Eric Loftus discovered pádel as a business proposition when, in 2021, he traveled to Cologne and paid a visit to FSB, the self-described international trade show for public space, sports and leisure facilities. As he has now explained to The Padel Paper, “every single booth at that trade show was talking about padel.” He was then vice president of the company he now leads, Cape and Island Tennis and Track, a firm that dates back to 1972, employs 65 and has built some 3,500 courts and tracks for universities, clubs and schools in New England. His interview with The Padel Paper gives us an American view of the world’s fastest-growing sport and reveals some of the cultural obstacles to its spread in the US. As it turns out, they have little to do with the sport itself or with pickleball.
Since his visit to FSB, Loftus has been busy establishing a new division, Northeast Padel. This “construction, management, and logistics firm” is set up to handle all aspects of court supply – sales, design, installation, maintenance, project management, storage, and transport – and to compete to advantage against the European competition. “If you buy direct” from a European supplier, “they may fly installers over from Barcelona who are not licensed,” he said. “Our country is very litigious, and if someone gets hurt, you’re completely at risk.”
Permits are a problem because America’s local authorities know nothing of pádel, and Europe’s pádel companies know nothing of cyclones. “Nobody over here knows what the heck these things are,” he said. “You send them the structural specifications, which are in Spanish and wind loads are calculated differently here than in Europe. Then you mention that you’re pitting 3m of glass against 50-knot winds… so you can understand the skepticism.” Another problem is the warehouses in the northeast, which lack “the necessary ceiling heights. We’re densely populated, and these venues aren’t common. We keep hearing the words ‘proof of concept.’”
The division has courts in storage and prospects for four deals but has had a slow year. “I’d have hoped to be a lot further along than we are now, but a year from now, I think it’ll be a totally different conversation,” he said. When pádel finally gets big in the US, “we will have boots on the ground to take advantage.”
“It’s a fairly easy transition for me,” he continued, “because we have all the infrastructure in place. We’re going to [be] activating space at shopping malls, town squares and winter carnivals and leveraging relationships with tennis and country clubs. Padel is permeating, and it’s not quite there yet, but it’s coming.”
Our readers might recall that A1 Padel (the former APT Tour) is taking a similar approach to the US, entering markets with half-empty bleachers on the prospect that said bleachers will fill over the years. Moreover, Loftus’s remarks on American litigiousness echo those of José Manuel Delgado, co-CEO of AFP Courts (holder of the Adidas pádel license). AFP has had to modify its designs to meet the regulatory standards of various US states.
In some respects, the regulatory scheme in the US is more like that of the EU than of any one European country. American building codes differ by state and sometimes by county. For instance, what is now the county of Miami-Dade – a prime US market for pádel – overhauled the local building code after 1992, when Hurricane Andrew flattened entire neighborhoods.
