entered a padel court for the first time in 2022. While I was in Philadelphia visiting my brother, he took us to PADELphia, a multipurpose exercise center located just outside the city boundaries. As a devoted tennis player who took up a racket for the first time in 1995 and was generally unimpressed with other racket sports, such as pickleball, America’s newest obsession, I had low expectations for this game, which has been compared to a hybrid of squash and tennis. But it was all my younger brother asked for. It transpired that he was aware of something I was not: padel is electrical. My initial thought upon stepping onto a padel court was that it seemed different from any other court within the racquet sports family. There isn’t a chain-link fence, which is almost often associated with a
