It's Been Quite the Week For U.S. Collegiate Padel
One bird, two stones...
Having grown up playing tennis and then later squash, I was always shocked (and disappointed) by the massive gap between the two sports here in the U.S., especially at the collegiate level.
Tennis is practically ubiquitous on U.S. college campuses. Even the medium-sized school I went to in Virginia had over 30+ tennis courts and a D-1 tennis team, compared to just two sad, dilapidated squash courts that only a small handful of people ever played on (myself included) and no club team to speak of.
Meanwhile, nearly every imaginable variety of two- and four-year college and university in America has some sort of college tennis team, be it a full-blown D-1 squad, a National Junior College Athletic Association team, or even just a club program.
Yet, despite squash finally becoming an Olympic sport in 2028, there are only about three dozen total NCAA squash programs today plus a smattering of club programs, largely clustered in the Northeast at wealthy, private liberal-arts or Ivy League institutions.
And the trickle-down effect — or lack-thereof, rather — of this is striking at places like our local squash club in Charleston, SC, where the age of the average member is well over 60 and you can count the number of players under 30 on one hand.
Luckily, U.S. Padel Already Looks to Be Going in a Much Different Direction
This is thanks in part to the American Collegiate Padel League (ACPL), which held its official launch tournament last weekend at Padel Haus in Brooklyn (and was sponsored in part by our Padel Nation partners at Kanso Sports).
All told, seven different schools — including Yale, Babson, U-Penn, Drexel, Duke, Columbia, and NYU — competed, with the team from Yale ultimately declaring victory.
As Rahul Verma of the Columbia University team put it, “ACPL is a great league. It’s the start of something big and I think it’s gonna be instrumental in helping padel growth in the U.S.”
Beyond this initial event, the ACPL plans to launch a full-blown collegiate padel league, whose inaugural season will kick off this coming September and include:
Self-organized "City Stages" (running Sept-Oct, Dec-Jan, and Mar-Apr), where official ACPL chapters will compete within their metro areas to accumulate qualifying points before major events…
Regional Majors, where chapters will travel to compete in the Fall Invitational (pre-Thanksgiving) and the Winter Classic (late February), facing off against broader regional talent to secure conference standing, and…
A National Final, where the inaugural season will culminate in early May 2027. Conference champions and top-ranked squads will advance to these National Finals to compete for “the ultimate collegiate padel title.”
In the meantime, the ACPL will be hosting a series of “Courtside Events” in places like Boulder, CO… Fort Lauderdale, FL (at RacquetX)… and Boston, MA (which, as I recently noted is finally starting to claim its rightful place on the U.S. padel map).
Doubling Down
As if this ACPL news wasn’t intriguing enough, yesterday the U.S. Padel Association (USPA) added to the U.S. collegiate padel momentum by announcing the first-ever National Collegiate Padel Championships, which are scheduled to take place April 10-11 at Padel Club Austin in Austin, TX.
During this first-of-its-kind event, American university students — from schools including the University of Miami (FL), the University of Texas, and Harvard Business School among others — will battle for the USPA national collegiate title and a chance to represent the U.S. at the FISU World University Championships in Málaga, Spain from July 6 - 11.
In a prepared statement, Rodrigo Ortiz, President and Founder of Longhorn Padel at the University of Texas at Austin, said:
“We have been working toward this moment since the very beginning. When we started Longhorn Padel, we knew there was something special here: the energy, the talent, and the passion our students bring every time they step on the court.
The National Collegiate Padel Championship gives our club the chance to be amazing hosts and welcome [c]ollegiate [p]adel [p]layers from around the country. We’re bringing Texas energy, Burnt Orange pride, and Longhorn hospitality to the national stage.”
As soon as we have further details on either of these collegiate padel initiatives, we’ll be back with more — so please stay tuned.
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