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Located on an island of reclaimed land beneath the MacArthur Causeway, the site of Reserve Padel is largely raw. Unkept grass grows on vacant lots. There’s somewhat haphazard parking. And the vibe is pretty industrial. Yet check in, and all that kind of melts away as the Magic City’s gemstone skyline comes into frame: Reserve—Miami’s toniest club built to serve the world’s fastest-growing racket sport—is a waterside idyll with million-dollar views. It also has a notable touch of pop-culture frisson: When I most recently played, David Beckham and his son Cruz were hitting on the court next to mine.
Reserve, one of a number of outposts dedicated to padel in South Florida, opened a pop-up location at New York City’s Hudson Yards this summer. The Miami site is also designated as a pop-up but intends to become permanent. Brooklyn’s own Padel House has piqued the interest of sporting Gothamites. British tennis star Andy Murray is a notable investor in the sport. Even the New York Yankees have put money into something called the A1 Padel Circuit Tour. With origins in Mexico and strongholds in countries including Spain and Argentina, padel is now storming the United States—from indoor clubs in Hallandale Beach, Florida, to private courts in Houston and the Hamptons. But what exactly is it? And why is it so damn buzzy?
Padel’s origins are linked to an adaptation of a squash court customized by a man named Enrique Corcuera in 1969 at his home in Acapulco. The space is enclosed, with fencing and glass, minus openings on either side at the center of the court. Yet the sport feels more like tennis. You use the same scoring system (love, 15, 30, 40, game), and you hit across a net into and out of modified service boxes. You also use a very similar ball, though the racket is different from a traditional tennis racket. The squash-like element comes into view when considering the high threshold of shot manipulation—hitting a ball off the glass, lofting lobs, powering through overheads, finding unlikely angles, or smacking the ball backward against the wall to ricochet it, now in forward motion, over the net. You can even hit the ball out of the court, whereby the opposing player can chase it down if they have the speed and agility. For devout tennis or squash players, it does take some getting used to. But if you’re racket-sports inclined, the learning curve is quick—and the fun-meets-physical payoff is enormous.
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“More and more, I started seeing the range of its appeal,” says Reserve’s founder, the billionaire businessman Wayne Boich, a former tennis player who was an early adopter of padel in the States. “From 15-year-olds to 75-year-olds, I saw people realize how quickly you get this very athletic feeling. You see people’s eyes open. They’re thinking, It’s always in play, I can let it bounce, I can hit it off the glass, I can volley, I’m getting a workout, there’s a lot of variety.”
“The court is only 33 feet wide,” continues Boich. “So the ball really is alive a lot of the time. There’s also something about the tennis-like element. When you hit it well, it’s empowering, like when you hit a good tennis shot. You don’t have that in a lot of racket sports.” (Squash, for example, is much more about compressed agility and slapping or slicing the ball; pickleball, to the padel crowd, is essentially glorified ping-pong.)
While padel is relatively democratized overseas, it has, so far, garnered a reputation in the US as being a bit posh. Some of that is fairly assessed—and Boich knows it. “We want to set it up where the sport is accessible to all,” he says. Reserve has a membership component (priority bookings, events, et al.), but in fact it is open to the public—it’s just pricier, per court, than other facilities in the Miami Dade and Broward County regions. “I think it’s important and incumbent on the sport to try and grow in all areas. Ourselves included.” One example: There’s a children’s museum nearby Reserve’s grounds. Boich has worked with the museum to offer gratis programs for visiting kids.
The speed—and accompanying spotlight—of padel’s US growth, though, is electrifying. High-wattage stars have helped to popularize it, including Dwyane Wade, the Miami Heat’s Jimmy Butler, Venus Williams, and the aforementioned Beckham. There’s an entire orbit of professional padel celebrity in Europe and Argentina too. And in fact this year, the US launched its own elite competitive association, the Pro Padel League. All of the 2023 season’s matches occurred in Tampa, but each team represents a city across North America. Another interesting point: Each team is coed, with women and men playing together. Twenty-eight-year-old software engineer Lucy Marshall, currently ranked 27 for US women, was drafted to the Toronto Polar Bears. (Disclaimer: Marshall is my cousin.)
“I was lucky to be picked, honestly,” says Marshall, who only discovered padel upon moving to Miami in 2021. “I think being able to show the sport in a high-level competition helped to publicize it and spread it. In this way too brands have begun to invest in padel, which reaches even more people.”
Guga Vázquez, an Argentine who relocated to Spain to compete in the World Padel Tour and the former world number 29 men’s player, joined the Pro Padel League’s Las Vegas Smash for its debutante year. The Smash won the entire thing.
He puts it best: “What I like most about it is that it’s a very social sport. You don’t have to be a pro to have fun. That makes it open and attractive for everyone.”