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The methodology behind every gear pick, court rating and buying guide on RacketRise.
This page explains how RacketRise produces its product recommendations, court ratings, and buying advice. If you have ever wondered how a particular padel racket made it onto our top-5 list, or why we recommend Decathlon Kuikma over a £200 Bullpadel for some readers, the answer is here.
We owe readers transparency about how recommendations are produced. The short answer: we research products against their specs, UK pricing and availability, and the feedback of players and established reviewers — and we refuse paid placements. The long answer is below.
Articles are written and editorially reviewed by Gary Innes, the founder — a Glasgow-based padel and racket-sports player. RacketRise's recommendations come from structured research rather than paid placement: comparing specs, UK pricing and availability, manufacturer information, and the published feedback of players and established reviewers.
Where specific technical claims sit outside the founder's direct expertise (medical advice, professional coaching technique, venue accessibility ratings), the article cites primary sources or specialist contributors and the disclosure is in-line.
To be clear about what these guides are: RacketRise reviews are built on structured research and comparison, not a hands-on testing lab. We don't claim to have personally played every racket and paddle on the market. Each pick is assessed in three ways:
Where performance claims rest on something we can't verify, we say so rather than imply first-hand testing we haven't done. We'd rather be honest about being a research-led guide than overstate it.
Our court database tracks 1,600+ UK padel and pickleball venues, aggregated from a combination of public sources:
Most listings are aggregated from these public sources rather than individually visited, so a Verifiedbadge marks only the venues we've confirmed directly. Each page lists what the venue itself publishes (court count, indoor/outdoor mix, opening hours, booking platform); we don't fabricate amenity data or scrape third-party reviews. Where a field is blank, we don't have data for it — and if you spot an error, tell usand we'll fix it.
Venues that haven't opened yet (slug includes coming-soon or opening-march-26) are noindex'd and excluded from our sitemap, so they don't show up in Google search results. They re-enter the index when the venue actually opens and the slug is renamed.
Recommendations weight five factors, in this order:
RacketRise is funded by affiliate commission on equipment links and by a small revenue share on accommodation bookings via Stay22. Both are disclosed:
The equipment database is reviewed quarterly. New 2026 product releases are added when they reach UK retailers. Buying guides are refreshed at least annually and after any major product launch in their category. Court listings are spot-checked monthly via booking-platform feeds; any reported error is corrected within 48 hours of verification.
Articles carry a Last Updated date in the byline. Articles with structural updates (new product picks, revised methodology, fact corrections) have their updated field bumped in the source — and that date appears in our XML sitemap, signalling Google to re-crawl.
We make mistakes. Court information goes stale, products change spec across model years, and reasonable reviewers disagree. If you spot a factual error or dated information, let us know — we read every message and correct verified errors within a working week.
Where corrections meaningfully change a product ranking or court rating, the article is updated, the updated field is bumped, and we leave a brief note about the change rather than rewriting silently.
The short version: We research and compare products against specs, UK pricing and player feedback, calibrate recommendations to the audience each guide names, refuse paid placements, disclose every affiliate relationship, and correct errors when readers flag them. None of this is heroic — it's what an editorially-honest UK racket-sports site should be doing.