The Wall Street Journal Just Covered Padel. Here's the Story It Didn't Tell.
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Real growth pressure. Clear thinking. No fluff. For leaders navigating the racquet sports industry right now.
A couple months ago I was in Philadelphia for an International Association of Pickleball and Padel Facilities meetup, and I played padel at Ballers.
Walk in and the first thing you see is an indoor soccer field with the original graffiti still on the walls, left over from the building's old life. This was the Delaware Power Station, closed since 2008 after 85 years running the city's electricity. Above the soccer field, padel courts. Next to those, pickleball. A gym. A small pro shop. A full bar and restaurant downstairs that turns into a club by the time you're leaving at night. Golf simulators on top of all of it. I would have paid whatever they asked to play padel in that building. It is one of the best-designed sports and social spaces I have walked into, period.
I bring that up because The Wall Street Journal ran a feature this week on padel's expansion in the U.S., published Wednesday, July 22, and Ballers is the lead example in it.
Here's what's actually in it, what I can confirm firsthand, and the real constraint on this entire boom that the article never quite names.
WHAT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ARTICLE SAYS
Ballers opened in that old turbine hall last November. Built by David Gutstadt, a former Equinox executive. Around 700 members now, paying $110 to $457 a month. He's since opened a second Ballers in Boston, which opened this past April, and is building a third in Los Angeles.
That retrofit pattern is playing out across the country. Parking lots. Distribution warehouses. Mall rooftops. Westfield Century City has a padel club on its roof. Westfield Sherman Oaks put three courts on top of a parking garage. The U.S. has crossed roughly 1,000 public padel courts, up from about 227 three years ago.
The (USTA) United States Tennis Association 2025 report puts padel at 1.1 million American players, the first year the sport got its own category instead of getting folded into something else. USA Padel reports individual membership up 53.5 percent and club membership up 51.5 percent in 2025. The Pro Padel League raised a real $15 million Series A in March, led by Charlotte Hornets co-chairman Rick Schnall, and picked up its first national TV deal: five championship matches airing on CNBC this year.
The construction cost cited in the article, roughly $50,000 a court per Alma Padel founder Abigail McCulloch, lines up with the broader market. Most fully installed U.S. outdoor courts now run $50,000 to $85,000. A bare $24,000 kit is the floor, not what most operators are actually building.
WHO'S WRITING THE CHECKS, AND WHO'S ACTUALLY BUILDING THE HARD PART
Look at who the article says is building padel right now. A former Equinox executive. Gary Sheinbaum, a former Tommy Hilfiger executive, backing a venture in West Palm Beach that hasn't opened yet. Jonathan Krieger, co-founder of the Bluestone Lane coffee chain, running Padel United in New Jersey. Ronnie Fieg, founder of streetwear brand KITH, built three padel courts into Kith Ivy NYC, his new members-only club in Manhattan. Initiation there is $45,000, plus $10,000 a year.
None of these are lifelong racquet sports operators, which raises the obvious question: do they know how to keep people playing once the opening-week energy wears off? Two of them, it turns out, do. Ballers has a director of athletics and a U.S. top-ranked padel pro on staff, and runs junior programs, women's clinics, ladders, and tournaments from day one. Krieger's Padel United Sports Club runs a structured ten-week coaching curriculum with named certified pros and weekly ladder play. Two former brand executives, building the unglamorous part on purpose.
Kith Ivy is the one that isn't, at least not publicly. Heavy on hospitality, an on-site spa, real design polish, a five-figure buy-in. No public evidence of leagues, ladders, a coaching pathway, or a single named pro on staff. It's already drawn outside criticism as a well-dressed club with a retention problem waiting to happen. Sheinbaum's West Palm Beach venture hasn't opened, so it's not evidence either way, though its own marketing already promises leagues and instruction.
So the honest version isn't "brand money doesn't build sport infrastructure." Some of it clearly does. The honest version is sharper: the operators who build the coaching underneath the experience are the ones with a real shot at holding onto members past year one. The ones who don't are betting the room stays interesting on its own.
THE ACTUAL CONSTRAINT, AND IT'S NOT COURTS
Here's what the article never names. The country has two bodies that certify padel coaches at their highest level. The Racquet Sports Professionals Association launched a four-tier padel certification pathway, and its toughest tier, Master Professional, requires 500 logged teaching hours in padel alone. One person has cleared it: Marcos Del Pilar - 𝗣𝗔𝗗𝗘𝗟 𝗨𝗦𝗔. Padel Smash, another leading padel coaching and media platform, has its own top credential, Padel Master Coach, held by exactly one person too: its co-founder, Julian Wortelboer. Between the two organizations that actually certify padel coaching at the elite level in this country, that's two people. For a sport that just crossed 1,000 courts. Courts aren't the constraint anymore. Coaching is, and a first lesson that's sloppy or underwhelming doesn't get shrugged off. People don't come back.
This is not a new story in racquet sports. It's an old one repeating itself. U.S. racquetball went from 2.8 million players in 1976 to 12 million by 1980, with roughly 30,000 courts built almost overnight. Then it collapsed, eventually losing more than half its peak participation. One longtime observer of the sport points to a single cause ahead of the others: not enough teaching pros to turn new players into lasting ones. Squash, over the same stretch in the same country, built its coaching and junior pipeline early and never had racquetball's crash. Same era, same market, opposite outcome, and the difference was who invested in the teaching, not who wrote the biggest opening-week check.
U.S. pickleball is already running the same experiment in real time. More than 1,200 new indoor facilities opened in two years, and trade press was reporting closures and bankruptcies by early 2026. The operators still standing share the same traits every time: strong locations, experienced operators, real coaching, programming that gives someone a reason to come back next month.
Sweden and Chile, the two countries the WSJ article cites for padel's own mega expansions and mass closures (more than 100 facility closures in Sweden alone) are worth a closer look at what actually happened inside them. Overbuilding and bad financing triggered both shakeouts, not a lack of coaching. But the operators still standing share a pattern. A recent industry analysis of Chile's crash put it plainly: the clubs holding on are the ones that stopped treating themselves as court rental businesses and built real destinations instead, bundling hospitality, wellness, coaching, and events into something people want to spend time in, not just book an hour on.
Spain is the clean counterexample. Padel has grown there for decades, with the federation building coaching infrastructure alongside the courts the whole way, more than 1,400 licensed coaches, youth categories, referee pathways. The UK is running the same model live: the Lawn Tennis Association took over padel governance in 2020, when the country had 69 courts, and has grown that to more than 1,500 while building a coaching workforce from a handful of instructors to over 700 registered coaches. Infrastructure first, in both cases. That's the opposite of how the U.S. is building this right now.
WHAT I DIDN'T KNOW THAT NIGHT AT BALLERS
I didn't know, playing padel there, that the reason the place worked wasn't the graffiti or the power plant or the golf simulators. It was that Gutstadt had already hired real coaching talent and built the ladders and academies before he needed them to prove anything to anyone. That's not the story I would have told walking out that night. It's the one that actually holds up under a second look.
Here's what I still can't answer, even having been there. The two bodies that certify elite padel coaching in this country have a combined two people holding their top credential. Ballers and Padel United found real coaching talent anyway. Everyone building a padel club behind them is competing for a pool of qualified instructors that barely exists, and there is no version of this boom where all of them find their own.
That's not a data question. It's a decision question, and it's exactly what I built Inside The Lines Advisory to work through with operators, investors, and brands trying to figure out whether the club they're building, or backing, or advising, has actually solved for this before the capital is spent.
If you're building in padel right now, evaluating a padel investment, or deciding whether it belongs in your existing facility, that's a conversation worth having this month, not after the next round of court openings.
If you want to read the original Wall Street Journal piece, it's behind their paywall, worth a subscription if this space matters to you. If you want to go deeper on what any of this means for your specific situation, that's what I'm here for.
THREE WAYS TO WORK ON THIS
If any of this is live for you right now, there are three ways I can help, depending on where you actually are.
Start with the Growth Pressure Review. It's free. Tell me where your business stands and I'll send back a written read on where the pressure is building and what I'd address first. No score, no automation. My actual read on your situation.
If you already know the problem and need it solved, that's Growth Advisory. A focused, project-based engagement built around one specific decision: evaluating padel as a new market, building the go-to-market plan, sorting out positioning before you commit capital.
If you want me embedded through the build, that's Growth Partnership. A monthly retainer where strategy and execution happen together, not handed off in a deck.
Most people start with the Review. That's the right place to start.
mike@insidethelinesadvisory.com | 205.789.4006 | mikehknowles.com
Real growth pressure. Clear thinking. No fluff.
SOURCES
The Wall Street Journal: "Inside the Push to Make Padel the Next Pickleball," by Andrew Zucker, July 22, 2026.
Ballers background, coaching staff, and programming: Ballers' own site, Hospitality Design, Philadelphia Magazine.
Padel United coaching curriculum and programs: Padel United Sports Club's own site.
Pro Padel League Series A funding: PR Newswire (original release), CNBC, Sportico, Front Office Sports.
U.S. racquetball participation history and decline: Forbes, Sports Destination Management, Padel Nation newsletter.
Sweden padel facility closures: Bloomberg, European Business Magazine.
Chile padel facility closures: Racket Business (Tim Farthing, June 2026), footboom1.com.
Spain padel coaching infrastructure: International Padel Federation (FIP).
UK padel growth and coaching workforce: Lawn Tennis Association (LTA Padel), RacketRise.
U.S. pickleball facility boom and closures: Gatorstrike, KSST Radio.
Padel coaching supply: Padel Smash Academy's own site.