Kids Padel Rackets

Four things separate a junior padel racket from an adult one, and all four are physics rather than paint. Weight first: junior frames sit between 300 and 350 grams, against 355 to 375 for most adult rackets, and a child swinging 370 grams cannot get the head to the ball in time, so they shorten the swing, hit late and shove the ball instead of striking it. Second, the grip. The LTA's own beginner guide describes junior bats simply as "lighter with shorter grips", and the shorter handle is what lets a small hand sit near the balance point rather than at the end of a lever. Third, the head: a touch smaller, and on most junior models round, which keeps the balance low and the sweet spot in the middle, where a developing swing tends to land. Head publishes the numbers for its Monster Kids, and they are worth knowing: a 475 square centimetre face against 530 on an adult Bullpadel Vertex, a 33 millimetre frame against the 38 millimetre maximum, and a balance point 255 millimetres from the butt, which is about as handle-heavy as a padel racket gets. Fourth, the core: soft EVA or soft foam, so the ball comes off the face with some help even at low swing speeds.

The rules do not define a junior category at all. The International Padel Federation allows any racket up to 45.5 centimetres long, 26 wide and 38 thick, with a handle no longer than 20 centimetres and a wrist cord that must be worn, and that is the whole of it. No weight rule. No balance rule. No age rule. Junior rackets are therefore the same overall length as adult ones; what changes is how much mass there is and where it sits. That is also why you cannot shortcut the decision by buying a cheap adult racket and hoping the child grows into it. They will learn to compensate for it, and those compensations are exactly the habits a coach spends the following year trying to remove.

What retailers list as a childrens padel racket is also built to be dropped, scraped along the glass and left in a car. Almost every junior model on this page has a fibreglass face rather than carbon, partly for cost and partly because fibreglass flexes and survives knocks that chip a stiff carbon weave. Treat the lower price as a design choice, not a quality compromise. Bullpadel and adidas go a step further and thin their junior frames to 36 millimetres, which takes a little weight out of the head without changing the look of the racket, and the look is, if we are honest, most of what a twelve-year-old is buying.

Junior padel rackets out-sell their search volume by a distance. When we built our catalogue from the best-seller lists of four UK padel shops in October 2026, nine of the fifteen products those shops agreed on most were junior rackets, and the single most agreed-upon product in the whole set, across rackets, balls, shoes and bags, was the Nox AT10 Genius Junior. Partly that is because the junior category is small, so a popular junior racket ranks high on a short list. Mostly it is because parents buy on recommendation. A coach says "get the Nox" or "get the Babolat" to a whole Saturday group, and the whole group gets it.

The pattern in what sells is clear enough to be useful. Three brands dominate: Nox with the AT10 Genius Junior, Babolat with its three-step Alioth ladder (Mini, Junior, Pro Junior), and Bullpadel with the Hack Junior and the Vertex Junior in Boy and Girl colourways. Dunlop takes the value slots with the FX Junior and the Galactica Junior, Head sells the Speed Junior and the Coello Junior to competitive ten-to-thirteens, and the Wilson Bela Junior V2 was the top junior racket by units sold at Padel Shack, the one shop of the four that ranks that way. Nearly all of them weigh 310 to 340 grams. Nearly all of them cost £50 to £72. The outliers tell you something too: the Babolat Alioth Pro Junior at about £85 and the Wilson Blade V4 Junior at about £80 sell to parents of children who already compete, and the Galactica Junior at about £38 sells to parents who are not yet sure the child will stick with it. Joma's round, soft Game Junior is another beginner option, though at 330 to 340 g it is heavier than most.

Our opinion, for what it is worth. The Babolat Alioth Junior is the best-balanced buy on the list for an eight-to-eleven-year-old: round, low balance, 320 grams, and about £66 against a £92 RRP. The Nox AT10 Genius Junior is the one your child will want, which is not nothing, since a racket a child is proud of gets carried to the court rather than dragged. Do not buy the Hack Junior or the Vertex Junior for a child under ten. Both are 340 grams with a diamond outline, and they are built for the tall eleven-to-fourteen-year-old who wants the racket their favourite pro uses, not for a seven-year-old whose wrist is still catching up with their enthusiasm.

Age is a rough guide and height is a better one, because an eight-year-old can be the size of a small eleven-year-old. The weights in the table follow the pattern in the brands' own specifications: the under-tens get 300 to 320 grams, the ten-to-thirteens 310 to 335, and the tall thirteen-plus either a 330 to 350 gram junior or a light adult racket. The height bands are the ones we use when fitting. Start from the table, then check two things in person: can the child hold the racket in a relaxed grip with the tip pointing up for ten seconds without the wrist sagging, and can they swing it through a shadow forehand without the head lagging behind the hand. If either fails, go lighter.

A note on the two-handed phase. Many small children hold a padel racket with both hands for the first season, the way they would a cricket bat, and that is fine. The Head Monster Junior has a longer grip for exactly this reason, and it is the one racket on the page we would put in the hands of a five-year-old without hesitation. By seven or eight most children have let go with the second hand, and the standard junior grip takes over.

Parents ask this every week, usually because there is a spare adult racket in the cupboard. The honest answer is that it will work for a single taster session and then start costing you. The weight problem is the obvious one: a late swing means every ball is hit behind the body, so the child learns to flick with the wrist to catch up. That flick is where junior wrist strain comes from, and it is also the hardest habit for a coach to undo once it is grooved.

The grip problem is less visible. An adult handle is sized for a hand that wraps all the way round with the fingers meeting the thumb. A child's hand on the same handle holds it in the fingertips, which means every impact is absorbed by the forearm rather than the hand. Over a term of weekly sessions that is how children end up with the same elbow complaints adults get from rackets that are too heavy or too stiff. The NHS describes tennis elbow as an overuse injury of the tendons that join the forearm muscles to the elbow, and a racket a child cannot control is an overuse machine.

Then the balance. Adult frames, even round ones, carry more of their weight up the head than junior rackets do, because adults have the wrist strength to make use of a head-heavy frame. In a small hand a head-heavy racket drops on contact, so the ball goes into the net and the child decides padel is hard. A round, handle-heavy junior frame does the opposite: the ball goes over, the child feels competent, and they want to come back next week. That is the whole point of the first racket.

Junior handles come in one size, so the adjustment is done with overgrips rather than by choosing a frame. The test is simple: with the child holding the racket in a forehand grip, there should be a finger-width of space between the fingertips and the base of the thumb. No gap means the handle is too thin and one overgrip fixes it. A gap wider than a finger means the handle is too thick, which is rare on a junior racket but happens when a parent has already wrapped it. Overgrips come in packs of three for £5 to £7, and a fresh one every term also keeps the handle tacky for a sweaty hand.

Shape should be round until the child is hitting with a full swing and a stable wrist, which for most is somewhere between eleven and thirteen. Round keeps the sweet spot central and the balance low. A teardrop is a reasonable step once a junior is playing twice a week with a coach and wants a bit more on the smash, and the Head Speed Junior, Wilson Bela Junior V2 and Babolat Alioth Pro Junior are all teardrops for that reason. The diamond outline on the Bullpadel juniors needs a word of its own: at 340 grams with a soft EVA core and a medium balance it behaves nothing like an adult 370 gram diamond, so the shape is more styling than physics. Even so, we would not put one in the hands of a child under ten, because the mass is at the top of the junior range and a small wrist feels every gram of it.

The core should be soft. Brands call it soft EVA, Soft Performance, Power Foam or similar. A soft core gives the ball a little rebound at slow swing speeds, so a child who is still learning to accelerate through the ball gets depth without forcing it. Hard cores are for players who generate their own pace, which no eight-year-old does. The face follows the same logic: fibreglass flexes and forgives, carbon is stiffer and rewards precision. For junior rackets fibreglass is the right call until the teenage years, and every brand on this page that publishes a face material for its junior lists fibreglass.

Search for a girls padel racket and you will mostly find the same rackets as the boys with a different paint job, and that is the honest answer: there is no girls' specification. Bullpadel sells the Vertex Junior 26 and the Indiga Girl 26 as Boy and Girl versions, and the two Vertex Juniors are identical on the specification sheet, 340 grams, diamond outline, soft EVA core, fibreglass face; only the colours change, though one retailer lists the Indiga Boy and Girl 26 under the exact same "blue" colour tag, so even the paint job isn't always as advertised. adidas does the same with the Arrow Hit Junior in white and pink or white and blue at about £50 each. Y1 sells its JX1 Junior in pink and in blue at the same £54. Pick by weight and height from the table above, then let the child pick the colour, which is the part they actually care about (and the part they will defend in the car for the whole journey home).

Two caveats. Children grow at wildly different rates around eleven and twelve, so a girl who shoots up early may be ready for the 340 gram Bullpadel juniors, or even a 350 gram women's adult frame, a year before a classmate; height decides, not age and not the label on the racket. And if the child wants pink, the pink padel racket page lists adult options too, for when they move up. The Bullpadel rackets page explains how the Boy and Girl juniors sit alongside the adult Vertex and Indiga lines.

A third caveat, specific to the entry-level Indiga Boy 27: one listing for the matching Indiga Girl 27 gives a round, low-balance racket rather than this one's teardrop, medium balance, which would make that pair different rackets, not just different colours, if the figures hold. We're flagging it rather than repeating the colour-only rule blind for this particular model.

A fourth: the current Vertex Junior Girl 26 referenced above is still being written up on our side, so right now the racket actually in stock is last season's Vertex Girl Junior 2023, a near-identical 330 to 350 gram diamond on our own cross-check against the current generation's figures. Buy with confidence either way; the formula has barely moved in three seasons.

The signal is not age, it is the swing. When a junior is hitting through the ball with a stable wrist, using their legs on the smash, and complaining that the racket feels slow or light, they have outgrown it. For most that happens between thirteen and fifteen, or earlier for a tall child who plays twice a week. The right next step is a light adult round racket at 350 to 365 grams with a soft or medium core, which is exactly the beginner adult specification, not a jump straight to a 370 gram teardrop. There is also a half-step worth knowing about: the Nox AT10 Genius Ultralight, a 310 to 325 gram teardrop with a low balance and a fibreglass face that Nox sells to light adults and big juniors alike, at about £57.

Two practical checks before you spend £100 or more. First, have the child hit with a borrowed adult racket for a session and watch whether the swing stays the same shape or shortens. If it shortens, wait. Second, look at the junior racket. Chipped edges and a dead-sounding face after a year of weekly play are normal and mean the racket has done its job, not that it has failed.

Clubs, schools and holiday camps buy junior rackets differently from parents. A parent buys one racket for one child; a coach buys a bag of six or eight that has to fit whoever turns up on a Saturday, survive being dropped weekly, and not cost so much that a chipped frame is a tragedy. Three rules make that work. Buy a spread of weights rather than eight of the same racket: two at 300 grams for the under-eights, three or four at 310 to 320 for the eight-to-elevens, two at 330 to 340 for the taller children. Buy fibreglass, which junior rackets are anyway. And spend the money you save on consumables: a spare wrist cord per racket, a pack of overgrips a term, and frame protectors on every edge before the first session, because the glass takes the paint off a bare junior frame in a month. Cheap footwork kit goes a long way with juniors too: a few low hurdles such as our single red folding hurdle turn a warm-up into a game.

The budget end of this page is where a club set comes from. The Dunlop Galactica Junior at about £38, the Enebe Astra Junior at about £42, the Black Crown Piton Junior and the Bullpadel Indiga Boy 26 at about £47, and the Head Monster Junior at about £49 are the five rackets we would build a set from, and the six-racket mix in the table below comes to about £285 before balls and grips. Powerleague clubs hire rackets to players from £3 a session, which gives you a sense of how quickly a set of juniors pays for itself against lending adult frames to children. For a school or club order of six or more, send the age range of the group through the contact page and we will suggest a mix; the whole order travels tracked and anything over £40 ships free.

Every padel racket, junior or adult, has a wrist cord, and the rules require it to be worn. For children this is not a formality. A racket that slips from a sweaty hand on a smash travels fast, and on a padel court it has nowhere to go but into a partner or the glass. The 2026 rules go further than most parents realise: under Rule 13r, a player who drops the racket or breaks the cord loses the point on the spot. Put the cord on before every point and replace it when it frays; a new cord costs pennies and the hole in the handle is standard.

Eye protection is not required in padel the way it is in squash, and most clubs do not ask for it. That said, padel is played in an enclosed court with the ball coming off glass at unpredictable angles, and a junior at the net is at the height where an adult smash arrives. Some coaches recommend sports glasses for under-twelves during drills, and the choice is yours. If a child already wears glasses, a strap and polycarbonate lenses are a sensible minimum.

The glass walls themselves are toughened and are not the hazard; the metal frame between the panels is, and so is the net post. Teach juniors early that the wall is a tool, not a target to run at. Good padel shoes with a proper herringbone sole matter more for children than for adults, because a slipping child runs into things an adult would stop short of.

Padel has gone from 15,000 players in Britain in 2019 to 1,500,000 by October 2026 on the LTA's count, which includes adults and juniors who played at least once in the past year, so treat it as the size of the crowd that has tried the game rather than a count of weekly players. Junior competition has grown behind it. The LTA's 2026 calendar carries 13 junior Grade 1 and Grade 2 events plus a first Junior National Championships, scheduled for late October 2026 at Just Padel in Derby; a GB youth pathway with under-14 and under-18 groups started in 2024; and FIP Promises, the international youth circuit, has run under-12 to under-18 events since 2021. At the other end of the scale the comedian Jason Manford runs a padel academy for schoolchildren, which tells you roughly where junior padel sits in Britain right now: somewhere between a national pathway and a celebrity hobby, and growing from both ends.

Costs at the entry level are lower than parents expect. Powerleague clubs list "Intro to Padel" sessions at £5 and racket hire from £3 on Playtomic, the LTA puts the average off-peak court booking at £7 a person an hour, and most venues will lend a racket for the first few sessions. The racket is usually the first thing a parent is asked to buy, which is why the £40 to £90 junior price band exists: it is the price of a child who has done a term and wants their own. Balls are the recurring cost, and the padel ball page explains why a tube goes further in a junior session than in an adult one.

For a child who plays weekly, the kit list is short: a junior racket, a tube or two of balls, shoes with a padel sole (the laced Bullpadel Baser Junior is one, if your child takes a UK 2), and a small bag so the racket stops living loose in the boot of the car. The padel bag page has one-racket backpacks from about £20, and Babolat makes a 14 litre Backpack Kids at £30 that holds a racket, a tube and a bottle. The Guardian's March 2026 racket test, run with a coach and four players over almost twenty rackets, included a best-for-kids pick, which is as good a sign as any that the category has arrived.

Juniors use standard padel balls. There is no junior ball in padel the way there is in tennis, because the court is small and the ball already runs at roughly 10 to 11 psi against 14 for a tennis ball. Some coaches start under-sevens with a low-pressure ball from a tennis mini programme, but by eight most children are on the same Head, Dunlop or Bullpadel tubes as everyone else, and a tube outlasts an adult tube because the ball is hit less hard and scrubs the glass less often.

Shoes matter more than parents expect. Padel is played on sand-filled artificial grass, which a running shoe or a school trainer slides on. A child who slips learns to play cautiously, and cautious padel is not fun. A proper padel sole stops that. Junior padel shoes list at £35 to £75 and sell for about £30 to £45 in UK shops: we list the adidas Junior CrazyQuick Kids at about £32 and the Babolat Jet Premura 2 Junior at about £50. If budget is tight, a clay-court tennis shoe is the next best thing; a running shoe is not. Children's feet grow faster than their swings, so expect to replace shoes before the racket.

A bag is optional but worth it, because a racket kept loose in a car boot gets hot in summer and heat softens EVA cores. A one-racket backpack costs £20 to £45 and keeps the racket out of the sun. Overgrips in a pack of three, a frame protector and a spare wrist cord complete the list, and if the whole lot is a birthday present the padel gifts page has the small-present end covered.

Junior rackets lead hard lives, and a few habits double how long they last. Keep the protector tape on the edge; it takes the scrapes from the glass that would otherwise chip the frame. Do not leave the racket in a hot car or against a radiator, because EVA cores soften and the face can delaminate. Wipe the face after play on a wet outdoor court, because sand grit in the holes wears the paint. And replace the overgrip each term so the handle stays tacky; a slipping grip is how children start gripping too hard.

Because children grow out of rackets rather than wear them out, junior padel rackets hold their value. A recognised brand in good condition moves quickly on club notice boards and the usual secondhand sites; keep the box and the cord, photograph the face and the edge when you list it, and be honest about chips. That resale value is a reason to buy a recognised brand rather than an unbranded racket at £25: the unbranded one is worth nothing on the way out, and the branded one pays for a chunk of the next size up.

Delivery is the same as for every racket we sell: tracked, 3 to 4 working days, free over £40 and £3.95 below, with a 30-day window to return it unused if the size is wrong. Full details on the delivery and returns pages. And when your child has outgrown everything on this page, the full padel racket range is the next stop.