For Great Britain’s Kerry White, the 2024 FIP Seniors World Padel Championships will be the latest chapter in a sporting odyssey that has taken her from England’s elite public schools to the gritty street corners of New York City.
Kerry will fly to Alicante this Saturday (13 April) to join the GB ladies’ and men’s squads for the event at the beautiful resort of La Nucia. The group draw takes place on Sunday night with the action commencing on Monday.
For 41-year-old Kerry, it will be the high point so far in a competitive padel career that started quite by chance during the pandemic. Prior to that, she reached similar impressive peaks in no fewer than three different sports.
Her sporting journey began with tennis, in which she reached county level as a junior before falling out of love with the sport at 18, partly due to its “bitchy” atmosphere at the top level.
Around that time, she went to watch her brother play Eton Fives at St. Olave’s Grammar School in Orpington, south east London. Eton Fives is played in pairs on a three-walled court. The ball is struck with the hands. There are only a few courts in the country, mostly in England’s poshest private schools.
Kerry, aged 13 at the time, fell in love with the sport, but was one of very few girls to play. A girls’ schools competition was created specifically to give her an outlet to compete. She won 11 national titles but, as she explains, “I basically ran out of competitors!”
Then she heard about wallball (called ‘handball’ in America). It was very similar to Eton Fives but without the side walls and with far simpler rules. Because of her reputation in Eton Fives, Kerry was selected for an international wallball competition in Spain in 2009. It was the first time she’d ever played the game.
Kerry explains: “It’s far less elitist than Eton Fives. Anyone can play, it’s cost effective and very easy to understand. It was exciting to be quite good at something from the beginning without having to re-learn a sport. I had good hand-eye coordination and was used to hitting the ball with my hands. My skills were transferable.”
She went on to compete across Europe and went to Portland, Oregon in 2009 for the World Handball Championships. There, she formed connections with players from the States and Latin America.
Fast forward a couple of years and Kerry applied for a transfer with her advertising and marketing firm (where she worked as a graphic designer) from their office in London to New York. She only intended on going for a year – but ended up staying for eight.
It was handball that made Kerry fall in love with New York City. The demographics of the sport in the Big Apple are radically different to the public schoolboys she’d rubbed shoulders with on the Eton Fives courts.
“Handball is a street sport in New York,” explains Kerry. “I was exposed to a whole different side of life. As an average white person, I was the minority. I’d be on a court with a county judge one minute and a drug dealer the next. I played almost every day. It taught me really tough competition and turbo-boosted my skills.
“It was sometimes intimidating being the only white person on a court and a female. People came and stared. But eventually they warmed to me, because it’s what handball does over there. It brings everyone together.”
But Kerry’s American dream was rudely interrupted by her visa expiring in May 2019. “I was gutted. I wasn’t ready to leave,” she says. After returning to the UK, she had the option to return but America’s ever-charming President, Donald Trump, banned immigration and then Covid struck. “It was such a weird time that it was nice to be closer to family,” Kerry recalls.
And then, quite by chance, she discovered padel. After the easing of the first lockdown in summer 2020, she went to Portugal and met up with Kate Hands, an old friend from tennis-playing days. They found the tennis courts at a local club empty, but some strange glass-caged courts nearby were packed. They ventured over for a closer look. A few days later, they gave it a go, then had some lessons and soon became addicted. “We kept changing our flights,” laughs Kerry. “Boris had put the UK into a second lockdown, so we ended up staying in Portugal for three months. We played padel virtually every day. I haven’t played wallball since.”
On returning to the UK, the pair found padel courts at Kerry’ childhood tennis club, Sundridge Park in Kent, and then joined Stratford Padel Club. Over the next year they started figuring out the nuances of the game. “It was so exciting to be decent at a brand new sport and encounter a whole new set of challenges,” says Kerry.
Kerry and Kate attended a ladies’ trial organised by GB women’s coach Sally Fisher in Harrogate in summer 2021. Both played in the FIP European Seniors Championships last year and, at the time of writing, both are packing their bags ready for their first World Senior Championships, starting on Monday.
Although Kate is Kerry’s oldest friend in the GB squad and they started their padel journey together, Kerry now partners Sarah Lochrie on court after they joined up for last year’s Europeans.
“I felt like a rabbit in the headlights at that event as it was my first major tournament,” says Kerry. “But what’s really exciting is we’ve now had a year of competition together.
“Padel is such a parnertship sport. You’ve got to gel together and know what the other person is doing. I’m really excited to see how far we’ve grown in a year. I’ve been playing five days a week. I’m under no illusions about beating the Spanish and Argentinians, but let’s just see where we’re at.
“It’s one thing knowing we’re decent nationally, but because it’s such a new sport we’re not necessarily pushed as much as we could be. Let’s see what the rest of the world is doing. I cannot wait.”
Follow GB’s progress in the ladies’ and men’s draws at the FIP World Seniors Padel Championships in Alicante (15-20 April) here.
