Karen Crawford can’t choose between padel and pickleball. She’s been flipping between the two courts for less than a year – and is already lifting top-level trophies in both sports!
Karen, a school teacher from Aberdeen, won the recent LTA Padel Grade 1 trophy at West of Scotland Padel, despite only meeting her American partner Daniela Bellini for the first time at the tournament. The previous weekend, she was in Milton Keynes, where she won the UK Young Persons’ Pickleball Championship.
After over 20 years of competing and coaching in tennis all around Scotland, Karen stopped playing at the end of 2022 and decided to start afresh in a new sport.
At that stage, she had seen and heard very little about padel. She tells us: “A scroll through Instagram led me to some padel pages and I was drawn to the sport by the glass walls, having briefly tried squash a few years back.”
At that time, her nearest courts were in Edinburgh, over a two-hour drive from home in Aberdeen. She connected with the Scottish Ladies Padel page on Instagram which led to finding a partner and entering her first competition.
When Karen entered the court on 12 March 2023 for the LTA Grade 5 Women’s Doubles at Game4Padel in Edinburgh it was the first time she had ever been on a padel court. She recalls: “I lost in my first match but knew that I would be able to figure it out on the court for the next match. The women that I met that day were so friendly and encouraging that I knew padel was a community I wanted to be part of.”
Thereafter, she watched padel videos on YouTube to immerse herself in the sport. “I really wanted to just learn the game,” she says. “I did four more tournaments in Edinburgh before I had any practice as courts didn’t arrive in Aberdeen until May.”
When Strikers Indoor Padel opened in her home town, she was first in the queue on its opening day and booked onto a match play group the next week. “This is when my padel progress really started,” she smiles.
It was at this point that Karen also discovered pickleball. “I was liking lots of padel pages on Instagram which started suggesting similar pages – that’s where I saw the word pickleball for the first time!
“It was a busy time for my brain learning the rules of two new sports. Pickleball was fun and I fell in love with the community. The pickleball community is so incredible, so inclusive and welcoming!
“I was quickly swept into festivals and started making connections with incredible picklers from across the UK and Europe. It didn’t take long for me to start competing in this either.”
Karen enrolled to gain pickleball coaching badges, travelling great distances to do so. She completed the Pickleball Scotland Ambassador and Coaching course, then flew down to Norwich at the start of the school Easter holidays to complete the Level 1 IPTPA Coaching course.
In the last nine months she has won pickleball medals at the Scottish Nationals, Belgian Open, English Open, Luxembourg Open and UK Young Persons Championships, as well as being signed up for the Franklin Premier Pickleball League and securing a two-year sponsorship with Joola.
But she has no plans to specialise in either sport. Her itinerary for the next month includes the Dutch Open and Paris Open in pickleball and the LTA Padel Grade 1 at Stratford Padel Club and East of Scotland Padel Open.
Karen has been visiting Strikers Indoor Padel every week to play and learn more about padel’s intricacies.
She says: “A few months into attending weekly matchplay sessions I connected with coach Will James. Will is an incredible person with some great padel experience behind him playing in England and Australia before moving to Scotland.
“I am so grateful to him for coaching me and spending time to really improve my technique and understand strategies. Strikers have developed a great padel community here in Aberdeen and they are very lucky to have such a great coach!”
