’s the kind of sport you can show up by yourself if you don’t have a partner. It’s an ease of entry to play it,” she said.

Padel is picking up across Canada

“I think that social sports are providing that third space. So a place you can go and you can still get activity and some exercise, but you also have an aspect to it so you connect with people and you can have conversations.”

According to the International Padel Federation, padel is currently played in 150 countries and boasts over 35 million players worldwide, with a near-even split between male and female players.

The sport has also been gaining recognition professionally, being featured for the first time at the European Games in 2023.  

The International Olympic Committee has also designated padel a ‘recognized international sport’ and there’s a push to have it included in future Olympic Games.

Invented by couple Enrique and Viviana Corcuera in Acapulco, Mexico in 1969, the sport is still played widely in its origin country, but also in hot spots like Argentina and Spain where padel was first introduced in the 1970s, according to the International Padel Federation.

In the 1980s, padel expanded to new countries including Brazil, Uruguay, France and the United States. The same decade, glass court technology was introduced which would become pivotal to the sport’s expansion.

In 1991, the International Padel Federation was born, and by the end of the decade, 11 national padel federations had been established: five in Europe and six in the Americas, including Canada.

According to the Padel Association of Canada, Calgary had the country’s only padel courts until 2021.

Stamile said much of the newfound growth in Canada is coming from Canadian travellers who are exposed to padel on their trips abroad.

“For years and years, we were so far away from the [padel] epicenter, which is Europe, South America, Asia and Middle East, that basically just, you know, there were too many … sport and recreation options in Canada, so padel was sort of lost in the weeds,” he said.

“But now it’s become so big: television, pro sports, the celebrities that are playing it all over the world, soccer players, tennis players,” he said. “The momentum’s too much for it to slow.”

Stamile said Calgary saw about 500 to 600 regular padel players until about three and a half years ago. Since then, the number of players has quadrupled with more courts being built in the city.

Jim Scouras, president of the Alberta Padel Association, said “there’s not enough courts right now.”

“The business plan that we looked at, we could sustain at least triple the amount of courts we have today with the demand we see in front of us, with conservative growth.”

Stamile said Calgary is set to get three new padel clubs, likely within the next year. 

True Padel Club, located in the city’s southeast, is opening seven professional padel courts and has already soft launched.

Spruce Meadows is completing its court construction, and Scouras said it could have outdoor paddle courts by the end of summer.

There are also plans in motion to repurpose city land for five new courts at the Patterson Heights Community Centre. Stamile said fundraising is still in progress.

With padel’s relatively newfound success, Stamile said seeing the sport now being embraced in Canada is deeply satisfying.

“Anytime I see somebody play on a court … I say to myself, you know, if it wasn’t for my being such a hard head and [having] persevered, this sport actually died two or three times in that time and I did my best to keep it alive [in Canada]”

“And I suppose not too many individuals, you know, can say or claim that they brought a whole new sport or recreation activity to a whole country. So from that end of it … it feels really good.”