‘Let our girls play padel!’

In this guest blog, Carson Russell, Chief Operating Officer of Smash Padel, says girls are being denied the opportunity to compete in padel due to LTA competition rules ported across from tennis. Update (Friday 24 Nov): the LTA’s response can be found below.

“Since launching our first club – Smash Padel Bicester – earlier this year, we’ve placed a strong emphasis on developing juniors. Children are the future of the sport and receive preferential treatment at the club, which our team feel is entirely justified if we want to nurture the next generation of performance and recreational-level players.

Recently, we had two girls aged 10 and 12 who were unable to play in a big tournament because there were not enough entrants into the girls’ draw. LTA rules seemingly prevent girls from entering a boys’ competition – and if they do so, the competition is deemed a ‘friendly’ event and no rankings points can be awarded.

In my coaching career I have been heavily involved in rugby. In that sport and others, the genders are combined until aged 12 or older so the sport can be as inclusive as possible and so players can experience a level of competition and thus have motivation to dedicate themselves to training.

You need good, healthy competition for those who have aspirations of playing at a higher level, possibly even professionally or representing their countries.

On the flip side, you also need to encourage grassroots-level participation. Governing bodies need do whatever they can to support clubs, schools and community groups to get people playing every week for the love of the sport or for their own personal goals, such as fitness or socialising.

Whether the objectives are at the top or the bottom of the pyramid, no sport should be putting up barriers that prevent people from taking part. Restrictions such as the banning of gender mixing at such a young age will detract from producing future talent and will also prevent people simply playing and enjoying the sport.

With these excessive regulations preventing girls from competing, padel is guilty of some rather disjointed governance. These rules, as I understand it, have been copied and pasted from tennis, presumably on safety grounds to protect girls from physical mismatches with boys.

But padel far less power-dependent than tennis, so I would like to know what piece of research or evidence exists for the LTA to apply this tennis logic to a different sport?

This is also an example of rules from the elite level being applied inappropriately to recreational or younger junior players.

The physical maturation levels of boys and girls is roughly equal until the age of 12, so in rugby they mix up until that age. Thereafter, it can become dangerous so they split. However, after that, rugby clubs collaborate and agree to form clusters so girls in each age group can combine with other local clubs to form teams. It is a mature, well-reasoned pathway to incentivise both genders when they are young.

Padel has not followed the same logic. If you are looking to grow a new sport and encourage participation as widely as possible, why would you not allow girls and boys to compete together?

It is understandable at an elite level above a certain age to separate the genders, but at a community level, there’s actually no reason why they can’t mix all the way through to adulthood.

Sports governing bodies all talk about the importance of inclusion, but they must practise it too. Policies that lead to the exclusion of young girls in both elite and participation pathways is not the way to do this.

I believe that a far wider group of stakeholders need to be consulted and that this should be a high priority for those involved in the senior management of padel at the LTA.

At Smash Padel Bicester we have invested resources into nurturing a group of girls who have transferred from tennis and fallen in love with padel. We are pretty confident they would achieve good quality results if they could enter tournaments, but that opportunity is being denied to them. There is a risk that these ill-thought-through rules could lead them to walk away from the sport.”

Update: The LTA has responded to the points expressed in Carson’s blog. They said in a statement:

The LTA facilitates and encourages various padel competition formats at all levels – including mixed competitions at both junior and adult levels. There is no rule [as suggested in the blog] that boys and girls cannot play each other on safety grounds (in either tennis or padel).

The clarification is that when competitions are offering ranking points, they cannot be mixed events, as is the case in tennis and in many other sports. It’s unfortunate that in this scenario the female junior competition was under-subscribed, however, with entries into the boys’ competition already completed, with ranking points on offer, it would not be possible to facilitate the entry of the girls into this competition.

The LTA, of course, wants to facilitate the growth of the sport at the grassroots level, and develop a new generation of padel players, and we actually encourage venues hosting tournaments to put on mixed events at both junior and senior level for that reason.