Nationals and a Paris Major: The Two Racquet Formats Growing Faster Than Tennis

Over the next two weeks, the racquet sports calendar tells you everything you need to know about where member demand is heading. The Veolia Pickleball Nationals run August 31 through September 6 in Cary, North Carolina — a national championship for a sport that barely existed as a club amenity a decade ago. The day after Nationals wraps, Premier Padel’s Paris Major takes over Roland Garros from September 7–13, staging padel’s biggest event on the same clay-court grounds that host the French Open. Looming behind both: the US Open men’s final on September 13, tennis’s marquee moment. Tennis still owns the biggest stage, but the two formats flanking it — one already crowding club calendars, one just arriving — are forcing a question more general managers are asking out loud: is it time to offer a padel club membership, and where does the budget for it come from?

For general managers and membership directors, this isn’t a spectator question — it’s a capacity question, a capital allocation question, and increasingly a member acquisition question. The data makes the case plainly.

Pickleball Is Now a Capacity Problem — Which Is the Best Problem to Have

The clearest signal that pickleball has crossed from novelty to core amenity: clubs can no longer keep up with demand for it. According to GGA Partners’ Club Leader’s Perspectives Report (August 2024), 41% of club leaders report capacity concerns for pickleball — second only to golf at 50%, and nearly double the 23% who report capacity concerns for tennis. When your newest racquet amenity generates almost as much access pressure as your golf course, the market has spoken.

Clubs that got ahead of the curve are already seeing it in the numbers. Florida Yacht Club in Jacksonville added four dedicated pickleball courts and a multipurpose sports court alongside its existing 10 Har-Tru tennis courts, as part of its multi-year “FYC150” renovation timed to the club’s 150th anniversary. The project wrapped in summer 2025, and General Manager Carol Edell put it plainly: “I keep hearing our members say, ‘We had no idea it would be this nice.’ It’s transformational.” Bay Head Yacht Club in New Jersey went further, using a Pickleroll surface overlay to double its pickleball footprint from two courts to four inside a new “Cottage & Court Yard” complex — a move the club’s own 2025 committee report credits with easing demand for its pickle courts.

The broader picture sharpens the point. The same GGA report found 49% of club leaders say their club is at capacity overall, with another 12% over capacity — but the pressure isn’t evenly distributed. Golf and pickleball are where the crunch lives, while tennis emerged as one of the amenities with the greatest perception of being under capacity, at 15%, per the same GGA data. That’s not an argument for abandoning tennis, which still leads pickleball in overall reach (64% of clubs offer tennis versus 56% offering pickleball, per GGA) — it’s an argument for rebalancing hours and programming investment toward where demand actually is.

The Capital Budget Already Reflects the Shift

Capacity concerns are a lagging indicator; capital plans are a leading one, and club capital plans have moved decisively. According to GGA Partners’ 2024 report, 34% of clubs have already completed or started a pickleball project, with another 28% planning to undertake one within three years. Tennis sits at 18% completed or started and 14% planned, per the same report — roughly half of pickleball’s pace.

Padel is much earlier in its adoption curve — padel adoption among clubs remains in the low single digits nationally, with only a small share of clubs currently offering it and a modest additional share planning projects — but that’s precisely what makes the Paris Major worth a club leader’s attention. A sport doesn’t land a major championship at Roland Garros without serious commercial momentum behind it. Padel today looks a lot like pickleball did before it became a 41% capacity concern (per GGA data): passionate early adopters, a low court footprint, and a social, doubles-first culture that maps almost perfectly onto how private club members want to play.

For clubs weighing what to do with an underused tennis court or a dead corner of the property, the strategic logic runs like this:

• Pickleball is the proven demand play. Clubs that built courts filled them. If your waitlists are already visible, you’re behind, not ahead.
• Padel is the differentiation play. Still rare among clubs nationally, it’s the kind of amenity that gets a club talked about among prospective members who’ve played the sport in Spain, Dubai, Mexico City, or Miami.
• Tennis is the optimization play. Under-capacity tennis isn’t a failure; it’s unmonetized inventory. Programming, not construction, is usually the fix.

What a Padel Club Membership Actually Looks Like Right Now

Padel is still a rounding error nationally, but the early movers aren’t experimenting on a whim; they’re restructuring membership categories around it. The Club at Boca Pointe in Boca Raton added four LED-lighted padel courts and rebuilt its membership tiers to bundle padel with pickleball, tennis, fitness, and aquatics rather than bolt it on as an add-on fee. General Manager Phil Wiese frames the relaunch simply: “It’s more than a club — it’s a place to belong.” The Greens Country Club in Oklahoma City installed the state’s first padel courts and now markets itself as the only padel facility in Oklahoma — a pure differentiation play. The Traditions Club in Bryan, Texas added two padel courts inside a new Racquet Center alongside its tennis and pickleball courts, and now holds a 4.8-out-of-5 satisfaction rating across nearly 90 reviews.

Notice what none of these clubs did: bet the entire budget on padel. In each case, a few padel courts were folded into a larger, already-planned racquet sports investment. That’s the template worth copying — a padel club membership works best as an extension of a racquet identity a club has already built, not a replacement for one.

Why Racquet Sports Are Pulling the Demographic Clubs Most Need

The growth of pickleball and padel isn’t happening in a vacuum — it’s part of a broader repositioning of what a private club membership is for. Growth Market Reports’ analysis of the global private club membership market names racquet sports explicitly as a growth vector: “wellness and recovery suites, racquet sports (notably pickleball and padel), culinary residencies, cultural calendars, and business salons can attract Millennials and Gen Z while maintaining relevance for Gen X and Boomers.”

That last clause matters most. Pickleball and padel work across generational lines — a 68-year-old member and their 34-year-old daughter can share a pickleball court in a way they often can’t share a first tee. Both are social by design, fast to learn, and built around short sessions that fit into a workday, driving visit frequency most amenities can’t match.

The stakes are substantial. Per Club Benchmarking’s Economic Impact research with CMAA, the 3,887 private clubs studied generate $32.6 billion in revenue and employ 573,000 people in the US. This isn’t a small bet on a fad — it’s a major sector reallocating real capital toward where the next generation of members is playing.

What to Do With the September Spotlight

The back-to-back scheduling of Nationals, the Paris Major, and the US Open final gives clubs a ready-made programming arc for the first two weeks of September. Some practical moves:

• Run a “Nationals week” pickleball ladder or round robin (Aug 31–Sept 6). Stream matches in the grill room. If courts are already at capacity, use the week to make the waitlist visible to leadership — that’s your capital-project business case writing itself.
• Host a padel introduction clinic during the Paris Major (Sept 7–13). Even without padel courts, a demo day at a nearby facility or a Roland Garros viewing event seeds member familiarity. Surfaced interest is a free feasibility study for a future padel club membership tier.
• Close the arc with a US Open final watch party (Sept 13). Tennis is the anchor, not the afterthought. A finals brunch drives dining revenue into a daypart the GGA data shows is already under capacity.

Private Club Marketing helps clubs turn a crowded racquet sports calendar into member acquisition and retention wins — messaging a new padel club membership tier, building the capital-project case for a pickleball expansion, or filling seats for a tennis watch party. If your club is weighing where racquet sports fit in next year’s budget, talk to us before the September spotlight moves on.