As he prepares to break new ground for British padel, Jack Binstead has opened up about the “mental release” that the sport has given him during a troubled year.
Jack only discovered padel in August, but has fallen for the sport in a big way. In just a few months, he has founded the GB adaptive padel team, secured sponsorship, a coach and manager and will next week fly to Dubai to compete in the Inclusive Padel Tour’s Winter Cup at ISD Padel in Dubai.
Jack, 27, is best known outside padel circles for playing the character Rem Dogg in BBC TV series Bad Education (also starring Jack Whitehall). He went on to play a role in Disney’s 101 Dalmatians and “did some comedy bits” before becoming a father, quitting showbiz, joining the 9 to 5 in cyber security, then working in TV production (oh, and by the way, he was a GB wheelchair racer as a teenager and also plays disability pool and snooker for England).
This year has brought personal turbulence and adversity in the form of a cancer scare, a break-up and financial struggles – but he says discovering padel has been “almost like therapy” in the face of these difficulties.
The 27-year-old’s first taste of the sport was with long-time friend Luke Dolphin, who is the adapted padel manager and coach at Rocks Lane in Chiswick, west London.
Jack told The Padel Paper: “I remember going for that first session with Luke and as I was sweeping my arm round and connecting with that ball and pushing my chair, there was this immense feeling of release.
“By the end of that hour’s play, I felt like a ****ing truck had been taken off my shoulders! I ended up craving that feeling so much that I started to come back four or five times a week. I still get that same feeling every time I go on court now.
“You don’t see people admitting to it, but I think padel is a form of therapy to many others as well. It’s not necessarily a cheaper form of therapy, but it’s something you might even get more out of! You’re not sat there talking through your feelings; in fact, you’re not talking at all – you’re talking through your movement and the power you’re putting through the ball. Only when you try it out do you experience the benefits it brings.”
Although he has now scaled back his training schedule to two or three weekly sessions, Jack’s rapidly-embedded passion for padel (“It just came out of nowhere!” he admits) has manifested itself in several ways.
Firstly, he secured four specialist wheelchairs for use at Rocks Lane courtesy of Mark Bullock at Middlesex LTA. He has also teamed up with Mat Johnstone, a world-ranked wheelchair tennis player from Southampton, to form a doubles partnership and the UK’s first adaptive padel team (with further team members hopefully coming on board soon). And he has secured sponsorship from Playbrave performance sportswear to enable him and Mat to train and compete.
“Rocks Lane have been absolutely amazing with me,” he says. “And if it weren’t for my friend Luke Dolphin, I’d never have discovered padel at all.”
Jack and Luke worked together in cyber security before Luke abruptly changed career to become a coach at Rocks Lane. Jack recalls: “My reaction at the time was, ‘You what, mate?!’ He badgered me to come down and have a game, but I was going through this bad time in my life and kept putting him off. Now I kick myself for being lazy and not going earlier! If he hadn’t done that, I would never have tried it, and we wouldn’t be here at all.”
Now the pair are about to head to Dubai as a doubles partnership at the Inclusive Padel Tour event, which sees wheelchair players compete alongside amputees with blades or prosthetics. “We are very, very excited,” says Jack. “We’re going to be really knuckling down with training over the next week before we fly out on Thursday [16 November].
“Although I’ve had to scale down my training recently due to family and work commitments, I would train seven days a week if I could! I’m certainly in a better place now than I was at the start of the year and padel has played a huge part in that.”
