The courts were a five-minute walk from the office. A colleague mentioned them one afternoon and, mostly out of curiosity, Flight Lieutenant Ben Hanley went along. He had no racket sports background, no particular reason to think this would stick. But that first session in Madrid – playing near the NATO air policing squadron he was stationed with – was the start of something that would eventually bring padel to British military bases, from Hampshire to Cyprus.

Within a year, Hanley had gone from curious beginner to RAF Padel Development Manager and the UK Armed Forces’ official lead for the sport. That progression says something about the person. It also says something about padel.

How Madrid changed things

Hanley and his RAF colleague Flt Lt James Davey discovered padel the way many people do: geographically. They were based in the Spanish capital and the courts were simply there, part of the city’s sporting fabric in a way that has no British equivalent yet. They started playing casually, then found opponents via Playtomic, took lessons, and entered local tournaments.

The progression accelerated. Hanley won an Adidas competition tied to the Hexagon Cup at the Madrid Arena in January – the prize being a session with five-time world champion Seba Nerone. “Going from not knowing the sport to playing with ex-world No.1 in a year was an eye opener,” he said.

That experience – playing with elite players, understanding what the ceiling looks like – is something padel enables in a way that few other sports do. The glass walls and enclosed court mean even club-level players can watch the top end of the game up close, and can learn from it.

Why the sport travels well

The case for padel in military communities is, in some ways, obvious. The sport is designed for four people. It punishes neither the unfit nor the beginner too harshly, and physical dominance matters less than reading the court and working with your partner. It can be played in almost any weather on a covered court. And unlike golf or squash, the learning curve is shallow enough that a group of mixed abilities can have a competitive game within a few sessions.

For a community where people are regularly posted, transferred, and separated from their home clubs, those qualities matter. You need a sport you can pick up again quickly, play with strangers, and that doesn’t require years of muscle memory to make worthwhile. Padel fits that brief.

Warrant Officer Class 2 Richard Hailwood, who pushed to get the first Army courts installed at Bicester Garrison in summer 2025, put it plainly: “It’s really inclusive to different levels of fitness.” Coming from someone who knows what works for a mixed group, that carries weight.

What’s already been built

The pace of development has been notable. By the time the inaugural Army Padel Championships were held in November 2025, there were courts at Bicester, at RAF Cyprus, and plans advancing for facilities at RAF Odiham in Hampshire and RAF Halton. The Army is in talks about converting a disused hangar into nine courts. What started as one officer’s enthusiasm in Madrid had become a formal programme with category three recognised status across the services.

The championships themselves found their winners in Juan Vilches, a Colchester-based officer, and Louis Hughes of the Royal Logistics Corps. The level was good enough to prompt a broader ambition: an inter-services championship, with the RAF and Navy now assembling teams to compete against the Army. The prospect of UK Armed Forces teams playing against international military equivalents is already in conversation.

When Hanley launched an Instagram page for RAF padel one winter, 150 people signed up in three days. That appetite had been there all along, waiting for a structure to attach itself to.

The pattern you see everywhere

The armed forces story is striking, but it is part of a wider pattern. UK padel is spreading well beyond premium venues in South West London – into football club car parks, workplace sports halls, university sports centres, and now military bases. The sport is finding its way into communities that have nothing obvious to do with its Argentine roots or its glitzy European tournament circuit.

What these communities share is that padel’s social format solves a real problem. Finding four people to play is easier than finding eleven for football. The game takes fifteen minutes to grasp and a lifetime to master, which means you don’t need to be selective about who you invite. And because you share a court with your opponent – the glass walls, the proximity, the shared enclosure – there’s an intimacy to it that tennis across a net doesn’t have. It builds something between players quickly.

That quality translates to institutions as much as to individuals. A padel court in a barracks functions as infrastructure for the kind of trust and team cohesion that military culture values – as much as any recreational amenity.

If you want to start something similar

The armed forces experience offers a useful template. Hanley’s approach – find people, document interest, present a business case, partner with an operator – is the same one that gets courts built anywhere. The Army’s work with Advantage Padel in Aldershot follows the same model as a pub landlord installing a court in a car park or a leisure centre adding two bays to its sports hall.

If you work somewhere with outdoor space, or belong to a community with a venue that goes unused at certain hours, the barriers are lower than you think. The Padel School and regional operators will often work on a revenue-share basis rather than requiring upfront cost. The appetite, as those 150 RAF sign-ups in three days demonstrate, tends to already be there. The broader pattern of how padel is spreading into communities beyond premium urban venues – football clubs, leisure centres, rural farms – is covered in padel outside London. And once courts exist, the question of how to find people to play with matters just as much as the infrastructure.

What comes next

Hanley is currently sidelined with an ACL injury, which is the particular cruelty that anyone who has played sport seriously will recognise – building something while being unable to play it yourself. The programme he has started will keep moving regardless.

The inter-services championship will happen. The courts will get built. And somewhere in a barracks or a mess hall, someone will walk past a poster for a padel taster session the way Hanley once followed a colleague to some courts near the office in Madrid, mostly out of curiosity, with no particular reason to think it would stick.