How I Became Obsessed With Padel: Rene Lewicki
We sit down with the Wilson Padel Biz Dev Manager to learn more...
Editor’s note: The following (lightly edited) feature article is the third installment of a new “How I Became Obsessed With Padel” series we’re rolling out from regular guest contributor, Scott Matulis, a former PR Director for the Worldwide Senior Tennis Tour who discovered padel in Vegas two 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 apologies for this week’s second article arriving a day late and very early in the morning (for U.S. readers anyhow). Publishing while traveling through Spain has proved trickier than planned, but we’ll shoot to get back to our regular schedule next week!
Rene Lewicki leads business development for Wilson in the Western United States. He’s German. He’s also one of the people working to grow padel in the U.S., and he has a unique perspective on what it will take to make the sport popular here. He thinks Wilson rackets are better than your current stick.
Here’s how he became obsessed with padel…
Give me the origin story, how you discovered padel and how you fell in love with it.
So, I played padel the first time when I was 15 or 16. I was at a training camp in Spain for tennis, and my coach, who was from Chile, one day said, ‘Hey, we are going to play padel today,’ and we were all like, ‘What is that?’
He got us out on the court and we played. And we did that two years in a row when we went to this training camp in Spain. We always played one afternoon of padel. And we all had a blast, but in all honesty, thank God there are no videos from back then. It was probably the most hilarious thing because we were all good tennis players, but we had no clue how to use the walls.
So, fast forward a few years, I was a grown up, worked in the sporting goods industry, lived in Berlin, Germany. A friend of mine told me there is someone building these weird courts in Berlin. It looks like tennis but smaller. I was like, wait, wait, that sounds familiar. So I drove out there and I realized like, ‘Oh my god, those are padel courts!’
So, I played for just over a year, I played every day at this club. We played through the German winter. Any time there was no snow on the ground, we would play padel. We had the onion system of clothing. We came with like six layers.
And then I moved to the U.S. for a job by myself. And besides working, I didn’t have much to do. I was not married. My girlfriend back then was in Germany, so I found out that there were padel courts that today are called The Padel Courts in Los Angeles. I would drive in on the weekends.
The club was run by some super nice guys from Spain. I would go up there once a month and just play for one or two days. It was padel and I loved it.
When was that, and how was the padel community at that point in LA?
That was 2014. And it was mostly expats; people from Europe. There was this super fun crew who were all from Spain, mostly from Madrid. They all came here to study or whatever, and two of them ran these padel courts.
Without being negative, I don’t think it was the most profitable business because I can’t even remember being charged there when I played. They were happy that I came out and that I knew how to play a little bit.
Back then when I played on those courts, I would have probably played on a school backyard if somebody would have made a brick wall behind me.
People who knew padel were so desperate for padel courts that the standards were way lower than now. I mean, nowadays, if you want to have a top notch padel facility, you look at six courts plus restaurants, and all these nice things.
I was just at that club and one of the cool things about it is that it has a half court. I’d never seen one of those before. Back then, every court that existed was like gold. We played tournament matches on that half court. It was hilarious. We would play for fun, just like one against one, little freakish singles tournaments. They were fun. It was different.
Also, it’s not necessarily the width. It’s the length, it’s shorter. And that’s the tricky part. That really throws you off when you play there.
How did you end up working for Wilson?
I was in the sporting goods industry in different roles. And I spent lots of years in the racket sport industry, so tennis and padel were always very near. At one point, my other business ventures were over and it was time for a change.
I made a list of stuff that I care about, and that I could imagine working in. Padel was number one. Tennis was number two. Coffee wholesale trading was number three. Absolutely unrelated.
And funny enough, I was in Italy last summer, and I had an Airbnb with my family, and I walked one day to a pizza place in a town outside of Venice, and I walked by this super nice looking old villa, and I saw a sign that said, Amer Sports, Wilson.
And I was joking to my wife, ‘Hey, why don’t I just walk in there on Monday and ask them if they’re looking for a padel guy in the U.S.?’
And believe it or not, three weeks later, I was back home and I saw a job on LinkedIn that Wilson is looking for a business development manager for padel. So I applied, got the job and I love it.
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Oh, and one other thing… my brand-new 352-page padel book was just released this week. So, if you enjoy the work I’m doing in the U.S. padel space, you can support me by ordering a copy (or two!) online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Or if you’re a club owner and you’d want to carry a handful of copies in your pro shop for “padel curious” people who are interested in trying the sport out but don’t know quite where to start, let me know and I can connect you with my publisher’s wholesale department.
Many thanks in advance!