Nottingham Tennis Centre to host first padel competition at Summer Racket Festival

Nottingham Tennis Centre staged its first padel competition on Saturday 25 July 2026, with the event set for 10:00am to 1:30pm and advance sign-up required. The centre pitched it as part of Summer Racket Festival 2026, and one promotional post made the entry level clear by calling it “not for ratings or rankings.”

That framing matters because the venue did not present the day as a closed club contest. Another post described Summer Racket Festival 2026 as “free for all the family,” while the image attached to the padel notice referenced the LTA Tennis Foundation. The centre also promoted a youth yellow tennis competition on clay for the same day, showing the festival was built as a mixed participation event rather than a single padel one-off.

The clearest sign that padel has moved beyond an experiment at Nottingham Tennis Centre is the court footprint behind the event. The venue said its four brand-new outdoor padel courts were open from 6.00am to 10.00pm, a long daily window that points to regular court usage rather than occasional exhibition play. A first competition only makes sense if there is already enough demand to fill courts, and a sign-up-only format suggests organisers expected structured entries, not casual walk-ins.

That local demand has been visible for more than a year. On 10 June 2025, Notts TV reported that Nottingham Tennis Centre was to build three new padel courts after the sport’s popularity tripled. By July 2026, BBC News was reporting that plans had been submitted for a £1m padel complex in Nottingham with five covered outdoor padel courts. Put together, those developments show a city where padel infrastructure is expanding quickly, and where established racquet venues are trying to capture players before the market becomes crowded.

The competitive pathway is also getting more formal. The Lawn Tennis Association has a dedicated padel website and a 2026 event calendar, which gives venues like Nottingham Tennis Centre a broader structure to plug into when they move from taster sessions to organised events. For Nottingham, this first competition looked less like a novelty and more like a test case: whether a popular leisure sport can turn court access, family festival programming and first-time competition into a regular local ladder.