Is everyone playing padel without us?

On a recent night, a padel club was packed here, as friends played under floodlights.

A devotee, Patricio Guzman, started during the pandemic. Mr Guzman, 38, has never played tennis but now plays padel four times a week – sometimes five if he’s in a tournament.

“I’m addicted to it,” he said.

Several players had never heard of pickleball. Three brothers in their fifties, who got together to try padel together for the first time, dried off after a match. “It’s like tennis?” asked Jorge-Andrés Quevedo.

A day later, at the Chile Padel Academy on the other side of town, Tomás Bachmann, the head of Pickleball Chile, sipping a sports drink after winning a game. Mr. Bachmann, 34, discovered pickleball from his brother, who used to live in North Carolina. He decided about two years ago to try and bring the sport to Chile.

But so far he has only sold about 30 nets and 80 paddles. A group chat for enthusiasts in Santiago, a city of nearly seven million people, has about 85 members.

“I don’t see a pickleball explosion here,” said Sebastián Varela, a Chilean journalist and founder of Clay, an international tennis magazine. “Why would we need this pickleball thing when we have so much fun with padel?”

Last year, about nine million Americans played pickleball, said Stu Upson, the CEO of American Pickleball. That’s almost double the players from the year before. A USA Pickleball spokeswoman said the organization had counted 45,000 courts in the countrynot including the driveways or the taped tennis and basketball courts, where the game thrives.