Do You Remember the First Time?
by Ben Nichols, Founder CEO of the world’s leading padel-dedicated Communications Consultancy, Padel 22
If you, like me, recently hit the big four-o, then you might, like me, be familiar with a band called Pulp. A band synonymous with what we in England called ‘Britpop’, the mid-to-late-nineties music phenomenon that represented the last great rock and roll era the UK celebrated, and the first truly transformative cultural-come-musical phenomenon in Britain since the Beatles and the Stones starting ripping up the music rulebook thirty years previous, in the swinging sixties.
Pulp were a band that, alongside the more (Stateside) famous Oasis and Blur, epitomised cool Britannia in the nineties. True, northern (England) working class grit from the famous steel city of Sheffield, and fronted by the charismatic, impossibly tall and skinny Jarvis Cocker. They were the band behind hits such as Common People and Disco 2000. And they were also behind a lesser-known song called Do you remember the first time?
So, before you lose me down a nostalgic 1990s rabbit hole, let me bring it back to padel. The padel movement. Because the words Do you remember the first time? were the first to hit me when I considered the topic of this short musing for Padel Mecca.
Why, you might wonder. Well, ever since I made my first foray into the professional padel industry in 2022, there’s been a recurring theme, a soundtrack perhaps, to my Padel PR chapter. And that’s that I, and many others in our new industry are doing this for the first time. Not practicing our profession for the first time, but indulging in the professional world of padel for the first time, because we’re all - across what I like to term the New Padel World - new, in the grand scheme of things, to padel. The UK, USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, the list goes on. We’re members of the New Padel World because the sport found us, or perhaps we found it, and it became a novelty to us – not to those members of the established padel order where the sport’s been around for many years, in some cases decades, the Spain’s, Argentina’s, Mexico's, Italy's, no, that’s the Old Padel World. I’m talking about the New Padel World, a new world order of which the United States is firmly a part, as it should be because until America embraces a sport, it can never claim to be truly global.
Clubs are perhaps the best example, as they represent the majority of new businesses we’re seeing being born in padel (because, let’s face it, without a club, there ‘aint no sport). Clubs across America are now being created, if not yet en masse, then at least with increasing regularity. And those clubs are typically being founded by folks from outside the racket sport industry. Folks who, yes, might have grown up playing tennis or college at Stamford or Harvard, but equally might never have picked up a racket and just found themselves on holiday in Portugal or Spain during a recent summer, making their debut within the walls. There are folks from the worlds of finance, management consultancy, construction, business operations, music, art, you name it, a plethora of different professions that have a shared passion: a passion to build padel. And yet they’re all figuring it out for the first time. Figuring out the opportunities, the business model (should it be pure padel or do you lure players in through the temptation of pickleball, only to show them the shiny new sport of padel in the court alongside?), the economics, and all the while with a dearth of statistics to help them make the best strategic decisions needed to allow their businesses to flourish. They’re all doing it for the first time, and isn’t that just a little bit exciting that, for the first time in our lives - especially those of my generation, let’s call them generation Pulp - we’re building a new sport, a new brand. We never had that opportunity until now.
These are all individuals, partnerships, investors and newly-formed businesses entering what some have predicted will be the biggest thing in America since, yes pickleball, but think bigger, the dot com boom. We’re witnessing the same with brands. New brands being concocted from a blank sheet of paper. Take Pulco Studios, the achingly cool, minimalist 1970s-tinged premium padel brand - think cinefilm meets polaroid, think sepia-style McEnroe-Borg-era vibes, think less is more, and think uber premium - well this is an apparel brand formed by fashion industry veteran and big hitter Joe Middleton (formerly Global CEO of Canterbury Rugby Clothing, Levi Strauss and Speedo), who came out of retirement and, alongside his Gen Z team members, has built Pulco from scratch. For Joe, and for us all, we’re building the padel world for the first time.
Take another example in my home nation of the UK. Student entrepreneur, George Modler, who is in his penultimate year of completing an undergraduate degree at University in Britain’s number one padel city, Bristol. In Modler, here is someone young, hungry, who happened to encounter padel, and spotted an opportunity, well two in fact. One, to create Golden Point Padel, the UK’s first University padel movement, bringing Universities and Colleges together to compete against each other for the first time. And secondly, The Padel Directory, which, launching next month, will do exactly what it says: provide a one-stop-shop directory for anyone seeking information on the who, what, why, when, where and how of padel. A site for brands, agencies, clubs, coaches, players, manufacturers and court constructors to call home. And yes, you read that right, he’s still at University, aged just 21.
My own business, Padel 22, started as we all did in the padel industry, with an embryonic idea. I built it as the first, and I’m proud to say almost two years later, leading international communications and marketing consultancy for the New Padel World. I knew at the time that this hadn’t been attempted before. I knew, like Joe, like George, like Benji here at New Jersey’s first ever padel club, Padel United, and like the growing band of brothers and sisters joining our community, that it was the first time. And perhaps the only time we get a shot at this with a sport, in our lifetime.
We never got a shot at this for tennis, soccer, golf, or any other sport. They’d all long been invented before we were born. Padel had been too of course, but it hadn’t arrived.
And that’s the exciting part. We’re doing this together, folks.
And one day, in decades to come, we’ll collectively look back and say “Do you remember the first time?”