After her breakthrough victory last weekend in Kuala Lumpur, GB no.4 Lisa Phillips has revealed how her padel career may never have started without two dislocated knees and a job as an au pair.
Sitting down with The Padel Paper following a gruelling 31-hour return trip from Malaysia, Lisa took time to look back at her early days in tennis and some horrendous injury setbacks, as well as reflect on her recent ascent from an office job to a debut tournament win on the international pro padel circuit.
“I’m still on a high! I’m absolutely ecstatic,” said the 28-year-old after her victory at FIP Bronze Kuala Lumpur alongside long-time partner Abigail Tordoff, for whom it was also a maiden world tour trophy.
Bringing home a winner’s cheque of just €350 (one third of the price of her flight) might appear something of an anti-climax, but the victory boosted Lisa’s ranking to an all-time high of 126 and greater prizes surely lie ahead as her career trajectory continues upwards.
Lisa left her job in ecommerce a year ago to coach padel at The Padel Hub Crawley, Esher and Reigate tennis clubs and The Hurlingham Club in London.
Last week, she did eight hours of coaching without a break before setting straight off to Heathrow for the flight to Malaysia. Combining coaching with a playing career is undoubtedly hard work, but she feels it’s absolutely necessary to maximise her potential as an athlete.
“Every single bit of money that I make from coaching goes towards my padel career,” she said. “It’s difficult and I do a lot of hours, but it’s the only way I can make it work at the moment.
“Looking back, leaving my office job was absolutely the right decision. It was a great job, but they wanted me to work more hours and I wanted to spend more time playing padel. Living in Chichester without many people to play, I was travelling to London evenings and weekends to train. I couldn’t focus on both things.
“Now as a coach I get a lot more flexibility around when I work. I’m spending my whole day at a padel club so I can just jump on court to train and hop into the gym when I have a spare hour.”
Lisa’s padel career may never have started were it not for several twists of fate, starting at the age of 19 when she dislocated both knees in separate horrific incidents only three months apart.
At that point, she was a semi-professional tennis player. Right at the end of a November training session, she hit an open-stance forehand and felt her knee give way underneath her. Her kneecap had come out of its socket. It took the ambulance an hour and a half to arrive while she writhed in agony.
Three months later, tentatively venturing back on court, she did a gentle lunge during a warm-up and her ‘good’ knee dislocated. It turned out she’d been born without a groove for her kneecaps to slot into. The cartilage had worn away and she needed urgent surgery.
After a year on the waiting list, Lisa had the operation, then had to endure 18 months of recovery. She decided to end her tennis career, went backpacking for eight months then did a ski season. Plans to live in Australia had to be shelved due to the pandemic, but when Covid restrictions started to ease, a friend suggested she become an au pair.
Within a week, Lisa had found a family in Spain who needed domestic help and moved out to live in their spare room during the second British lockdown. In a small Murcia town where she knew no-one and didn’t speak much of the language, she joined a local fitness centre which happened to have five indoor padel courts.
“Padel was a great way to practise my Spanish, meet new people and do a bit of sport,” she explains. “My whole family are squash players and with my tennis background, I took to it pretty quickly.”
She soon became “totally hooked” and played up to five times a day on her days off. When she left the job to come home, the Spanish family bought Lisa a padel racket as a departing gift. She didn’t use it for six months as there was nowhere to play back home in Chichester, West Sussex.
Instead, she played squash and one day an opponent introduced her to Wayne Jones, a Sussex-based padel player, coach and referee. After watching Lisa play padel, he immediately urged her to try out for the British team.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ was Lisa’s initial reaction, but her grounding in tennis and squash and 10 months spent on court with high-quality club players in Spain had, almost without her realising, made Lisa a very, very good padel player.
Alvaro Fernandez Guerrero, then the GB women’s coach, saw Lisa play and invited her to a GB training camp where she sparred with the likes of Laura Robson, Abi Tordoff and Catherine Rose. Abi invited her to play for Chelsea Harbour Club and partnered with her at a tournament at Stratford Padel Club. They finished runners-up to Tia Norton and Carlo Fito.
After that, Lisa was selected for the 2022 European Championships in Derby and was also in the squad that finished 10th last year in Sardinia. It seems pretty certain that she’ll be part of the GB squad again at the renamed FIP Euro Padel Cup in July.
“It’s the biggest honour to represent your country,” she says. “As a team, we’re always getting stronger and there’s more British women playing at national and international tournaments, which is great to see.
“I don’t like setting myself time limits to achieve targets as it adds pressure that you don’t need, but winning a FIP was a big goal of mine. That’s ticked off now, gives me even more focus and urges me on to train harder. As for what I can achieve in future, we’ll just have to see!”
