Slazenger Padel Club in Seacroft hosted the Pro Am Padel Tour Community Day to broaden access and increase youth participation in one of the fastest growing sports in the world.
00:00Our event is called the Pro-Am Paddle Tour. It's a pro-celebrity team paddle event.
00:05The model is we move around the UK, go to major cities. We have two days.
00:11First day is a celebrity pro-am and the second day is our community day.
00:15So the first day is much more about leaning into that celebrity engagement to create awareness and publicity around the sport.
00:22And then our community day is about getting as many new people on court as possible.
00:27So, for example, here in Leeds, working the likes of Leeds Rhinos Foundation, Leeds United Football Club Foundation and some other groups from the community.
00:37And that's where our partnership with the LTA comes in.
00:40Maybe players that haven't had their first experience with paddle, we give them their very first experience.
00:45They go away with a racket in the hand, a smile on their face, a voucher to play again, so that they pick up the sport again the second time and the third time.
00:52And that's really where this partnership with the Pro-Am Paddle Tour and today especially with Slides of the Paddle Club.
00:58Coming here today is very fun. It's different to like tennis because obviously the bigger swing and how to shorten it.
01:05And it's pretty close to tennis, but it's different because of the wall and getting used to the walls about it.
01:11It's so nice to watch them because obviously he's very sociable. He's a lot more sociable than other sports.
01:17I first got involved in Paddle about four and a half years ago. My background is player management, so I manage top British professionals.
01:23I had a feeling pretty early on that this was going to grow.
01:27Around that time or just prior to that, the LTA had taken on the governance of Paddle in Britain.
01:33And I think we have all been waiting for that boom phase.
01:37I would say certainly the last sort of six to 12 months, that is now happening for real in Britain.
01:43I've played Paddle before. It's very fun. You learn a lot of stuff. It's like tennis. So if you've done tennis before, it's great. It's easier.
01:53I would probably play this again if I could. And I hit the ball with some of my friends and then she hit it back to me.
02:01I first got into a sport in 2020, so it was during that Covid kind of period.
02:05And Covid was quite isolating, quite lonely for some people. So coming back out of Covid, going into an environment where there's four players on a court, not so much on your own.
02:16You're not going to the gym on your own. You're going into an environment where there's facilitation of play, but you're meeting new people all the time.
02:22It's a sport that's really accessible. So you kind of pick it up new, but you're obsessed very quickly.
02:28Leeds is an incredible city in terms of a sporting heritage. It's right up there in terms of the British cities and the ones that we want to touch and we want to be involved in.
02:40We're working really, really closely with the local authority and the borough councils to try and map out where Paddle can thrive and survive in the future.
02:47And I think it's really important that we do that work to make sure we don't sort of cluster one area, but make sure it spreads across the city.
02:55But we also reach out to all the communities to make sure the sport remains accessible.
