How to Run a Padel Club

1. Get the basics right before you open the doors

Padel sells itself the moment someone plays — the enclosed court, the walls in play, and the fact that a complete beginner can have a genuinely fun rally inside five minutes. That's the gift. The catch is supply: there are far more people who want to play than there are courts in most British towns, so the club that runs its court time well is the one that wins.

Court and venue

A padel court is 20m by 10m, enclosed by glass and mesh walls, with a net across the middle at 88cm in the centre. Crucially it's a doubles game played by four — singles courts exist but are rare in the UK, so plan around four players per court. You won't be lining a sports hall the way badminton or pickleball clubs do; padel needs a purpose-built court, which means you're almost always partnering with or hiring from a dedicated padel centre, a tennis club that has added courts, or a leisure operator. Lock in a recurring block — a fixed "Wednesday 7–9pm on courts 1 and 2" does more for retention than any amount of marketing, and it stops you fighting the public booking system every week.

Negotiate a discount on a block booking, confirm whether courts are indoor (the only reliable option through a British winter) or outdoor, and check the floodlight situation for evening play. Two courts is the practical floor for a club night — it gives you eight players on court and a small queue, which is where padel sessions feel best.

Equipment

The venue supplies the court and net. You need: a stack of loan rackets for newcomers (padel rackets are solid, stringless and short-handled — nothing like a tennis racket, so first-timers can't bring their own), a steady supply of padel balls (similar to tennis balls but slightly lower pressure — they go dead faster than you'd think, so budget for them), and a first aid kit. The loan rackets matter most: the single biggest driver of padel club growth is someone dragging a mate along "just to try it", and the club that hands them a racket at the door is the one they come back to. Don't make a curious newcomer buy a £90 racket before they know they love the game.

Open play vs structured format

Decide whether you're running open play (turn up, get matched into balanced fours, rotate every few games — low commitment, very social) or structured sessions (fixed Americano/Mexicano events, box leagues, ladders). Most thriving padel clubs lean on a sociable rotating format for their regular nights to keep the games close and the courts busy, then layer competition on top once they know who the regulars are. Don't try to be both on a single night — players hate not knowing whether they're queueing or scheduled.

2. Build a member base that turns up

Padel is the opposite of most new clubs: demand usually outstrips supply. There are more people wanting to play than there are court hours for them. Your challenge is less "find members" and more "channel the interest without it descending into a free-for-all on the booking system".

Where to recruit

• Local Facebook groups and WhatsApp communities — town pages and "padel near me" groups convert almost instantly. A photo of a busy court, a clear "next session Wednesday 7pm, £10, beginners and rackets provided", and you'll get replies the same evening.
• The LTA's court and club finder — the LTA is the national governing body for padel in Great Britain, and registering your venue gets you listed where the steady stream of people searching for padel will find you.
• Tennis and squash clubs — racket-sport players cross into padel constantly, and tennis clubs that have added courts are a warm, ready-made audience. A flyer on their noticeboard pulls.
• The padel centre itself — the venue you hire from fields a constant stream of "do you run sessions?" enquiries. Ask them to point those people at your club rather than turning them away.

Make joining painless

The fastest way to lose an interested newcomer is to make them email you, wait for a reply, and fill in a paper form on arrival. The fastest way to convert them is a single link or QR code that adds them to the roster, 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): players scan it, enter their name, and they're in — no email chain, no spreadsheet for you to update at 11pm. Stick the QR on the court fence and on the table in the clubhouse, and joining becomes a five-second job.

3. Decide how you'll collect money

Padel court hire is dearer than a sports-hall slot, so fees per head run higher than most racket sports — which makes collecting money cleanly more important, not less. There are three models worth considering, and you can mix them.

Pay-per-session

Players pay per night — typically £8–£15 a head depending on court hire and how many courts you've booked. Pros: fair for irregular attendees, easy for one-off guests trying the sport, no awkward standing-around to manage. Cons: jagged cash flow, and chasing money on the night — when court hire is already £40+ — is the most thankless job in club running.

Monthly membership

A fixed monthly fee covering a set number of sessions or unlimited play. Pros: smooth, predictable income that covers your court block, and far less per-session admin. Cons: it doesn't suit shift workers or sporadic players, who'll feel they're overpaying for courts they didn't use.

Hybrid (recommended for most clubs)

A discounted monthly membership for regulars who anchor your court block, plus a guest rate for one-off players trying padel for the first time. Best of both worlds — and given how many padel newcomers want to "just try it", a guest rate is essential. The only complication is tracking who's on which plan, which is where software earns its keep.

What to charge

Work backwards from your court hire. Take the total cost of the courts you've booked, divide by a realistic attendance number (not your aspirational one — a two-court night seats eight comfortably, twelve at a push with rotation), add a little for balls, and round to a number people can pay quickly. Charging £10 instead of £9.75 saves you twenty minutes of awkward maths every week, and nobody has ever quit a club over twenty-five pence.

4. Run a session that feels fair

This is where a padel club either grows by word of mouth or quietly stalls. With only eight players on two courts at a time, the difference between a great night and a flat one is whether the games are close and everyone gets a fair share of court time. Players forgive a slightly pricey session or a dead ball. They do not forgive watching the same four strong players hog a court while everyone else stands behind the glass.

The queue

With limited court time and four-player games, who's on next is the question that decides the mood of the night. A scrap of paper or "whoever shouts loudest" rewards the pushy and quietly punishes newcomers who don't know the etiquette. A digital queue fixes it: players tap to join from their phone, see their position, and get called on when a court frees up. Nobody can skip the line. ClubLono's queue is the core of every session, and the host can override anything — it's a tool, not a referee.

Matching players

Fair matchmaking is the single biggest factor in retention, and it matters more in padel than almost anywhere because the walls magnify a mismatch — a strong pair can keep a weaker pair pinned at the back glass for an entire set, and nobody enjoys that. ClubLono runs sessions as a Mexicano by default: after each round players are re-paired into balanced fours based on how they're doing that night, so the partnerships and opponents shift and the games stay close. The built-in rating (we call it HLR) updates per game, so groupings self-correct without you doing the maths. If your players track DUPR, which now rates padel as well as pickleball, Premium clubs can export results to it.

Scoring and rotation

Padel scores like tennis — points (15, 30, 40, deuce, advantage), games, then sets — and a match is usually best of three sets. For a rotating club night that's too long, so most sessions play a single short set per round (first to six games, or a timed round) and then re-pair. Set the rule explicitly before you start: without one, a tight set drags on while the other court finishes and players stand idle. ClubLono uses the "sets" scoring mode for padel and handles the standings as you go, so you tap in the set result and it sorts the next round and the running leaderboard for you — you play instead of refereeing a spreadsheet.

The newcomer brief

Keep a one-minute explainer for first-timers: the underarm serve off a bounce into the diagonal box, the fact that the walls are in play (you can let the ball rebound off the glass behind you and then return it — the thing that makes padel so forgiving and fun), and that the ball must bounce on the floor before it hits a wall on a return. Don't drown them in the full rulebook — three rules, a friendly partner and a loan racket is enough to get someone hooked.

5. Keep people coming back

Retention is cheaper than recruitment, in clubs as in everything else — and because padel court time is scarce and precious, a regular who drifts away is genuinely hard to replace with another at the same slot.

Communicate in one place

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

Schedule sessions ahead

"Same time every week" is the floor. Better is a published calendar showing the next 4–8 weeks, including the weeks you're not running because the centre has a tournament booked. Because spots are limited, padel rewards letting members book ahead so they can plan around it — and it lets you fill cancellations from a waitlist instead of leaving a court half-empty. ClubLono lets you publish a recurring session calendar with capacity limits and a waitlist, and members get a push notification when a spot opens — no separate Facebook event needed.

Add a competitive layer

Once you have regulars, a monthly ladder or a box league gives people something to climb between the casual nights. It's the difference between "a thing I sometimes do" and "my club". Keep the sociable rotating session as the welcoming front door, and let the competition sit alongside it for those who want it.

6. Stay legal and safe

The dull but necessary section — most of it is well covered by your national governing body.

Insurance

Public liability insurance is strongly recommended for any club running sessions in a hired venue, and most padel centres require it as a condition of letting you run a regular block. The LTA is the national governing body for padel in Great Britain, and LTA-registered member clubs are covered under the LTA's insurance arrangements; many commercial padel centres carry their own venue cover too. Confirm in writing whose policy covers your session — yours, the venue's, or both — and read what's actually covered, because affiliation or venue cover is usually a floor rather than full protection.

Safeguarding

If you run sessions for under-18s you need a safeguarding lead, DBS-checked coaches and a written policy. Use the LTA's safeguarding templates and "Safe to Play" standards rather than writing one from scratch.

Data protection (UK GDPR)

The moment you store members' names, emails or phone numbers you're a data controller. In practice: have a short, plain-English privacy notice, don't share personal data without consent, and let members delete their account on request. With ClubLono the data-protection plumbing is handled at the platform level and members can delete their own account from in-app settings.

Money handling

Padel fees add up fast — a busy two-court night can clear £100 in an evening — so open a separate bank account for the club from the start. Mixing club fees with your personal current account is the fastest route to a difficult committee meeting two years from now. With payments flowing straight to a dedicated account via Stripe, your books practically reconcile themselves.

7. Grow without burning out

Most volunteer-run clubs don't collapse from a lack of members — they collapse because the one person doing all the admin gets tired and quits. With a sport growing as fast as padel, and a booking system to wrangle every week, that burnout arrives quicker than you'd expect. The founder's real job is to remove themselves as the bottleneck.

• Spread the load. Train two or three deputy hosts who can collect the loan rackets, run the queue, take the set scores and lock up when you're away.
• Automate the boring stuff. Payment chasing, session reminders, the queue, the waitlist, refunds when a court falls through — all of it can be a tool's job. If it lives only in your head, it falls over the moment you're on holiday.
• Write things down. A one-page "how this club runs" doc — court-booking login, venue contact, payment login, where the loan rackets are stored, gate codes — protects everyone if you're suddenly unavailable.

8. The tools that actually save time

You can run a small padel club on a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group and a mental note of who's on court next. Plenty do. It works at 15 members, creaks at 40, and becomes a part-time unpaid job at 80 — which, with padel demand the way it is, you can hit in a season.

Dedicated club software collapses four tools into one and stops you being the bottleneck:

• The roster stops being a spreadsheet and becomes self-serve via a QR code on the court fence.
• Fees stop being chased and start being collected automatically via Stripe, straight to your club bank account.
• The queue stops being a shout across the court and becomes a phone-based list nobody can skip.
• Messages stop being scattered across WhatsApp and Facebook and live in one members-only chat.
• Sessions become a published calendar with capacity limits, a waitlist, and automatic refunds when a court falls through.

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. It's built for exactly the club this guide describes: a fast-growing group of padel players who'd rather be on the court than buried in admin.