Tennis Scotland backs new Galashiels padel courts in £1.5m project

Scottish Borders Council backed a £1.5m-plus tennis and padel centre at Galashiels Academy on 22 July, saying the community facility has received just over £1.5 million from the Transforming Scottish Indoor Tennis fund to develop three covered tennis courts and two covered padel courts beside the recently completed £64 million school campus.

The project sits inside Transforming Scottish Indoor Tennis, a programme run by the LTA, the LTA Tennis Foundation, sportscotland and Tennis Scotland. BBC Scotland said the new regional centre in the Borders is due to open early next year, which would make Galashiels Academy the fourth TSIT site and extend the scheme’s aim of filling geographical gaps in Scottish tennis provision beyond the main city hubs.

The academy setting matters. Scottish Borders Council said the new Galashiels Academy campus opened its doors on 6 January, with hundreds of pupils and staff celebrating the move into the replacement school. The earlier pre-planning consultation for the campus had already pointed to shared sports provision, including tennis courts and fenced pitches for use by both the school and the wider community, so the padel courts are being added to a campus built with dual use in mind rather than dropped into a standalone leisure site.

That makes the immediate winners fairly clear. Pupils at Galashiels Academy are first in line, followed by beginners and local club players who will get covered courts in a town of about 12,600 people in the Scottish Borders, well away from Scotland’s largest urban racket-sport markets. The indoor cover also matters in a region where weather can limit outdoor court time for much of the year.

The bigger question is whether two padel courts are enough to leave a lasting mark in the Borders. They should be enough to create the first point of access, especially for school sessions, introductory coaching and community booking slots, but they will need regular programming to turn first-time players into repeat users. For performance pathways, the value is less about court count than about whether the site becomes a dependable base for coaching, competition and talent identification.