The Joy of Padel podcast with Nick Baker (JOPS04E08)

On the latest episode of the JOY OF PADEL podcast, I had the opportunity to sit down with Nick Baker, a true man-about-town in the UK padel scene, passionate aficionado, and a driving force behind some of the country’s most thriving clubs and tournaments. This conversation was especially meaningful for me, as Nick Baker’s thoughtful perspective and deep experience across multiple racquet sports shine a light on how padel is carving out a unique, vibrant place in British sport.

Background on Nick Baker

Before immersing himself in the padel world, Nick Baker came from a strong racquet sports background—growing up with tennis, squash, and especially real tennis, which he played seriously from his teens. After a professional career in the City, Nick Baker found padel just before Covid, initially through a casual hit at Prested Hall with colleagues, and then dived deeper thanks to his brother-in-law in Epsom, an early hub for UK padel. Now, years later, he stands as one of the UK’s prominent club owners and the foremost organizer of team-oriented padel tournaments.

Main Topics Covered

Our conversation ranged widely over Nick Baker’s padel journey and his unique vantage point on the sport’s growth in the UK. He discussed how padel’s use of walls felt surprisingly familiar from real tennis and squash, but overhead shots—smashes, bandejas, viboras—posed a real challenge after years of keeping things below shoulder height. The serve, for Nick Baker, is where padel truly shines: simple enough for anyone to start, yet nuanced enough to be decisive at club level.

A major focus was building community. Nick Baker elaborated how the best clubs lower barriers to entry and cultivate friendly, welcoming environments—something he’s championed in his Buckinghamshire and Cornwall venues. We explored the sociable, generous spirit padel seems to attract (so different from the sometimes combative air of squash). Nick Baker is also a pioneer in junior and school outreach, subsidizing programs to help kids discover the sport early. He has built a tournament ecosystem—county championships, Masters, schools and university competitions, charity events—that gives players at every level a goal and a team to rally behind.

We even broke down the underappreciated value of singles padel, its distinct skills, and the rationale for installing singles courts at key sites. And of course, Nick Baker shared candid insights on officiating, the evolution of the UK competitive scene, and what it will take for British players to rise into the world’s top ranks.

Three takeaways from my conversation with Nick Baker

• Padel’s community spirit is its superpower. Whether you’re new or competitive, the fun, welcoming atmosphere keeps people playing, laughing, and connecting. Nick’s experience proves that when you lower the barriers, friendships and vibrant clubs swiftly follow.
• Tournaments and team events are the heartbeat of UK padel growth. From juniors to masters, county events to university battles, giving players something to train for—and a team to cheer for—makes all the difference. Nick’s focus on inclusive, well-run tournaments is inspiring a new generation of players.
• Building for the long-term means investing in youth and accessibility. Subsidized school programs, friendly coaching, and making singles courts available all foster a sustainable, diverse padel ecosystem. The payoff? More people discovering the game and UK talent ready to compete internationally.

I left our chat feeling both optimistic and proud to be part of this rapidly growing, joy-filled community. If you’re keen to find your local club, join a tournament, or just see what makes UK padel tick, check out ukpaddle.org—and be sure to catch the full episode with Nick Baker on JOY OF PADEL.

To connect with Nick Baker:

• Learn more at UKPadel.org
• Find/follow @UKPadel on Instagram
• Nick Baker on LinkedIn
• Contact via email: nick@UKpadel.org

To listen to The JOY OF PADEL podcast, you can use the embedded player above, or go find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or any number of other podcasting services listed here.

Send in your questions or reactions — as an audio file if you’d like — to nminterdial@gmail.com.

Further resources for The Joy of Padel:

charity padel events | doubles padel | joy of padel | junior padel programs | LTA and padel | mixed padel matches | padel accessibility | padel club location | padel club membership | padel clubs UK | Padel Coaching | padel community | padel equipment | padel etiquette | padel for beginners | padel in hotels | padel injuries | padel live streaming | padel over-head shots | padel pricing strategy | padel rules officiating | padel serve technique | padel shot variety | padel Tournaments | padel training benefits | real tennis vs padel | school padel tournaments | singles padel courts | squash vs padel | UK padel growth | university padel championships

This transcription comes courtesy of Castmagic.io an AI service for podcasters.

Minter Dial: Nick Baker. Tremendous to have you on the show. Fellow Jester aficionado, man about town in padel. In your own words. Nick, who are you?

Nick Baker: Very good to see you. And yeah, my, my background I’ve you know like, like lots of people I’ve come to fairly recently. I have spent most of my career working in the city but I kind of really kind of grew up from a racket sport background. My dad was a mad keen tennis and squash player and I you know have fond memories of playing lots of social tennis as a, you know, as a child with a fat family and a lot of time on the squash court. And then he really found real tennis and that became his kind of real love from a kind of racquet sport and really kind of passed that on to us. I’m one of the three, three boys and real tennis is the kind of sport that I took really kind of seriously in my life and was really playing from a, from kind of mid-teens. So, I’m kind of quite used to kind of walls and stuff. So, that, that’s, that’s the kind of good thing coming into but it really wasn’t.

I probably first went onto a court must have been just before COVID I was actually taking some work colleagues to Prested hall where as you tennis courts and we were really going there to play real tennis and try that out. And while we were there we said well why don’t we try this, this kind of thing that’s out, out there. So, we went and had a hit and it was great. And then it wasn’t again until actually as we started, you know, coming out of that first COVID wave that my brother in law Neil who lives in Epsom and Epsom as you know was becoming a bit of a kind of early, early center and he said oh you should come down and play and that. Oh yes, I’ve definitely done that once, once before so let’s try that out. So, I kind of went down there a bit and was playing, playing there and it really kind of took off from there.

Minter Dial: Well, so Nick having a background in squash tennis real tennis sounds absolutely perfectly suited for making padel. Tell us about your transition into and what did you find easy and what did you find most difficult?

Nick Baker: And I suppose kind of building on what I just said to an extent. I think walls, you know the walls have never phased me really in padel. I’m kind of used to a ball coming off a wall and used to a ball cutting down and wanting to cut a ball down. And obviously from my lawn tennis background, although I was never really very good at it, you know, you kind of have a sense of being at the net and volleying and stuff like that. I suppose the thing that I personally have found hardest in is anything that’s kind of over my head because, you know, in real tennis, you very, very rarely play a ball above your head height. And so, you know, so much of is. Is, you know, that head, you know, head height. Either it’s a bandeja or whatever, you’re bringing the ball down, you’re smashing it. And so, my kind of shoulder definitely does kind of feel it after a few. A few games of padel.

Minter Dial: That’s original.

Nick Baker: Yeah.

Minter Dial: So, I mean, obviously there are a lot more variety of shots in real. I, I tend to think it’s. You’re almost trying to block that. That high shot that’s going at, you know, maybe behind you. So, you just put out your racket almost and just try to block it back as opposed to try to do something with it. But in, in terms of the, the challenges of , how do you relate to the differences? Let’s say, for example, in. In doubles, obviously the lawn tennis, real tennis, lots of doubles, little less than squash. But what differences do you see in the dynamics of doubles in those three sports?

Nick Baker: And again, having not really been a kind of, you know, I was never a strong lawn tennis player, so I probably am least placed to talk about about that of the three. But Real tennis doubles is interesting. There are very. There are very different styles of playing Real tennis doubles, and there are forms of doubles where you can. You can pretty much hide a player on the court. They can serve and then make themselves very small. And one of you can run a round basically playing singles, and the court will allow you to get away with that up to a certain level. Padel.

As we know, you can’t hide a player on a court. As soon as someone is taking up too much of the court, trying to cover too much of the court, it just opens up too many holes. And so, I find, I really like that aspect of is, it really is a team. You can’t hide someone, but. Yes, but yet it’s still, I think, quite forgiving to having a variety of standards on court. I think that you can have a really great game with people, not all of the same standard. As long as everyone wants to play the game.

Minter Dial: Yeah, it requires a little bit of generosity from the better players, yet there are so many other things that are different. And my area of interest is this notion like communication. You would have thought that we would communicate a lot in lawn tennis, doubles and, and surely in, in, in real tennis, you do communicate yours, mine, you know, let it go because it’s going to be a chase or something. But it, there’s, there isn’t that same notion of, of calling out what your opponents are doing?

Nick Baker: Yeah, yeah, I think there is that. I mean, that there is to the extent, because you’re calling about where people are playing in the court, but it’s not as constant. But I think that’s partly because is, is such a kind of quick-fire game.

Minter Dial: Right.

Nick Baker: It’s a small court. The ball is back your end before you’ve, you know, before you really kind of thought about it. Whereas a Real tennis court being that much longer, the ball much heavier, can sometimes go onto a roof and stay up there for a while. Know there is more time to have a think about what’s going on. So, I think, yeah, I think that kind of quick fire, you know, they’re up the back, you know, lobbed, you know, that. All that kind of stuff middle, don’t, you know, I, I think, yeah, it’s, it’s a kind of great part of the game which again, makes it fun and it brings that, you know, community and you know, kind of team, team togetherness again.

Minter Dial: Well, we’re going to talk a lot more about what you’re doing in in general, but just want to finish on a couple other areas within your game. What is your favorite shot now that you’ve been playing for about six years? Really?

Nick Baker: What do I enjoy? I mean, I, I love the bajada. That’s probably my favourite shot.

Minter Dial: So, for the people who don’t understand what that is, that’s the shot bounces off the back wall, it comes above your, above your shoulder and then you’re hitting down the bajada. You’re hitting it down across the net from the back of the court.

Nick Baker: Yeah. And yeah, I love kind of that, that kind of that cutting action, really trying to get some action on the ball and try to get it cut down at the back. But I think the, the shot, to me that is the most interesting to me and I think the most important shot to me in is the serve. And I think that is what really sets aside from a lot of these sports. And what I love about the serving is, it’s on one hand, it’s just so easy, right? So, which is what makes great and accessible. You know, again, thinking back to lawn tennis, which is a technically difficult game, what send the serve in particular and what is the technically most difficult shot. Shot. Shot of all? The serve.

So, how do we start every single point, right? So, it’s just such a barrier to people having a lot of fun in tennis. And then you come out the other side, which is once you can serve and you kind of get better, then the serve becomes a really, really kind of dominant thing where, you know, you basically can be 6 foot 10 and all you can do is serve and not much else. And you’re going to be. And you’re going to do pretty well in a tennis match. So, I think that the serve is a kind of problematic thing to me in lawn tennis. And so, padel that, that really easy. You know, anyone can do it to kind of one extent. And you come out the other end and you look at professional padel players and it’s essentially getting the ball in play.

It’s a little bit like squash, right? If you look at professional squash players, the serve isn’t anything, right? It’s. You have to keep it fairly tight, but it’s getting the ball in play. But I think about what I think is really nice is actually in the middle ground. In , the serve is an important thing, right? You can actually put pressure on players through serving well. And even up to really quite good club standard players, good servers can really kind of dominate their own service game because they’ll get one or two either errors or cheat points. And that, you know, that, that kind of has a really big, big thing. So, I think it’s got this kind of lovely almost kind of bell curve to it. It’s kind of like it’s really easy at one end, then you can do it really quite well and in the kind of middle.

And then as you get better and better, it becomes less important again. So, it’s got. Got a nice kind of thing to it. And the, the other thing that I really like about the serve in padel is it in. In that kind of. It’s really easy to get. Get in. It kind of comes back to where the whole origin of serve came from, right? The, the whole origin of the serve was getting a ball in play.

It is from real tennis. And it, you didn’t even do it yourself. You know, king, you know, King Henry VII didn’t serve the ball that’s, you know, beneath you, right? You have your servant serve the ball and that’s the whole point is it’s literally you getting a ball in, into play. And so, it’s got a, it’s got a kind of lovely kind of end to end for me from kind of the sports that I love how it makes easy and accessible but, but yet still something that’s good to be, you know, to try harder.

Minter Dial: I love that. What’s really interesting, just going back to the bajada. What is the key to making a good bajada for you?

Nick Baker: For me, it is racket preparation and then really focusing on how high over the net you want that ball to go. So, less worrying about the outcome, but more worrying about the inputs. Right. How am I going to hit this thing and where am I aiming at something that’s kind of nearer than me than where it’s going to land.

Minter Dial: Love it. In and in the serve. One of the things I observed for having played with some of the best players, when they do they serve and they just nonchalantly get them all back. They are wicked subs, by the way. They look like they’re obviously just pushing it in, pushing it back, but they, they, 90% of their first serves are in and, and, and they come with, with a pepper, you know, a spice anyway, so that, that, that’s sort of something you don’t really feel from watching it. What about a shot that you’re trying to work on these days, Nick?

Nick Baker: I constantly need to work at anything kind of properly over my head, so, you know, a bandeja, vibora trying to, you know, kick, smash the ball out the court. These are just not, these are just not natural actions from, you know, what I’ve played for the last 30 years.

Minter Dial: So, yeah, one of the things that I, I, I enjoy marveling on, I though I, I limit it, but there are probably more, if you sort of want to go more to weedy. But there are seven different shots over your head and so and on. Like you mentioned before, there’s, there’s a lot of time the ball’s lobbed up. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Composition is doing lots of depending on whether your partner actually knows how to communicate with you. And then all of a sudden you have to execute well, which of the seven, where am I going to hit it, what profundity, you know, or depth, what type of spin, how hard, and so on. And by then you just drop it into the bottom of the net.

Nick Baker: Yes, there is that for sure.

Minter Dial: Forever learning. So, speaking of learning, Nick, what about what is, what is brought to you personally?

Nick Baker: What it’s really allowed me to Do. I mean, I really love, I love the game and what it’s brought to me are a couple of things. One is physically it’s much less demanding on me than the two sports that I play. You know, I played squash fairly seriously, you know, to a kind of club level, but I really had to give that up because my ankles and just couldn’t cope with it. And real tennis is running around a stone court and I’ve been doing that since the age of 15, so that hasn’t done much fun to my knees and my hips and my ankles either. So, is just physically so much more accessible to be for me to play on a regular basis. And that’s kind of one really good aspect. So, I can get out there, I can play, I can play outside as well.

Sunshine is great versus all these kind of indoor sports. And then the other thing is just I’ve met a really, really lovely group of people, both kind of when I travel to tournaments and clubs. And we run tournaments of course, but the, you know, but the kind of memberships that we’ve built up at our clubs as well, it’s just really lovely people that I want to spend time on court and having a beer with afterwards as well, so.

Minter Dial: Well, why, why do you think that is? I mean, you have badminton, tennis, real, these other choices. Do you think that there’s something particular about that draws a certain profile? I mean, not that everybody is lovey dovey, but surely there must be some other reason for why you find more of that social fun.

Nick Baker: I don’t. I mean, it’s a really good question and I think a lot of why is successful and why I think it builds successful communities is it comes back to the core of what sports all about, which is having fun. And if I take the other exam again, I’ve played a lot of squash in my life and I enjoy playing squash. I’ve rarely enjoyed the actual experience on court. It can bring out the very worst in people. I’ve seen some of the very worst sporting behavior of all on a kind of squash court. Maybe it’s because you share the space, but I think people are out there, they’re having fun, they want to have fun. You, you know, you can’t go more than a few points without something weird going on and therefore they’re being an automatic something to have a lot and then that just kind of bubbles over afterwards. You want to have a chat about it, you want to have a quick beer, you want to, you know. So, I think it just is Part of the kind of nature of the game, really.

Minter Dial: Well, and I have, I mean, I obviously agree with you on that. This is something that’s fun. You hit the. Let a net chord in the middle of a point and it bubbles over to the other side. Sorry. Not sorry, sort of. Right, that’s sort of. Generally speaking, the code should say, well, you’re sorry that you won the point that way. Then there’s the one. You hit the shot into the side netting and it bounces down. There’s no sorry but sorry because you’re explicitly aiming for that shot. Yet are there other times you hit it beautifully into the side netting. It just pops up.

Nick Baker: Oh yeah.

Minter Dial: And then you’re, you’re toast because they got the easy shot down on you. And, and so I, I feel like that, that element where you don’t know where it’s going, like you hit a really hard shot, you know, you’re going to do por tres or por cuatro and it clips the side, the netting up top above the, the wall or the glass and then it comes back in the court and it’s, it’s a cinch for the other team. So, there’s. This is constant, like you say, element of surprise which you don’t control. And so, there’s an element of always saying sorry, for example, oh, I screwed that shot up. I mean, that’s a shot you hit 99.8% out of 100 times. But. And like a double fault, you know, how does that happen?

Nick Baker: Oh yeah.

Minter Dial: So, Nick, let’s talk about your clubs. Because you, you’re one of the premier club owners in the, in the UK. You’ve been, you’re running the, the idea of getting clubs going. Tell us about the clubs you have and, and the projects you’re on.

Nick Baker: Absolutely. So, as of today, we have four clubs open. Three in Buckinghamshire and one in Cornwall. Our original club, our first club is at a place called Homer Green, which is a kind of suburb of High Wycombe. And this was actually at the, at this kind of squash club that I played at for 10 years or so. So, it was, you know, it’s only a mile up the road, as luck would have it. And it’s a, you know, multi-sport club with squash, lots of football, cricket. And in the corner of this big site were these derelict tennis courts.

And so, I had a chat with the then, you know, well, the, you know, the chairman and then, you know, committee of the overall place and said we wanted to, could we possibly build some courts? On these court and obviously they had no idea what we were talking about at all. This is, you know, 2020 and you know, so we talked them through how it’s all going to work and you know, very kind of open minded, right. This was literally a sport they, and most people had never heard of. They had some other kind of vague conversations in plan with other sports that might want to use the space. But they, you know, they kind of took a punt on us and we, and we had this kind of bold business plan that we were going to build a two-core club with 300 members by the end of year three. And there was probably some kind of eye rolling then kind of like, yes, 300 people are going to pay you to play a sport that no one knows what it is. But you know, but it, but you know, that’s. But so, Homer Green still has a very kind of strong place in my heart and it’s where I play most of my myself.

Minter Dial: So, we’ve expanded that. So, that was originally two courts, it’s now four and we’ve got three, three doubles courts and a singles court there. And we’ve just refurbished the whole place. So, that, that’s great. Our two other clubs, how many members do you have playing?

Nick Baker: We have about. I should know this off the top of my head, but it’s well over 4, 400 now. I mean it’s, and it probably closer to 5. So, it’s, yeah, it’s a really, really vibrant club. And then the two other clubs in Buckinghamshire are both two court uncovered clubs. One’s at a golf course and one’s at a tennis club and both are doing really, really well. And again, really lovely group of members. But our Buckinghamshire clubs are relatively near each other.

They’re within, you know, 20, 25 minutes of each other. So, we got to get a lot of people who move around and play at all of them, which is great. And then our biggest club is in Newquay, in Cornwall at the Seaspace Hotel, which we opened about 18 months ago. So, that has three doubles courts, two of which are under canopy and two singles courts. And really unfortunately, about two months into having opened, Storm Darragh hit Cornwall, which was at the time like the strongest storm in 75 years or whatever and completely just destroyed the club. So, we had to rebuild that and we reopened in May last year. So, we’re almost coming up to our new proper kind of anniversary and I, you know, really, really glad to say that the, the courts have held up well, Canopy’s held up well. The Club’s growing.

We’ve been through some even bigger storms than Storm Dara and it’s all been fine. So, I’m touching every bit of wood, but, but it’s, but it’s a kind of great place for us to be.

Minter Dial: So, yeah, you do need with the canopies especially to be careful about the wind component. So, when you’re building a club, Nick, as many people will be listening, they’re not necessarily in Spain where sort of is part of the culture, the furniture. But building a club, what are the keys to make it happen? I mean, especially when you have very few people who know about it and how do you go about filling it? What does it work for you? Are the top three insights that you’ve developed today that you think are vital for building a successful club?

Nick Baker: Well, I think that, I mean, I think it’s all this, a lot of it is about when, right. So, if, if we look back to when we opened our first club, how, how to make that start versus we open the club next week and how we would make that start. They’re very, very different stories, right, because as you know, as is great to see, you know, has grown hugely. And even if you’ve never been on a padel court, most people now know what padel is, right, because they read about it in the press. I still think that. But I mean, some of the fundamentals stay the same, which is you have to have an encouraging, warm, open door that says, hey, come and give it a go, come and try, make it easy, low barrier to entry, friendly, make people want to come, come back. And that’s partly to do with who you have running your clubs, but it’s partly to do with who your coaches are and then just building that community of nice people who want, who you want to be around. Right.

If, if you arrive at a club and people are friendly to you and Smiley and you come on court and you have a good time and people are helpful and you’re going to come back again and, you know, vice versa. If those things aren’t true, then you won’t. And so, I think that, yeah, that that kind of building of community, I think is, is absolutely key to that.

Minter Dial: And what about, like the community itself? Do you have to get schools involved people? Because is not the cheapest sport in the world. How do you deal with that component of community?

Nick Baker: I think this is absolutely key. And I, and I have to say I think it’s something that lots of clubs don’t do get right, partially because, you know, , you know, it’s a kind of victim of its own success. You can fill your courts with full price paying people, right. So, you don’t need to do anything else. And I just think that’s the wrong attitude and the wrong approach. So, we have always been very, very pro juniors. We’ve always had all, all of our juniors, they pay half price and we have subsidized coaching sessions and we’ve built really, really strong junior programs at all of our clubs and schools is very, very close to my heart as well. So, we have a number of schools who come and use our courts and again, we help make them, you know, that affordable.

And that includes both kind of local state schools and local independent schools as well. And we’ll, we’ll come on to it. But we run a lot of school tournaments and that’s a great way again of driving awareness from schools and getting people enthused and then they want to come and play it and start a program at their local club. And so, some of the Buckinghamshire schools that have, I mean some came to us, our clubs first and then went into tournaments, but by and large actually the schools have gone to a tournament and gone. This is amazing. We’ve got to do this and then come and really wanted to build a program at our clubs to get more of their school kids playing.

Minter Dial: All right, well that’s great. Before we go on to your tournaments, I just want. Last question, we’ll talk about. You mentioned how you have singles courts and you know, basically my feeling about padel is that singles is a rarity. There are not many singles courts, although there are some really interesting use cases for singles courts. Talk us through about. I mean, is it really a question of, oh, I got, I can jam in the space because I’ve only got 6 meters width as opposed to 10. Or is it really intentionally that you should have. If would you recommend going forward? Always thinking about have a singles court.

Nick Baker: I think it’s an interesting and kind of nuanced thing and I think it does depend on your site and who your local audience is. So, if I can start with where we first put singles courts in, which was in Cornwall. So, as a reminder, we’ve got three doubles and two singles. So, we could have put in four doubles instead. That was the amount of space that we had. But our thinking was we are in a hotel. You’ve got lots of people who are coming away for the weekend, maybe a kind of couple. Well, you know, it’s a bit more of a barrier.

It’s a bit more of an ask to go. Well yeah, you need to find two more people or two more guests and we’ll find you two more people and so on. So, actually in a hotel setting we thought singles was actually really important offering. Now that’s not to say that we didn’t think that our regular club players wouldn’t enjoy it as well but, but the kind of rationale behind it was around that kind of hotel guest. Now what we found in Cornwall is really interesting is that people really enjoy singles. Right. And again it, sometimes it’s a kind of last minute thing. Right.

It’s much easier to find one person with an hour and a half to go than, than three. And the other thing is it’s is it’s really good for your skills and we can come on to why I think that’s the case. But you know, I think it is a really interesting form of a game. So, we kind of fast forward and the other club we currently have a singles court in is Homer Green. And there are a couple of reasons why I did it there. One is because we had Cornwall and we thought actually this is a good thing. But the other thing is we physically couldn’t fit a fourth doubles court into Homer Green. So, everything aligned to, we can either have an empty 10 meter by, you know, sorry, a 6 meter by 20-meter space or we can put a singles court in there.

Minter Dial: And it’s been, it’s been really good. You know, big beginners like it as a first go. Again, feeling a little bit less under scrutiny. I haven’t got three people watching me but, but you can take that through all the, all the kind of gears and some of our top, top club players play singles because they find it a really good way of training their game.

Nick Baker: Yeah. So, specifically how, how do you see that in terms of building your skills in a singles court? What is it specifically that it helps for? So, there are, there are some kind of interesting thing about singles and I am fairly new on my journey in singles myself. So, I’m not going to claim to be a singles expert. I think I’ve played about six times now. But because of the nature of the court being so narrow, you, you actually it’s much easier to hit the ball out. So, the, the kind of, the importance of being rigorous and keeping that ball in is really key. But then because it’s 6 meters wide and not 5 meters wide, if you think about the doubles, the, the area that you have to patrol in doubles being 5 meters wide. Well in singles it’s 6 meters wide and that meter makes a difference and it makes passing much easier off a weak ball. So, if you play a weak ball into a corner in a singles court, you’re going to get past.

So, you’ve got to play middle, until you’ve got a ball that you can actually put somewhere under pressure at in a corner. So, I find those things and, you know, the players I speak to is, it’s really good at kind of honing that. My, my stock shot is middle, middle, middle, middle, until I’ve got something I can do something with. And then I’m going to, then I’m going to go for it. But it’s that, it’s that width is both a blessing and a curse.

Minter Dial: Love it. All right, last question on that before we go to UK is pricing. How do you price a singles chord? At the end of the day, the glass is all the same, virtually the same. There’s a lot of cost that goes into it. It’s a little less space, but how do you price it?

Nick Baker: There are different views on this and we’ve bandied around most of them. Where we’ve ended up is we charge people the same for singles as they would playing their spot in doubles. So, essentially half. Yeah, but, but that, that half spot is the same as a quarter spot on a, on a double score, if you see what I mean.

Minter Dial: Right, I see. Right. Well, anyway, so let’s talk about your tournament stuff. Yeah, so you get into padel, you’ve got these four clubs and, and tournaments. How did that appear in your radar? And where are we today?

Nick Baker: So, interesting start and I, I’ll kind of go to the end game first to say, you know, now we are, you know, what we is, we’re the biggest tournament provider in the UK. But yeah, that was never on our roadmap from kind of day one, like, I mean, I talk about this in many bits of kind of business from my past as well. You know, all, I think all successful business is a bit of, bit of vision and a bit of luck and kind of. If anyone who claims they sat down with their kind of crystal ball at the start and mapped out everything they were ever going to do and then did it is, is not, is not quite telling the truth. So, I forget the exact time. But, you know, pretty early on, Mark Ayers, who now works for us as our tournament director, who was the chairman of and Tennis, I believe, at Epsom, so knew my brother in law, Neil, was talking to Neil about how he really wanted to have an inter county tournament, but was having kind of trouble getting it going and would we be interested? And so, we kind of sat down and thought about and went, yeah, sure, we, we can do that. So, so we launched the county championships with the first edition was in 2023. But Mark ran as a volunteer and really that was the beginning of what has turned into, I mean, thousands of people play in our tournaments each year.

The County Championships is still very much kind of one of our kind of marquee gold events that we took from that first one and have now turned into different age groups. So, we’ve had the Open since 2023, but we’ve now got the over 40s, over 50s, over 60s, and we’re starting Junior. So, under 18 will kick off this year in November, which will be great to see. And each of these data keep on growing. I think you were obviously at the over 50s. I think we had 264 competitors. I forget the number of counties now, but it keep, it just, each one just keeps on, on kind of growing and growing. But off the back of the whole county championships, we then launched a whole bunch of other stuff.

So, the one, you know, I mean, I’m proud of all the things that we do, but things that I, you know, really kind of come to mind are universities. We launched and we held the second annual universities championship this year which had 220 students taking part in a weekend which is, you know, and the standard of student padel now is absolutely great. We launched schools, we had under 18 schools was our first one and we’ve since morphed that into under 15s and under 13s as well. And the under 18s. The first one that we held was the biggest ever Junior tournament in the UK. The second time we held it was 50% bigger and again the biggest ever Junior tournament. So, it just keeps on growing and it’s great to see so many people across all these different things. The county championships, the schools, the unis.

We do the four nations, we’ve started a master series. We do all sorts of things in this kind of team event space that just again builds on the fun of  padel. The camaraderie just brings that extra team dynamic to it as well.

Minter Dial: Yeah, I certainly felt that. And the enjoyment of having a team, not just you and your partner, but supporting others who are playing for you with you, their outcomes were important to you and, and having your teammates root for you as you’re playing is a, is a lovely, lovely feeling to come back to that notion.

Nick Baker: Yeah.

Minter Dial: In terms of the challenges though, one of the issues that I’ve faced, I mean is the ability to address the rules. For example, whether the ball was in or out because it sort of nudged into the corner between the carpet in the glass or the serve, where people the, the rules are very different about the, you know, belly button and where you strike the ball or how many steps you do or don’t take. And the officiating side of it, I mean it relies a lot on sort of self-governance. How do you guys approach that?

Nick Baker: I think it varies again by what kind of tournament we’re talking about here. But I think if we look at our most established one, so let’s say the kind of county champs where we’ve got, you know, play going on, on 20 courts, you know, and you, however many officials that you have, you’re not going to have one on each court. Right. So, there is always going to be an element of self umpiring. One of the things I really have loved about to date is how fair people are around that. I have very rarely seen bad behavior on a court. I’m slightly sensing more of it as people get more serious about the game. I think this will creep in.

But I really hope that we as an overall community can try to nip the worst of this in the bud. Because again, not that I was ever a serious tennis player, but I’ve been on the sidelines of amateur tennis tournaments that again can just bring out the worst in human behavior in terms of calling things in and out.

Minter Dial: Well, and the parents.

Nick Baker: Yeah, and the parents. So, to date, I have to say my experience has been people have self officiated really well and where there has been any disagreement, people have played lets without too much angst. But as I say, we are starting to see a bit of it every now and again. We see someone maybe call an official over and say I don’t think that Fred is serving the ball from the right height. Can, can you watch his next service game? So, so we do. There’s a slightly self-fulfilling thing that when you’re watched you probably don’t bounce the ball as high but you know, but it probably ultimately gets to the, to the right outcome. Right. Which is that people aren’t serving illegally.

Interestingly, the thing that I see the most of all is footfalls. And I don’t know if you, as you kind of wander the courts, you spot this. I mean there’s one thing which is stepping over the line when you hit the ball, which Is rare. You see it every now and again. Much more common is where people are serving with a foot the wrong side of the centre line. And that’s partially because they don’t really fully understand the rules. And so, just a quiet word that says you can’t actually serve like, like that and they go, oh, you know, really, really sorry, I’ll stop.

Minter Dial: But yeah, I think that there, I mean there have been changes in the rules as well as far as the steps and the. Used to be able to. You could bounce it within your side when you could strike it outside of your little corner. But in terms of the culture, Nick, you know, the idea of jesters at some level is copacetic with the idea. And I think that they, I hope that we can maintain some of these cultural aspects. For example, high fiving an opponent who has a great shot in the middle of a game, playing to serve rather than tossing to serve. I, I say that for two reasons. When I, when I do it with friends, I say, you know, hey, listen, we’re here to play, so let’s just play to surf and not have this sort of cold toss.

And then the second reason, it gets you in play mode anyway, you know, so you start hitting the ball, 1, 2, 3, and then, oops, you’re low, let’s go down. And it’s not that big a deal, but you can find, I mean, I. Number of times that first ball is, you know, like a 20, 30 shot exchange, like, oh, now I know what I’m in for. And I feel, I feel that’s great, you know, as opposed to, you know, the whack a mole kind of thing. So, tell us about how many tournaments you now run. What’s your ambition for UK Padel?

Nick Baker: So, we run, I mean, many, many tournaments that I will kind of lose, lose count, count of, but I can give you a kind of rough, you know, feel for it. So, we run the county champs across five different age groups around schools, across three different age groups.

Minter Dial: Oh, and by the way, mixed.

Nick Baker: Yeah, we have boys and mixed at schools and uni’s level as well. I’m a big fan of mixed padel, but I’m sorry, both obviously having men and women play their own divisions, boys and girls, but also mixed as in boys and girls, men and women on the court at the same, same time. And I particularly love, love, love it at schools. So, if you look at the under 13, under 15, under 18, some of the most enjoyable moments are the, are the mixed matches.

Minter Dial: Why is that? Why is that? Because, I mean, I. Having Played mixed. It, it can be complicated mixed, you know, like the I we talked about how much of the space do you take up when you’re the stronger player and this and that and then, you know, you don’t want to be just, you know, mansplaining, so to speak. What is it about the juniors that makes it so much fun?

Nick Baker: Because I think that teenagers very rarely get the, the chance to play sport together, boys and girls, because they generally are playing either sports that are quite single sex sports, maybe netball across rugby, whatever, or it’s a sport that absolutely boys and girls play. They just don’t play in a mixed team. So, I think that’s really, really, really nice. Yeah, so, yeah, so that schools and then universities, we run school alumni tournaments. So, for people who play for their ex-school, that’s the Jarvis Cup. At both the Open and the over 50 level, we’ve started a Masters series at five-year increments to give some of the very best players in the UK the chance to compete and actually kind of show their wares potentially from a kind of GB selection. Because at the overs age groups, as you know, in kind of international stuff, it works in five-year increments from 35 onwards. So, we’ve kind of replicated that structure to run a Masters series where we run a tournament in kind of every corner of the UK, plus one overseas.

So, we ran one in Spain as well to pick up the expats and then the kind of winners of all of those get to come and play in the masters finals. So, that, that was a really great addition to the roster this year. What else? I’m looking at my list here. Those are probably the kind of key ones from a, from a kind of tournament perspective and we are constantly looking at new ideas. One of the ones that isn’t new, but we are, will be running for the second time this year, which we’re really proud of, is we run a charity event which is on the 18th of June, which is in Canary Wharf and we do that in the aid in aid of the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Kids. We ran a first event last year which was great and raised a load of money for them. We’re hoping that this year obviously will be bigger than that. I think it’s a great way, I mean for the padel industry, but for UK to kind of give back a bit. I think there’s so much kind of focus on opening new clubs and doing this and more people playing, but actually let’s kind of do some of that and kind of give back to, to the wider, wider society as well.

Minter Dial: I have two last questions, Nick. The first is your relationship with the LTA and how integrated is the LTA with UK Padel?

Nick Baker: Look, we, we talk to the LTA a lot, as you would expect. We’re a completely open book. We talk to them about all of our tournaments. Many of our tournaments are LTA sanctioned events, so players get grading points and all that. And we’ve worked particularly closely recently with them on the County Championships. So, we just, for the over 50s, we really expanded out the kind of guidelines and the rules and how the whole thing was going to work there. And we had some of the LTA folk there over the weekend as well, which was great. So, I think we are kind of constantly working with them. We, you know, we kind of value our relationship with them and we hope that there’s some stuff that we can do on an even more tightly bound basis going forward.

Minter Dial: Yeah, so I, I don’t suspect mixed doubles is in the LTA rankings just yet.

Nick Baker: No, that, that is fair to say.

Minter Dial: That’s right. And, and then last question is with regard to the future of UK , talked about the Masters. When you look at the top ranks in the professional world, you have Aimee Gibson, who’s a top hundred, Catherine Rose. The men are much less present. There are no single British man in the top hundred. When and how do you think that the development of the British players is going to be enough to warrant competing at the higher, not the highest running away, but a higher level?

Nick Baker: I think it’s a challenging question and I think we will get there for sure. And I think you look at the talent in the kind of juniors coming through and some of the, you know, the kind of younger, you know, the early 20s players. And I think we’ve, we’ve, we’ve got a whole wave of people coming through. Obviously we’re tapping more into some of the kind of Spanish coaches. People are going to Spain more and so on. So, I think people are starting to really. Juniors are really starting to take seriously as their first sport and I think that’s a really important step. We, UK as an org, as an organization, don’t really play in that elite level.

So, we, we’re not first hand on the front lines of trying to develop that group. I mean, I think that’s more really with the LTA and they’re obviously kind of working with their own kind of set of coaches and players. So, it’s not something I see firsthand except when I look at the tournaments and the talent on show, you know, we look, you know, if I would employ everyone to watch some of the, the live stream from the university’s final. There was some really, really great padel on show there. And if, you know, the same is true if you look at, you know, kids coming through in the under 18s and so on. So, with that wealth of talent coming, I’m sure in, in the years, years to come, we will kind of get there. And again, if, if, if it can get into the Olympics, Commonwealth Games, all these things that we all talk about, that will, that will just, you know, that will make it so much more attractive for people coming through as well and give people a real goal.

Minter Dial: You mentioned the livestream. How did, how could someone go. And where is that? Is that a YouTube thing?

Nick Baker: Yeah, so we. So, if you go on to YouTube and you go on to the UK channel, you will find all of our live streams. We live stream from the county championships, we live stream from the Masters, the four nations, some of the schools and the universities. So, there’s a wealth of stuff there. And it’s a really interesting kind of historical look as well. If you look back at the standard maybe two years ago in a competition and then look at the same competition now and it you go, okay, wow. You know, padel in the UK has really, really can’t come on.

Minter Dial: Beautiful Nick, on these cloying words. How could someone learn more about you UK , your clubs, where. What would you like people to go and run and check out?

Nick Baker: So, our website holds a lot of stuff, so UKpadel.org you can certainly look me up on LinkedIn or Instagram, not that I’m a huge kind of Instagram, so you’re not going to find a lot there. But if anyone wants to reach out to me, then obviously LinkedIn is a good way to do it. Or you can reach me on email at nick@UKpadel.org.

Minter Dial: Fabulous señor. Vamos.

Nick Baker: Thank you, Minter. It’s been great.