I first wrote about the controversy surrounding how to properly pronounce “padel” in the U.S. clear back in December 2023 for my former site, The Padel State.
At the time, we had just a small fraction of the courts, clubs, and players that we do now. Yet despite all the growth we’ve seen since then — both infrastructure- and awareness-wise — the debate (unfortunately and frustratingly) continues to linger on.
However, I’m hoping that may soon start to change thanks to some higher-profile figures in the U.S. padel world coming out and attempting to set the record straight recently. This includes Michael Dorfman, the CEO of the Pro Padel League (PPL), who waded into the topic a few weeks back on CNBC:
Keep in mind, Dorfman isn’t the only CEO in the U.S. padel world who has come out and pronounced the sport properly on a CNBC segment about the sport, either (and no, I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but it’s not “puh-DEL”).
In fact, Wayne Boich, who is the founder and CEO of Reserve Padel, has now appeared on CNBC multiple times (often alongside superstar athletes turned padel addicts like Derek Jeter and Jimmy Butler) and pronounced it as it should be, which is “paddle.”
Given that the guy owns a half dozen of the highest profile padel clubs in the U.S., runs a series of ultra-luxe professional padel tournaments around the globe, and regularly plays with some of the best players in the world from Argentina and Spain, you’d think if anyone would know how it’s pronounced it’d probably be him, right?
Even so, there are still plenty of U.S. players and even club operators, for that matter, for whom “puh-DEL” is a hill they are willing to die on.
Untangling This Seemingly Never-Ending Knot
The first argument you’ll usually hear the “puh-DEL” camp roll out (if they even have one) is the fact that “paddle” actually refers to platform tennis — which some people call “paddle tennis” and is a similar enclosed-court racquet sport played largely in the winter in small (often very wealthy) enclaves of the U.S. in the Northeast and Midwest.
Therefore, in their minds, padel should obviously be pronounced “puh-DEL” to account for this.
The only problem with this argument is that, while it’s true that many people do colloquially refer to that sport as “paddle” (and will no doubt continue to do until the end of time), it has officially been known as platform tennis since clear back in 1950 when the American Paddle Tennis Association unanimously voted to change its name to the American Platform Tennis Association — ironically enough to help distinguish it from other racquet sports that were often also called paddle tennis.
To that point, there is another niche (albeit very fun) U.S. racquet sport — which is played almost exclusively in warm-weather spots like Venice Beach, California — that has also been commonly called “paddle tennis” over the years. However, yet again, this sport was officially rebranded as POP Tennis back in 2015, as you can see in the image below from their website.
In other words, as I also pointed out in my recently published padel book, for over a decade now there hasn’t been any racquet sport here in the U.S. whose official name is “paddle” or “paddle tennis” — despite many people and/or players of platform tennis and POP tennis continuing to refer to them as such.
So, there really shouldn’t be any need to mispronounce padel in order to differentiate it from these other sports.
Confusion Over Where the Confusion Even Comes From
Of course, there’s also a second camp of “puh-DEL” diehards who insist that since “padel” derives from Spanish and is often written as “pádel” in Latin American countries, the proper pronunciation is obviously “puh-DEL.”
Many will even immediately go on to cite a native-Spanish-speaking player or pro they know who pronounces it this way to heighten their case.
While that’s all well and good — and I’ll admit that, yes, I know a few who do, too — the fact of the matter is that having the accent over the “a” rather than the “e” means the emphasis should be placed on the first syllable and not the second, like those in the “puh-DEL” camp pronounce it.
What’s more, “padel” wasn’t even officially recognized as the proper way to spell the sport until 1997 (nearly three decades after the sport’s invention) — with many Latin American countries, including the padel powerhouse of Argentina, spelling it the same way it’s actually pronounced up until that point (as you can see in the images below from a leading global padel publication at the time).
Oh, and here’s one more thing to consider… one of the very first courts built in the U.S. (which, sadly, was recently torn down) was in Chattanooga, TN, clear back in 1996, and if you look closely at the dedication plaque (pictured below) you’ll notice something interesting: it’s called the Katherine Jackson Johnston ‘25 Paddle Court.
Blame It On Marketing
Prior to getting involved in the padel world, I spent 15+ years working on the direct-response-marketing team for a financial-advice company where anytime anything went wrong, from a missed budget to an unhappy customer, the easiest solution seemingly was to just “blame it on marketing” (i.e., us).
However, when it comes to the U.S. padel world’s ongoing pronunciation problem, it really is the “fault” of the marketers — namely a group of enterprising individuals who began importing courts into the U.S. about a decade ago and decided to market the sport as “puh-DEL” so as to differentiate it from platform tennis or POP tennis, which as discussed earlier, some people still call mistakenly refer to as “paddle.”
The only problem is that in their attempt to reduce confusion about what sport they were selling, they’ve inadvertently spawned a whole lot more confusion about the name of the sport we’re now all playing.
Just ask Mike May. He was one of the earliest pioneers playing and promoting the sport here in the U.S. clear back in the early 1990s, and went on to both serve as the President of the U.S. Padel Association for 21 years (!) and represent Team USA in 13 consecutive World Padel Championships (!!).
He’s been doing everything he can to help clear up the confusion, including recording the following video with Daniel Patti, the former President of the International Padel Federation…
… and chiming in on social media posts suggesting that “puh-DEL” is how it should properly be pronounced in the sport’s native tongue of Spanish with responses like:
Actually, everyone here in Spain, where I am right now with my Spanish wife, says it the correct way. They laugh at the American pronunciation. They don’t pronounce it that way either.
Who Needs Facts When You Have Opinions?
Out of gas, Out of road,
Out of car, I don’t how I’m gunna go,
I had a drink the other day,
Opinions were like kittens,
I was givin’ ‘em away
— Out of Gas, Modest Mouse, 1997
In my experience, the less time someone has been playing padel the more likely they are to not only call it “puh-DEL” but also vehemently argue their case.
And then there’s the final camp of folks who say that they simply don’t care how it’s supposed to be pronounced and are going to keep calling it “puh-DEL” because they think it sounds so much “cooler” or more exotic.
For the most part, my take on the whole thing has basically just been: who really cares how you pronounce it as long as you have fun playing it?
However, with The Sports Business Journal now declaring that padel is the fastest growing sport in the U.S., I do also think that perhaps it is time for us to all start rallying behind a single and proper pronunciation…
And to that end I’m happy to see everyone from Michael Dorfman to Mike May to the racquet brands like Play Henry and even the American Collegiate Padel League doing their part to help set things straight.
My hope is that if enough well-established figures within the sport continue to champion the proper pronunciation and enough newbies take a moment to educate themself about how the sport actually should be pronounced and why, we can eventually just fall in line with the other 99%+ of the padel playing world.
Then again, given that the U.S. is the kind of place where the “official” names of mammoth bodies of water can be changed practically overnight (after decades or even centuries of being called something else) based on the whim of a single former reality television star, perhaps it only makes sense that padel will forever be known as “puh-DEL” here in America.
I guess we’ll see…
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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!
Great article, Austin. You know where I stand on this. I'm a die-hard pádel guy.
Since I'm a bit of a grammar nerd, at least in Spanish, let me explain the etymology of the word pádel and add a few comments to your article.
Quick grammar note first: pádel is a palabra grave with the tilde on the á because the stress falls there. Words ending in a consonant other than n or s that carry the emphasis on the second-to-last syllable require a tilde (the little thingy on top of the á... so pádel needs the written accent on the á.
The word pádel comes from the word paddle. Paddle (AKA platform tennis) was the name of the sport that Enrique Corcuera knew back when he invented padel... and guess what? He used platform tennis paddles when he first played the sport in Acapulco... so the word pádel comes from paddle and, as you mentioned, for a while pádel was called paddle.
Here's the fun part: at some point, either in Argentina or Spain, a padel historian probably knows the exact story, someone Spanish-ified "paddle" by dropping the second d and swapping the position of the l and the e: paddle → pádel. Voilá, a new Spanish word is born.
It's all very confusing, I know. The English word paddle means paleta in Spanish. Pala, which a lot of Spanish-speaking people call the device we all use to strike the ball, means shovel. Let's stop there because calling them padel rackets is a whole different discussion. As you know, racquets, by definition, have strings... so... LOL