As part of the GB Padel Men’s Squad, this month Tom joined a training camp in Alicante where the team was preparing for the European and World Championships this year. The structure of the trip was 3 days training with the GB Team squad as well as training with local Spanish pro players at the Jordi Munoz Academy.
In this blog Tom shares his experience of the camp, his takeaways from the trip and where he thinks the next step for Team GB is to step up to that next level and compete with the best countries in the world at padel.
Here’s What The Training Was Like
If you’ve followed The Padel School for some time, you might have seen a few of my training vlogs at the Diagonal Pro Academy in Madrid. So, when it was announced that we’d be going to the Jordi Munoz Academy for the GB training, I was interested to see not only the differences in the training at these academies, but also how as a team, we’d handle the different playing conditions.
The structure of the 3-day training camp was a combination of ‘volume training’ in the mornings and match play sessions in the afternoon. This balance of technique plus tactical training was great for us as a team as we all need repetition and volume of training (essentially just hitting a lot of balls!), plus the tactical training to put theory into practice.
The dynamic of the GB team at this point in time is quite interesting. The highest ranked players on the team are training full-time and travelling each week for tournaments, whilst training 4 hours per day in between tournaments. There are also a number of lower ranked players on the team (including myself and Sandy) who have jobs or who are padel coaches and are still competing at a high level, but without the official FIP ranking to show for it. Despite this, we all play and compete at a broadly similar level which makes these camps perfect in the sense we can all play good matches against each other and help each other improve.
Some Of The Challenges
As a group who are used to training in the UK and indoors for the majority of the year; playing in sunny and slightly windy conditions was a big change for us! It took us a couple of days to get used to timing our overheads in slightly challenging conditions with the sun in your eyes and the wind moving the ball in the air. This made the game we played quite different. We were playing a lot more lobs, knowing that finishing the point with an overhead was not as easy as back in the UK under a roof. We also naturally played a bit slower as a result, being more patient in the rally because we knew it could take many more lobs to get the chance to finish the point.
One thing that really helped me personally in the conditions was using sports sunglasses. I always keep them in my bag even though I hardly ever get to use them in the UK! But in this case, they actually allowed me to see the ball, even when the ball was directly in the sun. I’d say well worth an investment if you are playing in sunny conditions yourself!
The Next Step For Team GB
Camps like this are a welcome opportunity for the squad and we need more of them. With many of our team training full-time in Spain, the rest of us are located in the UK so not only is it good to come together as a team, but also great to get the chance to train at academies in Spain with local players.
What’s great to see is that the level of the team is rising every year and we need to keep aspiring to continue that moving forwards. As so many other nations have shown, by supporting ex-tennis players to convert to padel, this would be a great way to raise the level of padel in the UK as a whole. On this front, the UK has some way to go to develop the infrastructure to facilitate such a process.
Summary
The camp in Spain was a huge success and it was a great opportunity to train with the team in outdoor padel conditions. What does UK padel need moving forwards? We need more training camps in places like Spain, AND also in the UK. It’s nice to get some sunshine and play in Spain where padel is so well established, but we can also try to recreate these environments for British players back home too!
