From the hillside villas of Acapulco to the beach clubs of Barcelona to, now, a potholed stretch of Industrial Boulevard south of downtown Austin, the ritzy, sweaty, buzzy sport of padel has arrived in Central Texas.
Last weekend’s grand opening of Padel Club Austin showcased the facility’s nine gleaming, glass-walled courts, lined with pristine artificial turf for this fast-paced racket sport that looks like a mix between doubles tennis and squash. The club also features a pro shop, a cantina, and, last Friday night, thumping, clubby beats from a live DJ.
Visitors in workout gear and patio-bar attire mingled as the orange-and-violet sunset dimmed against the bright court lights. A man in a printed shirt and flip-flops walked by with his goldendoodle as partiers posed for photos on an empty court. Nearby, novice players lobbed friendly rallies back and forth. On another court, the gameplay was more intense: Players called out to their partners in Spanish as they chased the yellow ball and smacked it hard across the net, or sometimes against the opposing wall, landing each hit with a satisfying pop!
The gameplay was quick and intense. A few times, a player missed a hard-hit ball as it passed him, only to turn around and hit it off the wall behind him and back across the net. One time, a player chased a ball out beyond the court walls, dodged a few onlookers to hit it back into play, and the point went on.
Padel would be familiar to anyone who’s played tennis. The scoring system is the same, and your goal is to return the ball before it bounces twice on your side of the court. The ball is like a tennis ball with a little less bounce, and instead of a stringed racket, you hold a paddle with holes. The walls are the key difference: The ball must bounce off the ground once, but after that, it can carom off the walls in any direction.
This is at least the eighth complex in Texas dedicated to the sport, which has been gaining momentum around the world for decades but has only taken off in the United States in recent years. And while there are global forces behind the rise of padel, the sport’s growth in this country—and certainly in Austin—is inextricably linked with that of another suddenly ubiquitous rec sport, pickleball. (Padel Club Austin is part of the Yard, a bustling entertainment complex that also features food trucks; local beer, whiskey, and wine makers; and outdoor seating. Plus, pickleball.)
In between lessons on the courts last Friday night, club pro Paloma Cortina explained that she’d first encountered padel as a teenager in her native Spain, where it’s second only to soccer in popularity. “I hated the sport just because I didn’t know what I was supposed to do,” she said. “And I don’t like being bad at something.” But she stuck with it long enough to learn some strategy, like how to react to the bounces off the walls, and she fell in love with the game. In college in the U.S., she took a break from padel to focus on tennis, but after a seven-year hiatus, she picked it up again five years ago. In 2021 and 2022, she was the top-ranked female player in the U.S.
“It’s an easy game to start playing, but it’s a difficult sport to master,” says club cofounder Andrés Osorio. He began playing five years ago in Miami, where he lives. He hoped to open a padel club there but decided the market was already too saturated. Instead, he opened a club in Maracaibo, Venezuela, and then this one. “Austin, I really love that it’s a really diverse city, sport-oriented outdoor living,” he says. “You have a lot of outdoor activities, and you can see people here that are more oriented to having a healthy lifestyle.”
Similar-looking mutations in tennis go back more than a hundred years, but officially, padel was invented in 1969 by Mexican businessman Enrique Corcuera. The story goes that Corcuera wanted to build a court for his tennis-loving Argentinian wife, Viviana Dellavédova. But the steep hills of his Acapulco estate didn’t provide enough room for a full-sized tennis court, so he carved into the hillside to create a smaller court with walls.
This new spawn of tennis took off among the couple’s wealthy neighbors and guests, including Houston socialites Baron Enrico and Baroness Alessandra di Portanova—whose Mexican getaway, Arabesque, was the grandest in the neighborhood—and other Acapulco notables such as Henry Kissinger and Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, of Spain. Within five years of the sport’s invention, Prince Alfonso began spreading the gospel of padel in Spain, and the pastime soon took off in Dellavédova’s native Argentina, too.
The Baron and Baroness di Portanova weren’t quite such evangelists for the sport in Texas. It took about twenty years, but when padel did first reach the United States, it was in Houston. According to the United States Padel Association, the first padel court in this country was built at the Houstonian Hotel, Club & Spa in 1993, and today Texas has the second-most padel clubs in the country, next to Florida.
The Houstonian still has two courts today, and while other facilities have come and gone, today the city’s padel fanatics have their pick of multiple spots around town, and two more in The Woodlands. Since fall 2023, the Houston Volts have represented the city in the Pro Padel League.
The first padel club in the Rio Grande Valley opened in McAllen last year; the first in San Antonio opened this summer; one will open in October in North Austin, and another is under construction outside El Paso. At least two facilities around Dallas–Fort Worth offer padel alongside other racket sports.
Saturday morning, a fresh crowd arrived to try out the new courts in South Austin. The sun was heating up already, baking players within the glass walls, and at the end of their matches, they emerged dripping with sweat, guzzling water, and smiling.
A woman named Morgan said she’d first played padel on a recent trip to Mexico and was happy to check it out here. She liked that padel was “a little bit more athletic” than pickleball.
A guy named Larry, sitting beside a court just after his game, said he loved the small confines of the padel court—he said the pace was fast and that getting to the ball felt like less of a fight—and that he’d definitely come back to play again.
To a few folks I spoke with at the opening, it seemed to mean something that padel had arrived in Austin, though it wasn’t clear quite what. You sure wouldn’t have seen this kind of thing here thirty years ago. Maybe Austin was becoming more international; maybe pickleball culture was evolving. One guy told me he was just impressed at how much money the operation was bound to make.
To Larry—who grew up in Austin, before leaving for the Pacific Northwest and recently returning—the city’s transformation was only a good sign. There’s simply more of the kinds of stuff he likes to do. “Texas has completely changed, and it’s changed for the better,” he said. “There’s always something to do.”
