This Could Be You

The first time I met Daniel Cooke, he was a regular-looking young guy with a great personality, terrific hair and two arms that were exactly the same size. He had no racket sports background and hit his backhand with a forehand grip. Honestly, he impressed me as one of those guys who probably got “rally” and “volley” mixed up. That was a year ago. He told me he’d never played tennis, but he was an athlete and had played center on his high school football team. I was like, okay, let’s see how those “run blocking” skills transfer.

Turns out they freaking do. Less than a year after I first met him, Daniel is more than a beginner who’s moved up to advanced. Daniel Cooke IS padel. He’s playing tournaments, he’s got a padel-playing girlfriend, a peer group of friends who are just as padel-obsessed as he is, the correct grip on his backhand and a right arm that’s noticeably bigger than his left. He’s actually TEACHING padel at P1 Padel in Las Vegas. He and his girlfriend just spent a weekend hanging out in Spain with Ale Galan.

Here’s how it happened.

Like a lot of us, Daniel started out by taking a lesson. His mom talked him into it. He wasn’t sold on it and didn’t pick up a racket for the next year and a half. At that point, he moved back to Las Vegas from Atlanta to become a firefighter. His mom, Parisa, had been playing all that time, so he decided to give padel another shot, more than anything, just to have something fun he could do with her.

“So last June or July I move back to Vegas and my mom has been playing for about a year now and has fallen in love with it,” says Daniel. “She tells me I need to try it again so I play a match with her and her friend Codie, who is now one of my best friends. That was when the switch flipped and I started to enjoy padel a lot more. I just enjoyed moving around and the sport was challenging physically and mentally. It gave me a fun thing to do with cool people.”

Codie: “I remember that match. He was all over the court and, just like he does now, he gave it his all every single time his racket touched the ball.”

The next few months is when I started seeing Daniel at the padel club all the time. Like, all the time, any time of day. I’d ask him how the firefighting thing was going and offer to let him carry me over his shoulder up and down stairs to prepare for his upcoming test. I noticed he was starting to get better at padel. He’d fixed his backhand grip. He was expounding YouTube tips.

P1 Padel club has a ton of younger people who are just learning the sport and Daniel fit right in, making friends while he improved. His serve got better, he was soaking up strategy and learning to track balls off the wall. He had the same great hair and his left and right arms were still the same size. But people were starting to notice the new guy.

“I met Daniel when he was maybe two weeks into padel,” says Daniel’s girlfriend Isabel Osorio. “He was filling in for a Women’s Night session, and I was recovering from a sprained ankle. After that, we became close friends and spent a lot of time playing and training together. Back then, Daniel didn’t really have a smash yet, so I’d do my best to feed him lobs to practice. He would teach me different shots he’d learned from Instagram reels or YouTube.”

As he improved, Daniel started playing more competitive matches. One of his new friends, Armand Sacramento, asked him to play a tournament. That tournament went poorly, just like my first tournament did, and yours too. “We get to this tournament in San Diego and get absolutely destroyed,” he says. “I didn’t take it hard or take it personally. It lit a fire under my behind.”

That fire propelled Daniel onto the court basically every day from that point on and led to an invitation from P1 Padel GM Phil Martinez, another young dude who had started taking his padel seriously, to team up for the club’s next league cycle, which they ended up winning.

At that point, Martinez was looking for someone to teach beginner lessons at P1 and asked Daniel if he’d like to give it a shot.

“It was an honor to be asked,” Daniel explains. “It lit another fire under me. So now I’m doing about 10-14 clinics/lessons a week with mainly beginner/intermediate levels and I absolutely love it. Considering that I started from ground level and worked my way up, I really do find a lot of enjoyment in helping people along that same process I did. And I enjoy every day and session I’m on a court. For me I feel I was given a lot of great opportunities and reasons to get out there and get better. Everyone needs a “why” to what they’re doing so for me once I got that I just ran with it.”

In addition to giving him a new “why” and a cool new job that has pushed firefighting to the back burner, padel has also given Daniel a third place, a way to spend time with his mom and a whole new group of friends. There’s always a ton of sand on the floor of his house and he told me he’s caught himself more than a few times watching baseball and thinking of the score as 2-love instead of 2-zero.

He and Sacramento launched a podcast called All the Racquet out of Sacramento’s apartment, discussing everything from who’s doing what on the pro padel tour to how to break up with a partner to why I got stuck with a $73.99 tariff bill when I bought my last racket.

Padel has given me a lot in my life,” Daniel says. “I’ve got an absolutely amazing group of people around me. I found my girlfriend, Isabel, playing at the club as well. It’s given me a job and a hobby that I love and it’s an absolute pleasure to be around every day in both aspects. A big thing for me coming from previous high level sporting backgrounds is that it’s given me a place to compete against others and against my previous self. And it’s given me a place where I can get back into that mindset I loved about football. You put in continuous work to get one percent better every day.”

Sound familiar? That last quote pretty much encapsulates why so many of us have been drawn in by padel. Daniel doesn’t look like me, he’s maybe younger, or older than you are and he’s definitely got better hair. He may not hit his vibora the same way you do, he may play a division higher or lower than you do, but his story probably sounds a lot, in places, like yours does. Most of us who have gotten pulled in by padel have a little Daniel Cooke in us, don’t we?

Daniel’s mom: “It’s been truly amazing watching Daniel grow, both in the sport and as a person. One of the things I admire most is how much joy he gets from seeing his clients improve. He is genuinely invested in every single person he works with. His dedication, enthusiasm, and care make him not only a great coach but also a great person to be around.”

The padel Gods have embraced Daniel and drawn him to their hoary breast. A few weeks back, Martinez entered him in an Instagram raffle sponsored by Reserve Padel and Adidas. Daniel won tickets for him and Isabel to attend the Reserve Cup Marbella, two Metalbone Reserve rackets and a meet and greet with Galan. In Spain. That’s him in the middle.

Also, check out his right arm. Vilas, man.