Editor’s note: The following (lightly edited) feature article is the first installment of a new “How I Became Obsessed With Padel” series we’re rolling out from regular guest contributor, Scott Matulis, a former PR Director for the Worldwide Senior Tennis Tour who discovered padel in Vegas two years ago and can now hit balls off of the glass occasionally. He is the author of the LinkedIn and Substack serial novel The Applicant.
Aaron Hasnain owns Padel N9NE in San Diego, CA, and is one of the bright young entrepreneurs curating the padel wave in southern California.
Up until a few years ago, Aaron was a biotech guy developing drugs for people with pulmonary disease. Which is why I wanted to sit down with him to discover how he became obsessed with padel.
Here’s what I learned from our conversation:
Are you from San Diego originally?
No. I was born in Canada, so I’m Canadian. I lived in Canada for 15 years and then moved all around the U.S. after that. My father was in biotech, so we moved to North Carolina, then San Francisco, and eventually San Diego, because those were all biotech hotspots.
I’m biotech by training. Right now, I run business development for a publicly traded biotech company called Gossamer Bio. We started the company in 2018, took it public in 2019, and I’ve been there for a number of years developing drugs for people with pulmonary disease.
So how does that biotech background lead to padel?
I have a place in the Bahamas in a community called Albany. It’s a very cool community that was started by Tiger Woods, Justin Timberlake, and Joe Lewis.
Joe Lewis is a very successful British businessman. He invested in some biotech companies I’m affiliated with and he called my father one day and said, ‘Hey, I want to meet you guys. Why don’t we fly you out to the Bahamas, put you up for a couple days, and we can have a meeting?’
So we flew out there. And lo and behold, he has a yacht in the water. And when I say yacht, at the time he actually had two. One was around 380 feet. It was like a floating city. It was probably the most insane thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It was so big it didn’t fit into the marina and had to be docked half a mile offshore.
And in the bottom of that boat was a padel court.
Wait… inside the yacht?
Yes, inside the yacht. The boat is called Aviva. Joe is from the U.K., where padel is very big, and he traveled around the world and fell in love with the sport. So, he literally built a boat around the padel court.
The court is indoors. It has something like 25- to 29-foot ceilings. It’s the most unbelievable thing you’ve ever seen. You can find pictures of it online if you Google Aviva padel court. It’s nuts.
And the whole thing is on stabilizers, so when you’re at sea and the boat is rocking, the padel court doesn’t move. It’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen.
Funny, that’s exactly the same way I was introduced to padel… So when you were playing, you couldn’t tell you were on a boat?
There’s no way you would tell. You don’t even feel like you’re on a boat. It’s this massive floating skyscraper. It probably had more than 100 staff members. It was just a whole other level.
So, of course, my first introduction to padel is on this boat. And I’m like, ‘What the hell is this?’
This was around 2018 or 2019. I played the sport and fell in love with it immediately. I was always an athlete. I grew up playing tennis and golf and different things, so the hand-eye coordination was there. I picked it up relatively quickly, but I was never really that good.
Joe was in his 80s and unbelievable. He moved like a cat. He played so silky smooth. He was incredible. So I played with him a couple times, with my dad, out there.
Did you keep playing whenever you went back to your place in the Bahamas?
Yes. The community in the Bahamas built a number of courts. At the time, I think they had three courts and an indoor court. Now they have something like 14 courts. So every time I went out there, three or four times a year, I would play either on the boat or in the community.
Eventually, I came back to San Diego and thought, ‘I’m really loving this. I have to find a way to actually play in San Diego.’
What was the padel scene like in San Diego at that point?
There really wasn’t one. At the time, there was maybe one YMCA court that was kind of shut down. Barnes Tennis Center had one or two courts, but it was far from me and they weren’t really that nice.
I had a tennis court in my backyard that wasn’t really being used. Kids would run around on it, but it wasn’t anything special. So we called Joe and said, ‘Hey, I need the manufacturer.’ There was really nobody in the U.S. building courts at the time.
They introduced us to the guys who had the Adidas license in the U.S., AFP. They basically flew a team down from Spain and helped me set up a court in my backyard.
This was around 2018, so there was really no infrastructure. Nobody knew what padel was. I thought they would just show up and build it. Little did I know, they had to get a crane to lift the metal pieces and glass over my house. It was this whole production.
These were Adidas courts?
Adidas is in the padel scene, primarily outside the U.S., and now they’re getting more into the U.S. But at the time, they licensed the U.S. rights for padel to a company called AFP.
AFP had the exclusive license to use the Adidas name for courts and products in the United States. They were smart. They got that license early when padel was nothing in the U.S.
Adidas was probably thinking, ‘Padel is never going to take off in the U.S. because pickleball is king.’ So AFP had the U.S. rights, and they connected me with the team.
They flew down, built the court, and it took about a month, which is not how it works anymore. But eventually, I had a padel court in my backyard.
How did it evolve from a court in your backyard to starting a padel club?
I started to play and slowly introduced people in my family. And then something just exploded. Covid happened. By the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021, everybody was looking for things to do outdoors.
I’m a really social person. The biotech community is really strong here in San Diego. I have lots of friends and family here.
Very quickly, without a doubt, and I’m not exaggerating, I probably had close to 300 people playing at my house every week or every other week. It got insane. People were dying to come play. I had to create a spreadsheet.
I live in a gated community, so I was putting everybody on the gate list. People were just coming and going. Even if I wasn’t playing, I would say, ‘Okay, you have the court from this time to this time, then somebody else comes from here to here, and then I’ll jump into a game from 12 to 2.’
There was this revolving door of people at my house all day long.
What was the level of play like? Were these people who knew padel — or mostly beginners and tennis players?
Nobody really knew how to play, but they were all athletes. They were people in my ecosystem. I know a couple of professional athletes in the area who were coming out to play, and we were having decent enough games that it was super fun.
Then word started to travel locally that I had a court, and that I was the only one at the time in San Diego with a private court. So people who had moved to San Diego from other places started calling me randomly.
One of my neighbors, who I had never met before, called me one day and said, ‘Hey, I heard from the HOA that you have a padel court. I’m from South Africa. I love padel. I would love to meet you.’
So I started getting people coming to the house who actually played the sport.
Is that when you realized this could become something bigger?
That’s when the light bulb really went on. I was like, ‘This is really cool. There really isn’t anywhere to play in San Diego. Maybe I can create a social ecosystem out of this.’
At the time, it wasn’t about making money. It was more like, maybe I could find some land, build a court or two, and create a great place for people to connect, especially because of what was going on with Covid.
That backyard court showed me there was real demand. People wanted to play. Some already loved padel, and others would try it once and immediately want to come back.
That’s really how the obsession started.
You can visit Padel N9NE and play on its 8 pristine panoramic outdoor courts at 9885 Barnes Canyon Rd, San Diego, CA 92121. For more information visit their website, follow them on Instagram, or call (858) 732-9014.
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