Never Played a Racket Sport? You May Learn Padel Faster | Hamilton

If you’ve never played tennis, squash or badminton, you might assume you’d be starting padel a step behind everyone else. You’re not. As a coach, I’d go further: having no racket-sport background is a blessing, not a handicap. You arrive with nothing to undo, and that makes you easier to teach than a lot of confident club tennis players.

Habits are harder to change than skills are to learn

Coaching someone new to racket sports is mostly a matter of adding things. Here’s how to hold it, here’s where to stand, here’s what a padel shot looks like. Coaching someone with years of tennis behind them is mostly a matter of taking things away. Their body already knows what to do with a ball at shoulder height, and it’s usually the wrong thing for padel.

Adding is quicker than removing. A beginner who has never swung a racket will copy what you show them. A strong tennis player will nod, agree, and then do the tennis version as soon as the point gets tight, because that’s what their muscles have rehearsed thousands of times.

What tennis players have to unlearn (and you don’t)

It helps to see the specific habits, because they show exactly where a newcomer has the edge.

The big smash. For a good tennis player, a smash ends the point. In padel, a smash that isn’t hit perfectly bounces off the back glass and stays in play. Now the other team is coming forward, and you’re facing either a counter-smash or the loss of your spot at the net. This is the hardest adjustment strong tennis players make. If you’ve never been rewarded for hitting the ball as hard as you can overhead, you don’t have that reflex to fight.

Topspin. Tennis players are taught to brush up the back of the ball so it dips into the court. In padel, that kick makes the ball sit up high off the glass, which hands the other team an easy ball. Getting tennis players to hit flatter takes real work. A beginner has no spin habit to undo, so learning to hit through the ball flat is just learning, not unlearning.

The serve. A padel serve is underarm. The ball is bounced first and struck at or below hip height, with at least one foot behind the service line under the rules that came into force in January 2026. Tennis players have to rebuild their serve from scratch. You just learn it.

The walls. Most racket-sport players are trained to hit the ball before it gets away from them. Padel asks you to let it come off the glass and play it on the way back out. If you’ve never played a racket sport, there’s no instinct telling you a ball behind you is a lost point, so there’s nothing to argue with when you learn to wait for it.

If you’re a tennis player reading this, none of it is bad news. You bring footwork, timing and match sense, and those count. Our post on moving from tennis to padel covers the transition in detail.

How long until you’re actually rallying?

This is the question most first-timers really want answered, so here’s the honest version.

A complete beginner with no racket-sport background needs one full hour with one of our coaches, or a First Serve Padel Social, to get a proper rally going. By that I mean five or more hits back and forth, pretty consistently. That might not sound like much. Compare it with a beginner tennis match, though, and it’s a lot. And that’s after just one hour of working together.

A tennis convert gets there faster. I won’t pretend otherwise. But the progress a true beginner makes is huge. Over a few sessions with us they build the confidence to play, rally and keep going on their own, long after the coaching has finished. That’s the real goal: a player who books a court with friends and just plays.

The long game: where the no-background player pulls ahead

The tennis player’s head start doesn’t last forever. What we see in our coaching sessions is that many tennis players start to struggle once they reach a higher level, because the habits that are wrong for padel keep coming through under pressure.

The player who has only ever played padel doesn’t have that problem. Using the glass, letting the ball hit the back wall with confidence, digging out of a corner over and over again: all of that comes more easily to someone whose only reference point is padel. They never learned to fear the ball going past them, so they never have to unlearn it.

You don’t need to be good to have a good time on a padel court, and if you stick with it, starting from zero can turn out to be the better foundation.

What to do in your first few sessions

A no-background start works best when you lean into it. Four things make the biggest difference.

1. Get a lesson before you get a racket. You don’t need an expensive racket as a beginner, or even your own. Spending $80 on an hour of private coaching will change far more about your game than any racket will, and for a complete beginner that hour goes a long way, because there’s nothing to unpick. Our intro lessons are built for exactly this, and you can hire a racket at the venue.

2. When you do buy, go round. A round racket suits someone learning from scratch for three reasons: a bigger sweet spot, a lower balance that’s easier to control, and a core that usually isn’t so firm the ball flies off the face into the back glass. That third one matters more than people expect. The racket quiz on our shop will point you to a few.

3. Talk to your partner. A lot. Padel is almost always played as doubles, and it’s better to over-communicate than under, especially with someone you’ve just met. Start by calling whose ball it is. Once that’s a habit, it grows into calling who’s going up for a high ball, which starts to direct your partner’s next shot. Nobody needs a racket-sport background to do this, and it’s the easiest improvement a new pair can make.

4. Play with other beginners, early. Lessons teach the shots; games teach you when to use them. A social session or a casual game booked through the Open Matches feature in the app gets you playing people at your level without the pressure of a proper match.

What I don’t start with (and why)

Ask most of our coaches what they’d teach first and they’d probably say the grip: the continental grip, used for everything. It matters, and we’ll get there. But in my sessions, I don’t usually get to the grip until we’ve had a rally or two. People come to padel to play, so the first job is getting you hitting the ball back and forth. The technical detail lands better once you’ve felt what you’re trying to improve.

Starting from zero in Hamilton

Padel Park is at 82 Duke Street in Frankton, with three indoor padel courts that you can book through the app, plus a pro shop and racket hire if you’re not ready to buy. If you’ve never picked up a racket, here’s the path we recommend. Start with a free Intro to Padel session. Then come to a First Serve Padel Social, a coached hour of skills and friendly games capped at four players. From there, move on to Beginners Padel Coaching or our Padel Socials. Check the app or website for current session times. You may have heard the sport called paddle, paddle tennis or padel tennis. It’s all the same game, and it’s all here.

Don’t apologise for never having played anything. You’re starting with a clean slate, and in padel that’s a good place to start.

Read next

Booked in? Never Played Padel Before? Here’s Exactly What to Expect walks you through your first visit, step by step. Then read Move as a Pair, the positioning habit worth building from day one.

Written by Nicholas Woods — owner of Padel Park Hamilton and accredited padel coach. Drafted with AI assistance, reviewed and fact-checked before publishing.