The padel app turning matches into meet-cutes

Playtomic was built to help players book courts and find matches. It’s increasingly becoming a platform for people to meet dating partners and friends.

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Padel has taken the sports world by storm. In a smaller but growing circle, it’s also become a way to date.

Much of that runs through Playtomic, a booking app for racquet sports where players join “open matches” with strangers, chat through the app, and meet people they wouldn’t otherwise encounter. For some, those connections carry off the court.

“People are meeting each other on the court . . . [and then] grabbing a beer or coffee from the grounds,” says Pro Padel League CEO Michael Dorfman.

That kind of interaction is exactly what the app Playtomic is designed to facilitate, and increasingly, to scale.

In 2017, co-founder Pablo Carro set out to solve a basic problem: booking a court. “ We didn’t find any user-friendly app[s] that was convenient for making a reservation for court bookings,” he says. “It all started with that very basic necessity because we were not able to find a court or someone to play with.”

At the time, padel itself was still emerging globally, having originated in the late 1960s in Acapulco, Mexico, and later gaining traction in Spain. But that timing turned out to be an advantage. Instead of retrofitting old systems, Playtomic grew alongside a new sport.

“ The thing is that padel is a new sport,” says Carro. “So it’s a new club, it’s a new business, and every single new business [is] considering the tech side.”

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