The Second Act

Gillian McIlroy made everyone in the class feel welcome, and she did it before we had warmed up. She opened the intermediate session at Level 7 Padel Club in Ayr, on Friday 2 October, by talking to each of us in turn: what level we played at, how much we had played, what we wanted to work on.

The class ran from half past one to half past two, with three of the four courts busy. It was sunny when we started and raining by the time I left. There were two other players. We warmed up, played four games so that she could see where everyone sat, and then the drills began.

With me, she worked on the middle. Once an opponent came across, the aim was to play to the middle and then out to the glass, so that I was moving one player rather than switching between two. We worked on drops that arrived at her feet, on chiquitas from the baseline, and on making life hard from the back of the court for whoever was at the net.

The courts were new, and above each one hangs a single long rectangle of light. There is no lamp to look up into and no blind spots.

It was a tough session, and not a stressful one. She was fun and easy company, and I enjoyed it. What stayed with me was how plainly you could tell she was holding her own game back to stay at ours. At the end she invited the other two to the Saturday-morning Americano.

Padel was not where she began. "I played tennis since I was 5. So I've played tennis for 35 years." She was helping with coaching at fourteen. Then: "Went to uni, didn't work out, became a tennis coach as a kind of, 'I'll do this until I figure out what I want to do in my life.' And stayed in it." She holds the LTA's Level 4 Senior Performance Coach qualification. Her job before this one was coaching at Newlands, a large tennis club in Glasgow.

It came through a friend. Gillian bumped into Meghan Montgomerie four or five years ago, by her reckoning, and Meghan got her playing at West of Scotland Padel, a charity on an industrial estate in Stevenston. It was out of Gillian's way. For three or four years she played there once a week.

She arrived with a game already formed. In one of her first matches she was partnered by Meghan, and somebody had told Gillian that you are not supposed to hit a smash hard. So she held back, hitting what she calls "these, like, daft little tap shots." Meghan asked, "What are you doing?" and then told her: "Smash that as hard as you can... They're stuck to the back glass. They're never going to get it." Keep going, Meghan said, until the other pair start moving forward early. Then tap it.

At the start of 2026 Scotland held trials for its over-age teams, the 40s, 50s and 60s together on the same weekend. She was one of five women picked for the over-40s, and from January she was playing three or four times a week. In March the squads went to Leeds for the Four Nations, which England won overall, ahead of Scotland. "It was so nice to be part of, like, Team Scotland and the support." She loves, she says, the environment around the game. She played in the over-40s at thirty-nine, which they had a laugh about, because she did not turn 40 until May. "It's not a given that you're in it. Like, everybody's getting better."

Before Leeds, she and her team-mates went to seven different clubs looking for games. They got the women together at Racket Barn, played some at West of Scotland and some in Edinburgh. After Leeds she took a padel coaching qualification, Level 1 with the Padel Coaches Registry. Roughly ten people did the course together, and only one of them was not a tennis coach. She is due to shadow a course as a coach educator.

Asked who built the women's side at West of Scotland Padel, she went through where her team-mates had come from: Meghan and the captain, Charlotte McClure, from tennis, like her, and the others from other sports. Then, back to the question: "I guess it was just the only place to play for a while, and we all kind of knew each other."

By the LTA's record, West of Scotland Padel won the Padel Scottish Cup in 2023 and 2024, and lost it to Edinburgh Sports Club in 2025.

On Sunday 6 September this year the two clubs met again in the final, at Racket Barn in Glasgow. Gillian played with Meghan. They won one rubber and lost one, and it came to two-all, which sent it to a 10-point shootout. Meghan and one player from the other pair won it, and West of Scotland took the final 3-2 for a third title in four years. "It feels amazing," the captain told the LTA, "especially to win on a shootout after losing in one last year."

Women are still a minority in the game: by the LTA's count this year, about 30 per cent of the people playing padel in Britain. West of Scotland Padel's own trustees, in their report for the year to March 2025, describe women as "significantly under-represented".

Gillian described one Americano at Level 7 with three men and five women. The women all had a slight tennis background and held their own. She says what puts people off is the movement and "the speed the ball's coming up sometimes", even among beginners. "You don't want to put people off. You want it to be enjoyable for everybody that comes in."

When I raised women's events, she said Level 7 had been having that conversation that morning: some women-only sessions, and some for the over-50s.

The club sits on the old Ayr Ice Rink site on Limekiln Road: four indoor courts, the first phase of a wider redevelopment. Gillian is head coach, with one other coach and a third on the way. The programme runs from intro sessions and beginner coaching to beginner Americanos, three or four intermediate classes and one advanced.

One of her beginners is her own mother, in her seventies, who had played a little badminton and mini tennis years ago and was not sure she could manage it. "You will. Like, honestly, you will," Gillian told her. She had "a nice little rally". Gillian expects her back.

Her plans run to a Scottish Cup team playing out of Ayr next year, league teams, and kids' classes soon. In a note after we met, she wrote that nobody has left after a first visit saying it is not for them. They all, in her words, "can't wait to come back".

On the Saturday morning I went back for the Americano. By Friday only two of us had signed up, and Gillian expected to need one court. Then came a flurry of late names, and there were eight of us across two, changing partners every round. Gillian ran it rather than played, moving between the courts, chatting, seeing how people were getting on.

Most of the people I met had come from tennis, along with some squash players. My last game was with one of the strongest players there, and it showed me exactly where I sit on the scale. It was humbling, and a joy to watch from that close. At the end nobody hurried off. Everyone stood around talking, and I could see how padel might grow in the west of Scotland.

Andy Galt paid for his own place in the session.

Level 7 Padel Club · 9 Limekiln Road, Ayr KA8 8DG · level7padel.com · courts booked through MATCHi · general enquiries info@level7padel.com · coaching with Gillian McIlroy: coaching@level7padel.com