Jack Bailey has amassed over 2.5million views of his padel videos on TikTok and Instagram in just a few months. He offers some advice to other content creators looking to capture scrollers’ attention through the magic of the 20×10…
“What’s surprised me most is how much opportunity there is for beginners in this space.
You don’t need to be an advanced padel player to grow an audience. In many ways, being at the early stages of the game makes your content more relatable to a wider group of people.
Since starting in January 2026, that approach has taken me from averaging a few hundred views to consistently reaching between 5,000 and 10,000 per video, with multiple clips passing 50,000 and over 2.5 million total views across platforms.
It hasn’t come from doing anything overly complicated, just staying consistent, focusing on relatability, paying attention to what works, and always looking at content through the eyes of the viewer.
I picked up a padel racket for the first time in December 2025. A month later, I started posting content — not because I had a background in the sport or any level of expertise, but because I could see how quickly padel was growing in the UK and felt there was space for something different.
Most of what I was seeing online didn’t reflect the reality of being a new player, and that’s exactly what I was experiencing. I didn’t expect anything to happen early on, but I was willing to stay consistent and see where it could go.
At the beginning, the numbers were small. Most videos sat around a few hundred views, and that was normal. Then one clip started to move. I remember watching it hit 10,000 views and refreshing my phone as the number kept climbing. Two days later, it reached 100,000.
That was the moment everything changed, because it made me realise that growth wasn’t just luck. There was a reason certain videos worked better than others.
What I quickly understood is that people don’t necessarily engage with ‘perfect padel’ — they engage with padel they recognise.
As a beginner, most of the points I was playing weren’t clean or technical, but they were real. Rallies that ended in slightly chaotic ways, shots that weren’t textbook, and moments that anyone new to the sport would instantly understand.
That became the focus. Instead of trying to post the best-looking points, I focused on making content that felt familiar.
Captions played a huge role in that. The hook wasn’t in the footage itself, but in how the viewer was brought into the clip. Simple, relatable lines that made someone stop and think “that’s exactly what my games look like” made all the difference.
It shifted the content from something you just watch to something you interact with, share, and send to friends. With padel growing so quickly, there’s a large audience of beginners who are all having similar experiences on court.
I also realised that posting clips without any clear purpose didn’t work. A rally on its own isn’t enough. If there’s no reason for someone to connect with it, they’ll scroll past.
The biggest change came from asking a simple question before posting anything: why would someone care about this? If the answer wasn’t obvious, it wasn’t worth uploading.
Consistency has been just as important as the content itself. I’ve posted twice a day at the same times, every day.
That routine not only builds momentum but also gives you something just as valuable as views, which is data. Over time, patterns start to appear. You begin to understand when your audience is watching, what they engage with, and which types of videos hold attention. It becomes less about guessing and more about adjusting.
The biggest shift, though, is learning to think like the viewer rather than the creator. It’s easy to post something because you like the clip, but that doesn’t mean it will connect. You have to step back and look at it from the outside.
Would you stop scrolling for it? Would you send it to someone you play with? If not, it’s probably not strong enough.”
