Not many players in the UK know this, but you can play singles padel. The sport’s current popularity is based on its fun, sociable doubles format; but singles courts do exist.
As all padellers know, a standard padel court is 20m x 10m. Try playing singles on that and you quickly realise you cannot possibly cover the space and you have to adjust the game to playing either diagonally or just down one half of the court.
Hence the singles court: it’s the same length (20m), but only 6m wide. If you want to visualise it: a standard padel court has five glass panels at the back (each 2m wide), whereas a singles court only has three panels. The next time you’re down at your club, stand behind the back wall and visually shrink it down to three panels wide.
So how many publicly accessible (as in not at a private residence) singles courts there are in the UK? I’ll tell you: six.
I spoke to a couple of people recently who know first hand what it’s like to have singles courts. Rocket Padel Bristol has a fabulous set-up with 12 doubles and two singles courts, all indoors.
General Manager, Marcus Ballyn, said: “The two singles courts see our highest utilisation. I encourage anyone building new clubs that if they have space available to add some singles courts in, then they should consider it.”
And when I spoke to someone intimately associated with a similar sized club in Spain, again with two singles courts, he said exactly the same thing. Anecdotally I hear stories of some of the big Italian clubs taking out some of the their doubles courts and replacing them with singles courts.
So why is it that there are so few singles courts in the UK?
First off, we’re obviously much earlier on in our padel journey than a lot of the European countries … and it makes sense to start with the core configuration (doubles) which of course is the recognised format played on the Premier Padel tour.
Other than that .. hard to say. It’s a great game. It definitely has some differences to the standard doubles but is still a lot of fun. And surely we’ve all had experiences, whether first hand or not, of an open match being cancelled because it just wasn’t possible to get four players together.
So other than the obvious headline difference – Having half the number of players – how does the singles game differ? Well, the main difference is that being at the net is not quite as important as in doubles.
As a singles player you need to cover 6m of width, whereas in the doubles you are only really covering 5m, sometimes less. This means the passing shot in singles is easier.
Ask anyone who has played some singles and they’ll also say it can be quite a cardio workout: maybe particularly attractive to those squash and racketball players out there who like to get a sweat up. One word of warning: if you play on a singles court and then move back to a standard doubles court, it can seem very big!
We at UK PADEL want to embrace all things padel to increase the number of opportunities there are for everyone to participate – which definitely means singles as well. Planning permission allowing, we are very excited to be opening the largest padel centre in Devon and Cornwall later this year. It’ll have five courts and two of those will be singles courts. And with a fair wind we might have two more singles courts in the Home Counties before too long.
Looking forward to reporting back how everything is going nearer the end of the year!
Nick Baker | CEO and Co-Founder, UK PADEL
