By RJ Mitchell
ABIGAIL TORDOFF may have played at Wimbledon but she has admitted her delight at being selected for the GB Team to play the World Championship padel qualifiers at Derby in three weeks means every bit as much.
The 43-year-old has modestly described herself as the ‘mother hen’ of the GB team who will take to the court at We Are Padel Derby – the 11-court super-venue which is the largest padel facility in the UK – to battle for a place at the XVI World Padel Championships.
Yet the disarmingly modest Tordoff once trod the hallowed lawns of SW19 when she played at the 1999 women’s singles championships while reaching a career high of No.242 in the WTA rankings in 1998.
After retiring from tennis in 2000 Tordoff first flirted with padel in 2012 during a work sojourn in Barcelona in 2012 but it was to be a further nine years later before she took the game seriously; in fact, seriously enough to transition from novice to full international in less than a year.
Now, speaking exclusively to The Padel Paper, after her selection along with GB No.1 Tia Norton, Hansie Ruddick, Olivia Smith, Lisa Philipps, Libby Fletcher, and Catherine Rose was announced earlier this week, the former international tennis player has admitted she is “honoured” at the opportunity to fly under the Union Jack in her new sport.
Tordoff said: “I’m really honoured to be part of the GB team and it’s always a special thing to pull on a top with your country’s flag on it. So, I am just super-excited to be going to Derby and to see what we can do on court.
“Previously I was asked to play in a GB Seniors but this is the first for the open category and it’s really nice for an old lady like me!
“Like anything at that level it will be difficult with no easy matches and we have to go out there and take it match by match.
“But the team is full of real competitors and it will also be good to have some home support so I just hope we get a few people along to get behind us as that can really make a difference in the tough moments.
“We Are Padel, the venue, looks incredible and this is just such an exciting time for British padel. We recently had the FIP Rise event in London and if you look back just two or three years ago we wouldn’t have been able to do that.
“So it just shows how the sport has grown and the way the interest levels are growing with it.”
Tordoff continued: “Hopefully we can get lots of kids up to Derby to watch the qualifiers and just inspire the next generation as a lot of youngsters don’t know anything about the sport. Developing padel with juniors is a big thing for the LTA and junior participation, as well as female participation, are two things I am especially passionate about.”
When it came to her meteoric rise to the cusp of full international selection in the competitive cauldron of a World Championship qualifying campaign, Tordoff’s case was boosted by a fine summer in which she won the LTA Grade 2 Women’s Tournament with Lila Simpson at the National Tennis Centre.
Reflecting on her summer of transition from former tennis star to bona fide padel ace Abi said: “I’ve had a great summer just playing a lot. I am relatively new to padel and have come from a tennis background and played tennis all my life.
“I was a tennis professional and stopped at 21, so I am probably the mother hen of the team and really I only started playing last year but even although there is an advantage when you come from tennis you are learning all the time.
“You have to change certain ways and bad habits from the tennis court and to iron these out for the padel court. But I have played with Lila and also with Lisa (Philipps) and that is great.
“I played a very long time ago when I was in Barcelona around 2012 as I was out there with my work as a sports agent and I tried it but it wasn’t for me then as I just didn’t get padel then.
“But I tried it again last October and gave it a few goes and thought this is just a really cool game and this time I wasn’t put off by the walls!
“So I gave it a proper go and suddenly I was hooked and wanted to play padel every single day. I have two young kids and they love playing padel and they love playing tennis and I think that is the beauty of the sport, I don’t think it takes anything away from tennis.
“They sit very well and side-by-side nicely. I was in Guernsey not that long ago and they have tennis and padel side-by-side and I was asking a few questions about how that impacted on the tennis membership.
“But they assured me the tennis membership, just like the padel membership, was growing and that the bar facilities were so much more vibrant and that the whole social scene had picked up.
“So it is just a great time for padel and now there is some real depth with the women’s game and that is very exciting.”
Team GB have already had a few training sessions under their belt including this week at the NTC where coach Alvaro Fernández Guerrero put his charges through an early morning session as the countdown to Derby reaches three weeks.
For her part Tordoff was keen to praise the Spaniard and his No.2 Max Lutostanski while also backing her team mates to cut the World Championship mustard: “Alvaro is a fantastic coach with so much knowledge to share. I personally love working with him and I think that he gives you some golden nuggets and that just really works for me and the other girls feel the same way.
“So he is a brilliant coach to work with and there is nothing but positivity with him, especially on court. I feel that makes him a very good coach with women as I think that women need that type of positivity more than the men.
“Max and Alvaro working together is tremendous. The more coaches we can get into the sport to make a difference the better. It would be nice to see more female coaches involved but the addition of Max is only a positive thing and he has shown that already.
“We’ve got to know each other over the last year through competitions and it is just a great bunch of girls. It is kind of a mixed bag in terms of experience levels but we are all hugely passionate about representing our country and the team bond in the group is fantastic.
“We had a training session at the NTC on Thursday morning with Tia on court and Lisa and we have training sessions coming up that will all help us on the countdown to Derby and we have had a few of these that have been hugely beneficial.”
While Team GB are No.2 seeds behind Denmark, Tordoff is adamant her side’s focus must all be about delivering their best rather than worrying about the opposition: “I wouldn’t single out any other nations in particular. That is because every match will be hard. You don’t really go into qualifying for the World Championships not going there with your best game.
“Even if you are not at the top of your form you will be competing to your absolute maximum. So there will be no easy matches. Obviously there will be better players than others but that is just the case with sport.”
It’s a shame she was selected, for political reasons only. Much better players out there who she’s stepped on the toes of
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