The Outdoor Sports Season Is Here — Is Your Court Ready?

Roland Garros kicks off later this month – without defending champion Carlos Alcaraz, who withdrew due to a wrist injury, throwing the men’s draw wide open. Meanwhile, padel continues its explosive rise across Europe, with over 35 million players worldwide and thousands of new courts being built each year. Whether it’s Grand Slam tennis under the floodlights of Court Philippe-Chatrier or a Tuesday evening padel match at your local club, one thing connects every court: the quality of light above it.

Ask any player what bothers them most during a match. The answer is rarely the surface or the weather – it’s the light. A blinding glare that strikes mid-serve. A drifting shadow that turns tracking the ball into guesswork. Uneven illumination where one end of the court feels like a stage and the other like a basement.

Whether you’re a recreational player or running a facility with courts booked every evening, good lighting isn’t a luxury – it’s the foundation of a playable space. At Lightholm, we’ve spent years engineering lighting that solves exactly these problems, outdoors and indoors alike.

It Starts with Optics

What separates a proper sports luminaire from a cheap floodlight? Optical engineering. A well-designed fixture directs the maximum share of its input power onto the playing surface – not into players’ eyes and not into the windows of neighbouring houses.

More wattage doesn’t automatically mean more useful light. Inexpensive floodlights often lack proper photometric data, which means there’s no way to run a lighting simulation before installation. You only discover what you’ve actually got once the fixtures are up – and by then, it’s an expensive problem to fix.

Every Lightholm luminaire is engineered so that each beam reaches exactly where it needs to go. We offer tailored optical solutions for every project, with datasheets and photometric files available for download on our website, alongside simulation support and technical consultation.

Outdoors: GEO Floodlight

For outdoor courts and fields, our GEO Floodlight system is a modular platform with independently adjustable modules, each ranging from 50 to 450 W, that align precisely to the geometry of the playing surface. Low-angle optics reduce the glare index, improve playability, and keep the night sky dark by minimising stray light. The result: floodlight efficiency of up to 185 lm/W with minimal spill.

The housing is IP66-rated, manufactured from die-cast aluminium, and comes standard with C4 corrosion protection, validated through a 720-hour salt spray test. For particularly demanding environments – coastal areas, industrial zones – C5 and CX coatings are available on request.

Indoors: Steel Sport and Beyond

Inside sports halls, our Steel Sport luminaire is purpose-built for the job: ball-impact tested to DIN 18032-3, rated IK10 for impact resistance, and controllable via DALI 2.0. Lighting levels can be adjusted with the push of a button – full brightness for competition, reduced output for training or recreational play.

Linum and Fornax round out our indoor range, covering arenas, schools, training centres, and multipurpose courts. All are designed for high-ceiling installation, vibration-proof performance, and long operational life under continuous use.

Built to Last

LED module lifespan across our range exceeds 100,000 hours – in Northern European conditions, that translates to roughly 25 years of operation. And reaching end of rated life doesn’t mean the lights go dark; output decreases by only about 10% over that entire period. Real-world proof: luminaires installed by our Swedish partners in 2014 are still running more than a decade later, without a single module replaced.

The real question for any facility owner isn’t the upfront price – it’s total cost of ownership. In Scandinavian public procurement, this is already the deciding factor. The electronics in our GEO luminaires, for instance, can be swapped in seconds without interrupting power, which dramatically reduces maintenance costs over the life of the installation. The cheapest floodlight today often turns out to be the most expensive one five years down the line.

See the Game, Not the Light

As the outdoor season gets into full swing and Roland Garros draws the world’s attention to the clay courts of Paris, millions more players will be stepping onto their own courts – from brand-new padel facilities in Stockholm to municipal tennis clubs across the Nordics. What all of them deserve is lighting they never have to think about.

Because good lighting is like a good referee: you only notice it when it’s bad. Lightholm’s goal is for our luminaires to go unnoticed – so that what you notice is the game.