Coaching
From never-held-a-racket to holding your own.
Our beginners’ session is an hour, costs less than a round, and ends with you playing an actual game. No drills in a line, no shouting, no drills named after someone’s surname.
There’s a route up from there if you want one. Plenty of people never take it, and the club is built for them too.
The route up
Four stages, and most people stop at two.
That’s not a failure of the programme, it’s the programme working. Plenty of members have played twice a week for two years and never had a lesson after the sixth one.
Week one
You have never held a racket
First Serve, free, first Tuesday of the month. An hour, mostly spent playing rather than listening. Nobody is watching you.
Free
Weeks two to six
You can rally, badly, and enjoy it
The Beginners’ Six — one hour a week with the same eight people, so you learn the sport and eight names at the same time.
£54 for six
Whenever you fancy
You want the shots to go where you meant
Improvers’ clinics on Monday and Thursday evenings. Drop in when it suits; there is no course to fall behind on.
£12 a session
Only if you want it
You have started checking the ladder
Tactics sessions in pairs, plus a coach who will happily tell you your partner is standing in the wrong place. Most members never get here, and the club runs perfectly well on the people who don’t.
£30 an hour, shared
Who’s teaching
Three coaches, one of whom will suit you.
They teach quite differently on purpose. If the first one you try isn’t clicking, say so and we’ll move you — nobody takes it personally.
Priya Raman
Head coach
Good for: people who are certain they’ll be terrible
Came to padel from twelve years of badminton and has taught roughly six hundred people their first rally. Runs First Serve, and remembers everyone’s name by the second week.
Tom Whitlock
Coach
Good for: improvers who’ve plateaued
Obsessive about court position, which is the thing nearly everyone gets wrong and nobody notices. Will make you play four points without hitting a winner, on purpose.
Danni Okoro
Coach, ladder captain
Good for: anyone who’s started taking it seriously
Runs the club ladder and the Sunday Americano. Has strong opinions about the lob and will share them whether or not you asked.
Start with the free one.
First Serve, first Tuesday of the month, 7pm. No booking, no kit, and no expectation that you come back — though most people do.