Padel vs Tennis

A padel court is 20 by 10 metres and fully enclosed. A tennis doubles court is 23.77 by 10.97 metres and open. Padel uses a solid stringless bat under 45.5 cm long; tennis uses a strung racket. The padel serve is underarm and must bounce first; the tennis serve is overhead. Padel walls are in play; in tennis the ball is dead once it passes the baseline.

Scoring is the one thing that carries over unchanged: 15, 30, 40, game, sets to six.

Volleying, court sense, anticipation, doubles positioning and the scoring system all transfer directly. Tennis players are usually competitive in padel within a handful of sessions.

Two habits in particular. The first is power: in tennis a heavy groundstroke wins points, while in padel the same shot comes off the back glass and hands your opponents an easy ball. Padel rewards the lob and the placed volley far more than the winner.

The second is the overhead. A tennis player's instinct is to smash every high ball. In padel the smash often sends the ball out of the enclosure or bounces back to the opponents, so the controlled bandeja — a sliced overhead that keeps you at the net — is usually the better choice.

Backing away from the back wall is the third, and it is the one that takes longest to fix.

Padel, clearly, and it is not close. A tennis rally between two beginners tends to end on the second or third shot; a padel rally between four beginners keeps going, because the bat is easier to control and the walls keep the ball alive. That is the main reason padel converts newcomers at the rate it does.

Yes, and many people do. The common complaint is that heavy padel play softens a tennis serve and flattens groundstrokes, since padel never asks for either. If you compete seriously in tennis, keep some tennis-specific practice going.