Padel Tennis in Medina

Today I discovered a new hobby, padel tennis. I had heard about it before, but now it has become so common that it could no longer be ignored, and I decided to try it. I was surprised when I typed “padel” into Google Maps, the search returned more than 15 locations in Medina. I started going through them, comparing reviews and prices. Some locations even had coffee shops, and in others, in addition to padel, you could rent a football field.

In the end, I settled on Padel Hub, as it had quite good reviews and an affordable price of 65 SAR per hour. For booking, I used the Malaeb app, which is a service available in Arab countries where you can rent various sports facilities for any sport. You can also find a team there if, for example, you don’t have friends in the area yet.

I remember about three years ago I had a similar idea, even a prototype was made, but in the end the project was frozen and never got back to it. This became an example for me that you need to focus on speed and listen to your intuition, because at that time there were doubts about whether there would be demand for such a service, and now life has shown that there is demand and quite large.

Anyway, I rented a court and in the process discovered a sign saying 2 vs 2. I realized I needed to find three more volunteers, wrote to acquaintances with an offer to play with me, and at the same time watched YouTube for the rules of the game. Fortunately, some friends already had experience and helped me at the beginning.

We arrived at the court, there were four courts, three for 2 vs 2 and one for 1 vs 1. Also, one court was covered with a tent all around, apparently it’s a court for women. We went to reception, they pointed us to a wall with rackets, we chose the “freshest” ones, got 5-6 tennis balls and went to try ourselves on the court.

During the game, I realized that padel looks much simpler from the outside than it actually is. It’s quite a dynamic game that requires good cardio and a sense of your partner. In general, we played for an hour, prayer time came, we performed a collective prayer right there on the premises and parted with the condition that this wouldn’t be the last time.

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