Every handover day produces the same photos: clean court, straight glass, fresh lines. The first proper training block tells a different story – uneven bounce at the glass seams, ponding in the low corner, dead sand spots under the lights. Operators who track complaints name poor installation, not product specification, as the failure source. The published glass-injury incidents made the same point harder: nobody held an acceptance checklist that could have intercepted the defects before players arrived.
A padel court construction guide usually stops at hire a crew and follow the steps; this one is written for the buyer who has to sign. It turns the FIP Rules clauses and the SAPCA Code of Practice tolerances into per-stage acceptance checks, with the numbers each authority actually publishes. We sit on the turf side of these handovers, and the same rework sites keep returning. Sign nothing this checklist cannot measure.
What the FIP Rules Actually Require From a Finished Court
Before anything is ordered, the governing text deserves a close read: the FIP Rules of Padel set out what a finished court must deliver, clause by clause. Most club buyers skim the drawings and skip the clauses. At handover, the clauses are the contract. A padel court construction guide that never quotes them leaves the buyer arguing taste instead of tolerances.
Surface: Regular Bounce Is the Only Non-Negotiable
FIP allows cement, synthetic material or artificial grass on one condition: the surface must allow a regular bounce of the ball. Regularity is where bounce becomes measurable. The rules require differences in the inside levels to be less than 3mm, measured with a rule of 3m (1/1000). A surface that misses that figure does not merely look uneven; the ball reports it to every player on every point.
Enclosure: Heights, Openings and the Safety Area
The enclosure carries its own clause set, and each item is an acceptance check rather than an option. Glass courts must comply with the standards for tempered and plate glass referenced in the homologation annex, and the walls must stay uniform, hard and completely smooth. The mesh fence is built from soldered rhomboids with holes no less than 5cm across the diagonal, forming a flat, vertical face. For out-of-court play, each side needs 2 access points and a clear safety area of at least 3m wide and 4m long, with 3m of height. Access openings must be protected with cushioning not less than 2cm thick, firmly fixed to the structure.
Court size, line width and free height follow fixed figures, and the full dimension and clearance breakdown is written up in the companion piece. Verify those numbers on the drawing before the steel is cut, because they are expensive to fix afterwards.
Light and Orientation: The Checks That Happen Too Late
Lighting and orientation are drawing-stage checks, yet they surface last. Light poles must sit outside the court; if a pole falls within the safety area, out-of-court play is not allowed. Projectors need a minimum altitude of 6m from the ground to their underside, with 8m suggested for new facilities. Outdoors, FIP recommends a north-south longitudinal axis, admitting a variation between N-NE and N-NW.
Site Preparation: Drainage Decisions Come First
Drainage failures do not show up in the delivery photos; they show up in the first heavy rain. The slope question looks settled until three authorities give three different numbers. FIP caps the transverse evacuation slope at 1% from the centre towards the outer edges for surfaces without drainage. The SAPCA Code of Practice for the Construction of Padel Courts builds new porous courts level, with the 1:100 gradient established at formation level instead. Published contractor figures of 0.5-1% describe impermeable routes only.
All three readings stand once each is tied to its construction type: porous systems drain downward through the build-up, while impermeable systems drain across the