Editor’s note: The following (lightly edited) feature article is the eighth installment of our “How I Became Obsessed With Padel” series from regular guest contributor, Scott Matulis, a former PR Director for the Worldwide Senior Tennis Tour who discovered padel in Vegas a few years ago and can now hit balls off of the glass occasionally. He is the author of the LinkedIn and Substack serial novel The Applicant and his own padel Substack.
Andi Neugarten-Maio doesn’t do anything half-speed.
She has run more than 100 marathons, competed in triathlons and Ironman events, played high-level tennis, and built an athletic-apparel company. When she discovered padel, she dove in headfirst.
Today, the founder of Miami-based 6LoveSports plays or trains almost every day, structures vacations around padel, and says she needs her “padel fix” every morning.
(Oh, and she just won a silver medal at the FIP Senior World Cup in Buenos Aires — which was the best-ever finish for a U.S. National Team).
So, I recently interviewed her to learn more about how she became obsessed with padel. This is what she told me…
Why don’t you give me a little background on yourself, and then we’ll move into how you discovered padel.
Okay, so I’m 60 years old. I’ve had a partial knee replacement. I’m a Type A personality. I’m all-in with everything I do. I compete at the highest level. I push myself every single day. I train three times a day.
I was a tennis player growing up. I started playing tennis from the age of four in South Africa. South Africa could not compete internationally. There were sanctions; we were locked out of the world for many, many years.
I stopped playing tennis in high school. When I was 16, I put my racquets down. I became a runner. I have run over 100 marathons. I couldn’t break three hours. I’m a 3:11. That was my best marathon.
I then became a triathlete. I’ve done three, four Ironman events, about 50 half Ironmans, and my whole life has been about fitness and health. I’m not a health freak by any means, but I’m very active.
I love an early workout. I have always been an early riser. I’m a 5 a.m. girl. I used to be up at 4:45 a.m. every single day and in the pool at 5 a.m. In the freezing-cold San Diego winters, standing at the side of the pool, freezing cold. Couldn’t wait to jump into the water, which was warmer than the air. And then home to get my kids ready for school by 6:15 a.m.
So, the 5 a.m. days for me are great. I wake up and I work, and I’m usually on the padel court by 7 a.m. here. Only because the courts don’t open earlier.
You’re scaring me a little bit. 5 a.m. activities for me are extremely limited. Tell me how you discovered padel?
So, I moved from South Africa to San Diego and started playing tennis again very, very regularly, almost daily. When I do something, I do it all in: lessons, training, and I played the senior, I guess, the senior amateur tour, right? I was playing all the tournaments. All that stuff. And then I got bored. I moved to Miami, and I was just kind of over tennis. It just wasn’t doing it for me.
I live in Miami Beach, and I saw these courts down the street. The oldest padel club in Miami is called Real Padel. And there’s a big yellow tennis ball. I used to drive by and I’d see these cages and think, ‘What is this? It’s a racket, it’s a tennis ball. You know, I’m gonna be really good at this.’
And I kept trying to set up a lesson, but I couldn’t get hold of the coaches. I couldn’t get hold of the club. I just couldn’t find my way onto the court. And I was a little intimidated. I was a lot intimidated, actually.
Then about two years ago, we went on a trip to Barcelona, and we stayed in a gorgeous hotel up in the hills in the Costa Brava somewhere. And they had three padel courts. So I checked in, and I said to them, ‘I’d like a lesson, please.’ We got a coach, and on two of the mornings, I learned a little bit about how to play padel, playing off the back wall, and all that kind of stuff.
So I came back to Miami, and I thought, okay, this is pretty cool. I’m now gonna set up a lesson ‘cause now I feel confident enough to actually walk onto the court. I managed to get a lesson at Real Padel and met a coach who kind of became a mentor to me at the very beginning, Mariano Gombi.
He’s been around and about, and he’s landing in different places, but he kind of started saying to me, ‘Well, you know, you could be really good. Like, you’re gonna develop very fast, and there’s this whole U.S. national team. And the world championships are coming up, and you should apply for the U.S. National Team.’
I was like, ‘Me?? I just started playing. Maybe I could make the team. I don’t think there’s so many people playing.’ Anyway, I applied for the team. I was a little late, but I did go with the U.S. National Team to Alicante two years ago. I was not on the official team, but I was with the team as part of the team, and I played in the pairs. They could enter some extra teams into the pairs event. So I did.
Then I realized that there’s a big community of women here, and they’re really good. If I want to play, and I want to compete, I’m gonna have to step up my game. So, I started planning matches, started getting lessons, and the more I played, the more I wanted. The more my level went up, half a point or a point. I started intermediate, then I was high intermediate, then I was advanced.
How long did that take? If you’re a good tennis player, padel is pretty easy to pick up, isn’t it?
No. It’s easy to get from intermediate up to low advanced. To become a real advanced player takes a long time. It’s experience and strategy, and it’s completely different from tennis. So, I’ve been in the same group now, in the same place, for a year, developing my game and definitely improving. But to get to that next level, where I’m able to compete at a high level in D1, is not easy.
I was really good at tennis, but tennis is a game you can master. You can hit the ball and, yes, you’ll make stupid mistakes, but you walk off the court and you’ve generally played well. You’ve hit that ball well. On the days where I think I’m playing the best padel of my life, I’m losing horribly. Or nothing’s working. The ball’s just not going over the net. It’s not going into the court.
So, for me, the challenge has been learning something new and excelling in a new sport. Having tennis skills, hand-eye coordination, is a benefit, right? You know how to hit a ball. But being able to do that on the padel court is completely different. To learn how to do a bandeja, how to do a vibora, they’re all new things.
What do you have to work on to get you from where you are to where you want to be?
Strategy, footwork, mainly strategy. And learning how to not hit as hard. The rebounds off the back walls. Put the ball where the other player is not. So it’s all that stuff. Like hitting softer than the person hitting to you. I can use the glass. I’m great at defense, but it’s those hard balls where your reflex is to just block it or hit it. That’s when you have to let it go. And it’s gonna slow down. So it’s getting that message to my brain every time.
And if you watch a real padel player, the reflex of hitting the ball before it hits the wall is not there. Their reflex is to let the ball go. So breaking that pattern has been one of the hardest things.
And I take lessons with a lot of coaches. I get something different from each one of them. Some of them hate the fact that I go to other coaches, but some people say things in a certain way that I just get, or one coach will tell me something, and the next coach, a few days later, says the same thing in a different way, and I hear it.
My desire to improve is probably a little insane. I want to understand every part of this game. The walls, positioning, defense, decision-making, when to attack, when to slow things down. I want to master it. I don’t just want to be good for my age. I want to find out how good I can possibly become.
I play against 20-year-olds and I want to compete with them. I don’t walk onto the court thinking, ‘Well, they’re 20 and I’m not.’ I walk onto the court trying to figure out how I’m going to beat them. I want to play at the highest level I possibly can. I know there are physical realities to getting older, but I’m fascinated by how much you can compensate with technique, anticipation, positioning, and a better understanding of the game.
And that’s probably one of the reasons I’m so obsessed with padel. You never master it. Every time I think I’ve figured something out, I realize there’s another level. And I want to get to that next level.
I’ve spoken with several women who have started women’s padel communities. I have not met anyone who has started a men’s padel community, though. Why do you think that is?
Because women love other women. They love groups with other women. They love to make friends. They love to hang out with their friends. They love to play padel with their friends.
I realized that what padel was giving me personally was something I wanted other women to experience. That’s really where 6LoveSports came from. It wasn’t a business plan where I sat down and said, ‘Padel is growing. I should build something around it.’ It happened organically.
I saw what this sport was doing for me and for the women around me. The friendships. The confidence. The competitiveness. The community. The excitement of having something that belongs to you. And I wanted to create more opportunities for women to experience that.
What started with getting women onto courts has grown into leagues, tournaments, travel, international events, and this extraordinary community. Now, I have the biggest padel community in the country.
I have 6LoveSports for starters here in Miami with over 350 ladies every week playing league. My league started, and it’s successful because we show up, we’re not going to book club. We’re spending an evening with our friends. We’re playing padel.
We don’t have to arrange the match ourselves. It’s arranged for us at the right level. League starts at 7 pm and they leave at 10:30 pm. And they’re drinking wine. We always do a big charcuterie board, and they’re hanging out for the evening.
So I’ve created the space where they can go, and then they meet other women who play at their level.
Padel has a way of taking over people’s lives, and it sounds like it’s taken over yours. Is that fair to say?
This sport is like nothing I have ever encountered. When I discovered padel, I didn’t just start playing. I became completely obsessed with it.
My whole life, I’m looking to see where my husband is, because he really has no idea how much padel I play. My whole life revolves around my padel matches, my padel schedule, my lessons, which pro I’m going to.
I’ve developed an incredible new circle of friends through padel. And they’re not necessarily people I would ever have met otherwise. Padel crosses ages, countries, languages and backgrounds.
I’ve met professional players. I’ve trained with incredible coaches. I’ve traveled to compete. I’ve developed friendships and relationships with people from all over the world. You can arrive somewhere knowing nobody, step onto a padel court, and suddenly you have something in common. Padel has opened doors to experiences I never expected to have.
I’ve traveled because of it. I’ve competed internationally because of it. I’ve met people I would never otherwise have crossed paths with, from professional players and coaches to people who simply share this crazy passion for the game.
That’s the part I never anticipated when I first picked up a racket. I thought I’d found a sport. I actually found an entirely new world.
I mean, my obsession with padel changed my vacations. My husband is not a racket-sports person at all, but he started playing. I took him to the Rafa Nadal Academy this summer, and he absolutely loved it, and he actually learned to play really nicely. So now he insists that every vacation we do includes some padel.
Our vacations work around that. I have to get my padel fix every day. And as long as I do in the morning, I’m happy for the rest of the day. If I haven’t played padel, I’ll call a friend, we’ll go and drill. It doesn’t have to be a match.
You don’t have to stop discovering new versions of yourself because you’ve reached a certain age. You don’t have to stop being competitive. You don’t have to stop being ambitious. And you definitely don’t have to stop becoming obsessed with something new. I certainly haven’t.
Padel makes me feel youthful, challenged, competitive, and excited about what’s next. And tomorrow morning, I’ll probably wake up thinking about what time I can get on a padel court. You know, it’s just become a lifestyle, and it’s become something that I need every day.
To learn more about Neugarten-Maio’s latest women’s padel venture, the Athena Padel Cup, be sure to follow along on their Instagram page.
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