Newly-opened Barrio Padel in Nottingham is a “little bit different” to your average padel venue, with inclusion at the core of its philosophy.
Barrio Padel is situated at the Holme Pierrepont Country Park, home of the National Water Sports Centre, the training hub for many GB Paralympians, and serves as an extension to the state-of-the-art disability sports facilities at the venue.
The club’s co-founder, Matt Bennett, told The Padel Paper that removing barriers to participation for was one of three “really important values in how we design and run our club.”
He said: “The first one is an uncompromising player experience. We set out to ensure that all the elements a player would want are here at our location, the 3m run out around each court, the 9m-13m height of the roof to ensure it doesn’t impact the game and to ensure the courts are for all players to experience, able and disabled.”
Barrio’s second core value centres around inclusion, equality, accessibility and community. This begins with some fundamental design factors.
The opening apertures beside the net are deliberately wider so a 120cm sports wheelchair can fit through the gap by opening a lock in the gate, coming through and closing the lock behind them.
Matt invited Andrew Simister (pictured below, right), the GB adaptive padel player and Inclusive Padel Tour competitor, to the club’s opening event. Matt has ambitions of hosting an IPT event at Barrio in the future. He also wants to establish a disability coaching centre in Nottingham.
“Some wonderful people came down and played at our opening event. There was a lady who drove down from York, just so she could hit a padel ball for the very first time, having had a new above-the-knee amputee leg for only a year.
“Toby, an eight-year-old, came down in his sports wheelchair. He was the first one to use the gate, and the problem we had with Toby is we couldn’t get him off the court, he was loving it so much!
“We’re fortunate that this site and the location is all accessible because the Paralympians train here in rowing and canoeing.”
Barrio means ‘neighbourhood’
Barrio Padel’s third key value is to build padel for all the city’s neighbourhoods. Indeed, the word barrio means ‘neighbourhood’ in Spanish.
Matt states. “We want this to be inclusive to all people.
“The costs of building a good padel facility are high, therefore the court costs are relatively high, therefore not all people can’t afford it. We’re very much interested in getting corporate sponsorship to help us open up court time for those who can’t afford it.
“One of the things I find with padel, compared to other sports, is you can get people on court and put a smile on their face pretty quickly. It’s relatively easy to learn, it’s a very social sport, and you can get good quite quick – mentally that’s a really good thing.”
