The National Universities Padel League (NUPL) is aiming to double its numbers next academic year after a highly promising first season in 2024/25.
Fia Tweedie and Barnaby Stephenson founded padel clubs at their respective universities, Newcastle and Edinburgh, and teamed up to create the NUPL, allowing students from across the country to take part in competitive padel.
British Universities and Colleges Sport (BUCS) have said that they aren’t going to adopt padel for “a few more years”, but the rejection has not stopped the game from taking over UK universities.
Guy Stonor runs the padel society at the University of Exeter and is also NUPL coordinator. Speaking to The Padel Paper, he reflected on a highly successful debut season which included 10 participating universities, 10 fixture dates, over 150 students and over 330 hours of padel played.
“It is encouraging to see now that there are people my age playing,” said Stonor. “It isn’t just people between the ages of 28 and 40 any more. It has been really exciting to see the growth of student padel and continuing to help do that is our main aim.”
League fixtures ran throughout the last academic year with top pairs qualifying for a knockout competition. The best 72 students competed at Finals Day on 25 April at The Padel Hub Whetstone in North London.
Although numbers are not yet confirmed, the NUPL hopes to expand to 17 or 18 universities in 2025/26 and double its numbers to over 250 players and over 500 hours on court. Organisers plan to add a Midlands conference to the existing North and South conference. “We hope that we can get to a point where we can add more regional-based conferences, but that will happen as the sport grows,” added Guy.
As a student-run organisation, the NUPL aimed to avoid pushing their costs onto the participating students. Guy believes that getting sponsors on board has encouraged more players to take part.
“Our biggest challenge at the start was finances, but we didn’t want to push that cost onto students. Barnaby, Fia and I all set up our respective padel clubs, and we were all aware that the biggest barrier to entry was people having no money.
“A lot of the societies aren’t rich either as it’s their first or second year, but we managed to achieve some sponsorship through R3 Sport. They’ve been amazing with funding the league. We like to think that off the back of a successful first year that we can attract some form of sponsorship this year.
“Another issue was that none of us had ever run a padel tournament before. Barnaby and Fia were running the northern segment of the competition but had pretty much not played in a padel tournament before. We had to make sure that we got the logistics right, got the format of the tournament right and making sure the students felt they were getting something out of it. We didn’t want students to think ‘I’ve got to travel to Bristol just to play one 10-minute match’. Our Finals Day was really successful. We had five or six brands come down and close to 200 spectators.
“At Exeter, we are quite lucky because our society has over 200 members, but we need to speak to other societies to see what does and doesn’t work for them. At the end of the day, we are just all passionate about padel and student padel. We knew that we had to work together.
“The sport is exploding right now. There have been three or four padel societies that have started up and got in touch saying that the NUPL gave them a reason to start and that’s really exciting to see.”
