Pep Stonor’s Empower Padel is set to expand its community of female padel players through partnerships with several leading UK padel operators.
Empower Padel encourages women and girls to start, return to sport or stay in sport through padel. It provides women with opportunities to meet each other and form welcoming communities.
Empower Padel has now teamed up with major operator PADELHUB, as well as Padel Stars and Padel Maidenhead, and has other potential partnerships in the works.
Pep and her team are in the process of placing LTA Level 2-qualified coach ambassadors in each location. These ambassadors will work with the local manager to help women new to padel meet other women to play with and get on court confidently.
Pep said: “For every single woman, their motivation to start to play padel will be different. One might be motivated for fitness goals, another woman may want it for social reasons whilst another may want it for a break from work or kids.
“So to have that welcoming face there that can treat you individually and work out a group that would suit your level is so important.”
Pep started Empower Padel in September 2024, after bringing the Swedish Femme Open brand to the UK in September 2022 with an initial event at The Hurlingham Club in London.
She subsequently ran several events to drive women’s participation, and also represented her home country, Australia, in two Senior FIP World Championships.
Since Empower Padel began, it has run over 50 events and has two and a half thousand women on its database, demonstrating the demand for female-focused padel opportunities. It also organised five events in Australia in 2025 in partnership with Padel Australia.
“Empower Padel is something I really feel passionate about, as sport has been such an important part of my life,” added Pep. “I want to be able to share that with other women who may not have had the opportunities I had growing up to play sport.
“Being Australian, I’ve always played sport – mostly team sport; it is a way of life in Australia for most women. I find it very sad when I meet women in this country who have never played a sport before because there are so many physical, mental and social benefits, particularly with padel.
“I have women in my network now playing padel every single week, and there is such joy when they realise they can play and they can consider themselves sporty. We need to change the narrative for women and padel offers a real chance to make that happen.”
A recent survey conducted by Empower Padel showed 71% of respondents had less than two years of experience, but 82% of them now identify as advanced or intermediate, indicating that women are gaining confidence in themselves quickly.
Furthermore, Empower Padel’s community is highly engaged with the sport, with 84% of respondents playing weekly or more, and 12% saying padel helped them return to sport or try a sport for the first time.
Pep noted that there are still some barriers for female players, particularly around navigating the padel rating system and finding suitable groups.
She explained: “Every single app will ask a woman to self-rate before she’s even got anywhere near the club. And we all know that women tend to underestimate their abilities. So before they even know it, they have graded themselves at 1.5 when they may well be double that. And so they can’t go to any of the club roll-ups that are over 2.0.”
Empower Padel’s ambassador network helps to solve this issue by hosting social mix-ins and encouraging women to contact each other for matches, as well as offering initial advice on the padel booking apps and rating system.
By partnering with PADELHUB, one of the biggest operators in the country, Empower Padel can now reach more women and tailor its programmes to each venue. With PADELHUB’s support, they offer Intro to Padel sessions, matchplays and social events, creating stronger communities.
The Empower Padel team recently attended the Premier Padel Finals with one of its established communities, organised by Weebora, the International Padel Federation’s travel provider. The trip highlighted how successful Empower Padel’s communities have become, with participants increasingly interested in travelling together to play padel internationally.
Pep expressed her excitement for the PADELHUB collaboration, saying: “PADELHUB have seen how we can help build their women’s community and they’ve been the first to really spearhead it.”
Nik Sariyski, Director of brand and marketing for PADELHUB, added: “We know that padel is ultimately a social glue. It’s very, very community-focused. We know that just from insights, we felt that half the population, women, were at times underserved in the rest of the landscape. So we wanted to just really partner with someone who shared that value as well.”
PADELHUB has already noticed positive results, with feedback showing that women feel more confident to play and find groups to have a game with regularly.
Empower Padel’s coach ambassadors will be present in all of PADELHUB’s venues: Fleet, Crawley, Southampton, Epsom, Tunbridge Wells, Reading, and Whetstone.
Pep also has ambassadors in Padel Maidenhead and at Padel Stars, with other potential partnerships in the works.
She remarked: “There are some seriously capable women in our network. They all just want to help other women get back into sport and I think that’s the best thing. I usually recruit people who have the same values as me. They want to have fun and help other women and just create a really lovely community that makes a big impact on padel.”
