LTA and Empower Padel launch women's Activator pilot

Empower Padel and the LTA have launched a four-month pilot designed to put women at the centre of getting more women onto padel courts, through a network of women trained to run sessions themselves rather than a top-down messaging campaign.

The Women’s Padel Activator Pilot Programme trains “Padel Activators” – women and young women who introduce their own communities to padel and help newcomers move from a first taster session into regular play. It’s a peer-led model: rather than a national campaign asking clubs to run more women’s sessions, it puts specific people in specific venues with the job of building a habit, not just running an event.

Where the pilot is launching

Three new activations are starting under the pilot: Padel Stars Basildon, Padel4All Eastbourne and Pure Padel Lightwater, with a fourth venue expected to be confirmed shortly. These sit alongside weekly sessions already running at Padel Hub Slough, Fleet, Padel4All Bracknell and Padel Maidenhead – venues where Empower Padel has been building a track record since partnering with local operators.

Padel4All Bracknell offers a sense of what “established” looks like in practice. Since opening in December 2025, the venue has run three weekly women’s coaching sessions, a ladies’ mix-in morning, a sold-out “Padel, Pizza & Prosecco” tournament, and girls’ coaching for six to nine-year-olds that’s already built a waitlist. It’s the kind of sustained, weekly presence – rather than a one-off event – that the gender-gap conversation in UK padel has been asking clubs to commit to.

What a Padel Activator does

The role sits somewhere between coach, community organiser and welcome committee. Activators are trained by Empower Padel and the LTA to run taster sessions for women with little or no padel experience, then stay involved as those players return – pairing newcomers with regulars, running women-only slots at a consistent time each week, and flagging to the venue when demand is strong enough to justify a second session or a beginner ladder.

It’s a deliberately low-tech intervention. No app, no national ad spend – just a person at the venue whose job is making sure a woman’s second visit happens, and her third. Padel’s drop-off point tends to be early: a first taster session is easy to sell, but converting that into a weekly habit is where most beginner initiatives across all sports fail. The Activator model is built around that specific gap rather than the top-of-funnel problem of awareness.

The targets behind the pilot

Over its four months, the programme has set three headline targets: 1,000 unique participants, 500 repeat participants and 200 regular monthly players. The gap between those numbers is the point – Empower Padel’s own survey data from its Bracknell partnership found 71% of participants had less than two years’ experience in the sport, which suggests the harder job isn’t getting women to try padel once, it’s getting them back for a fourth or fifth session before life gets in the way.

The pilot also extends beyond adult recreational players. University activations are planned, and a Next Gen Padel Festival will target players aged 16 to 24 – an age bracket that’s mostly missing from UK padel’s current demographic, which skews toward players in their 30s and 40s with disposable income for court fees.

Why this fits the wider push

Empower Padel was founded by Pepita Stonor in September 2024, built around a simple observation: only around 30% of UK padel players are women, a figure that holds fairly steady across the sport’s more established markets too. Since then, the organisation has run more than 50 events, built a database of roughly 2,500 women, and become the kind of grassroots partner the LTA has increasingly worked with directly rather than around. Stonor received the LTA President’s Award in 2026, the first time it’s gone to someone from the padel community.

The Activator model is a bet on a specific theory of change: that the gender gap in padel isn’t just a marketing problem, it’s a trust problem, and trust is built by someone who looks like you running the session, not by a poster in reception. For background on why the gap exists and what’s at stake if it isn’t closed, see our earlier piece on padel’s women problem.

If you’re near one of the new pilot venues, Padel4All Eastbourne is one of three dedicated padel venues in the town and already runs pay-and-play sessions via Playtomic – worth checking their booking page for any Activator-led sessions as the pilot gets under way.

Four months is a short runway to prove a model works at scale. But if the Bracknell numbers are any indication – full tournaments, waitlisted junior sessions, players who stick around – the harder question by early 2027 won’t be whether Activators can get women onto court once. It’ll be whether the funding exists to keep them there permanently.