How to Grow a Padel Club

1. Where padel players actually are

Here's the good news no other club founder gets to hear: with padel, finding players is the easy part. The sport is the fastest-growing in Britain and there are nowhere near enough courts to meet demand. Your job is less "drum up interest" and more "be the obvious place for the interest that already exists to land".

• Local Facebook groups and WhatsApp communities. Town pages and "padel near me / [your area] padel" groups are where the demand pools. A photo of a busy, smiling court plus a clear "next session Wednesday 7pm, £10, beginners and rackets provided" pulls replies the same evening.
• The LTA's court and club finder. The LTA is the national governing body for padel in Great Britain — register your venue and you appear where the steady stream of people searching for padel will find you.
• Cross-over sports. Tennis and squash players move into padel constantly — the technique transfers and the social, doubles nature wins them over fast. A flyer on a tennis or squash club noticeboard is a warm audience; so is a pitch at their AGM.
• The padel centre itself. The venue you hire from turns away "do you run sessions?" enquiries every week. Ask them to send those people to your club instead — it costs you nothing and they'd rather the courts stayed busy.

Notice what's not on this list: expensive advertising. With padel you almost never need it. Spend the energy you'd waste on ads on making the experience so good that players bring a friend each — that's the only growth channel that compounds.

2. Make joining a five-second job

Every newcomer you lose between "I'd like to try padel" and "I'm in the roster" is a player who'll end up at someone else's club instead. Friction is the enemy. The slowest path is asking people to email you, wait for a reply, then fill in a paper form when they arrive flustered at the court. The fastest is a single link or QR code that signs them up, shows the next session and lets them pay if they want to commit.

In ClubLono every club gets a join QR code and a public page (something like clublono.com/c/your-club). Print the QR and stick it on the court fence, on the clubhouse table, and at the bottom of every Facebook post: players scan it, type their name, and they're in the roster — no email chain, no spreadsheet for you to update at 11pm. You can leave joining open or approve newcomers in one tap if you'd rather gate it. The whole point is to capture interest at the exact moment it's hottest, which for padel is usually right after someone's first game.

3. Nail the newcomer experience

Padel has an unfair advantage: the game is genuinely fun on the very first try, far more so than tennis or squash, because the walls keep the ball alive and the short racket is easy to control. That means a good first session converts at a rate other sports would kill for — and a bad one wastes the easiest sell in racket sport.

• Hand them a loan racket at the door. Never make a first-timer buy a £90 racket to find out if they like padel. The club that lends kit is the club they come back to.
• Give the one-minute brief, not the rulebook. Three things: the underarm serve off a bounce, that the walls are in play so you can let the ball rebound and play it, and that the ball must bounce on the floor before it hits a wall. That's enough to start a real rally.
• Pair them well. Put a beginner with a patient regular against another balanced pair — never throw them in against two experienced players who'll pin them at the back glass. A Mexicano format does this automatically: ClubLono re-pairs the field into balanced fours each round so a newcomer always gets close, winnable games.
• Make the goodbye warm. "Same time next week — I'll save you a spot" plus a QR to the calendar turns one good night into a habit.

4. Keep your regulars

Because padel court time is scarce, every regular you keep is worth more than at a sport with unlimited hall space — you can't simply slot in a replacement at the same prized slot. Retention is the whole game once you've got a core.

One communication channel

If reminders live in a WhatsApp group, cancellations in a Facebook event and the social plans in someone's camera roll, people miss things — and missing a padel night, when there are only eight spots, means a wasted court and a broken pairing. Pick one channel for everything. ClubLono includes a members-only club chat with photos and reactions where every player on the roster is automatically a member, and booked players get a thread for their specific session so a last-minute "court 2's glass cracked, we're all on court 1" reaches the right eight people, not all 80 members.

A published schedule

"Same time every week" is the floor; a visible calendar of the next 4–8 weeks is what regulars plan their lives around. Because spots are limited, let members book ahead and run a waitlist so a drop-out is filled instead of leaving a court half-empty. ClubLono publishes a recurring session calendar with capacity limits and a waitlist, and members get a push notification the moment a spot opens — no separate Facebook event to keep in sync.

5. Build a community people invite friends to

Padel is, more than most sports, a social game — it's doubles, it's chatty, and the rallies are long enough to natter between points. Lean into that. The clubs that grow fastest aren't the ones with the best players; they're the ones where people make actual friends and then can't help dragging those friends onto a court.

• Give the club an identity. A name, a logo, a colour, a group photo after a session. People invite friends to "my padel club", not to "a court booking".
• Run socials beyond the court. A post-session drink, a Christmas mixer, an end-of-season club-day round robin with a trophy bought from a tenner of everyone's fees. None of it is software's job, but it's what turns attendance into belonging.
• Celebrate in the chat. Post the night's photos (with consent), shout out a newcomer's first win, share the Mexicano leaderboard. ClubLono's club chat with reactions is built for exactly this — and a lively chat is the thing a member screenshots and sends to a mate with "you should come to this".

Every friend a happy member brings is a player you didn't have to recruit — and in padel, where one curious newcomer becomes a regular faster than almost anywhere, that's the engine of growth.

6. Add competition once you have regulars

Casual nights are the welcoming front door, but a core of regulars eventually wants something to climb. A light competitive layer is what turns "a thing I sometimes do" into "my club" — and it gives people a reason to book that prized court time every single week.

• Start with a ladder. Lowest admin: players (or pairs) sit in a ranked column and challenge a rung or two above, swapping places on a win. It runs continuously with no fixed calendar, which suits padel's grab-the-court-when-you-can reality.
• Graduate to a box league. Once you've enough regulars, split them into seeded boxes of four to six who play everyone in their box over a month, with promotion and relegation between cycles. The games stay close because boxes are matched by standard, and the reshuffle keeps it fresh.
• Punctuate with a club day. A one-off round robin or knockout with a trophy gives the season a peak everyone can aim at — and makes a great recruitment photo.

Keep the sociable Mexicano night running alongside the competition — never replace your beginner-friendly front door with a league, or you choke off the newcomers who become next season's regulars.

7. Let fees fund the growth

Padel's growth question is rarely "where do we find players" — it's "how do we get more court time", and court time costs money. The clubs that expand are the ones whose fees and memberships reliably cover the courts they have and bankroll the next block they book, without the founder fronting it from their own pocket or chasing a tenner round the court every week.

The trick is to make money collection invisible. Cash on the night is the enemy of growth: it's awkward, it leaks, and it ties the most committed person on the court to being the treasurer. Automatic payment — a tap to book, money straight to the club account — frees that person to actually grow the club, and gives you clean books to take to a venue when you ask for a third court.

ClubLono is free for a single club, with no time limit and no feature cliff — roster, queue, Mexicano matching, sessions, chat, capacity and refunds all work on the free tier. On paid sessions, the host receives the payment less Stripe's 1.5% + 20p and a 5% ClubLono platform fee. ClubLono never holds members' funds — money goes straight to the host's bank account via Stripe, and cancelled paid sessions auto-refund every booked player. There is no per-player fee. The Premium tier (£19.99/month or £199.99/year, with a 14-day free trial on either) drops that platform fee to 1% and unlocks multi-club hosting, leagues, kiosk mode for a court-side tablet, cross-club stats and DUPR export. The annual plan works out at roughly £16.67/month — about two months free versus monthly billing. Premium pays for itself once a club is doing roughly £500/month in paid sessions on monthly billing, and there's no point at which it costs more than free. As your club grows from one busy night to several courts and a league, the platform grows with it — and the fees that fund the next court collect themselves while you're on court.