A little known sport not long ago, padel tennis has seen an astronomical rise in popularity: The legend goes that padel tennis was first conjured up in 1969 by a Mexican businessman who wanted his own personal tennis court but was short on space (and built walls around it so he wouldn’t have to go chasing balls into his neighbors’ yard. Padel has long been adored by amateur athletes in Spain — but it wasn’t until the outbreak of the pandemic, and the lockdowns that followed, that the game really took off.

Case in point: In Italy, which has 5k padel courts (five times more than it did pre-covid), padel is soon expected to become the second most practiced sport in the country after football.

So how’s it played? Imagine squash and table tennis had a baby, and you’re pretty close to padel. The game has the same central premise as tennis but is typically played in doubles on a smaller, walled off court. Here’s a quick guide to the basics.

Italians aren’t the only ones going wild for padel — it’s a huge craze here, too: Our first few padel tennis courts were set up way back in 2014, says JPadel co-founder and CEO Ismail Seddik, who had a hand in bringing those first few facilities to Egypt. But the padel tennis landscape today is unrecognizable now compared to even a year ago, he tells Enterprise. At the start of 2021, there were about 50-60 padel courts in Egypt. Now we’re looking at some 200 courts—and by the end of the summer, JPadel will be responsible for 28 of them. Seddik says. “Now, in every sporting club I pass by you find football pitches, tennis courts and padel courts.”

Why the padel madness? We have a newfound appreciation for staying fit: “Covid-19 really helped drive this demand for playing padel tennis,” Seddik says. “There’s been a huge increase in awareness about the importance of staying active and exercising that wasn’t around 3-4 years back, and I think people were also really bored with hanging out at cafes.”

And padel has a low bar to entry: The doubles set-up brings the camaraderie, and the design of the racquet and courts makes it an accessible sport for beginners. “It makes it a cozier and a more social game. The paddle racquet is also a bit more intuitive than other racquet sports like tennis,” Seddik says.

Expect to hear more padel talk: The Egyptian Padel Federation wants to train 1k kids in the sport, and competitions have sprung up in plenty of local clubs. With courts now being built outside Cairo, the sport could soon be generating interest from a broader segment of society, Seddik says, adding that padel could soon become “one of the main sports in Egypt.”

We could even go pro: “We could be only a few years away from an Egyptian padel tennis team showing up in international competitions,” Seddik says.

Another eerily similar pandemic-era paddle sport is taking root across the Atlantic: Pickleball. The invention of a US congressman in 1965 and typically a pastime favorite at retirement communities in the US, Pickleball is a combination of tennis, ping pong and badminton that’s lately seen booming interest from younger people, too. Pickleball racquets are a little more boxy than in padel tennis, and the game is played with a plastic ball full of holes.

Meta-racquet, anyone? If going outside isn't your thing, a virtual reality racquet could be soon coming your way. The AirRacket apparently simulates what it feels like to hit an actual ball, by shooting out compressed air so that players can better “feel that directional force right from the impact of the ball,” one of the researchers behind the technology said.