History of Padel in US

A Houston beginning

Padel's history in the United States starts with a single exhibition. In 1993, Houstonian Club executive Ed Thompson and Argentine enthusiast Felipe Arnold, who had watched the sport take off at home, staged a match against Mexico to introduce padel to American players. The following spring, the first purpose-built padel court in the country went up on the lawn of The Houstonian Club in Houston, Texas, and hosted a second exhibition to mark its opening. The same year, an American team competed in the FIP World Cup for the first time.

A governing body renamed twice

Thompson and Arnold founded the American Paddle Association alongside that first court, making it the sport's first national governing body in the country. Mike May led the organisation for two decades before renaming it the United States Padel Association in 2007, a change the association described at the time as reflecting the sport's growing national footprint and its internationally recognised spelling. In July 2026 the body rebranded again, to USA Padel, with president Bill Ullman calling the new name "direct, national, and built for the next chapter of this sport in America." The organisation points to a sanctioned tournament calendar and a national competitive base that have both grown steadily as evidence of the distance travelled since the single court it started with in 1994.

Three decades as a private-club curiosity

For most of that period, padel in the United States stayed confined to hotel and country clubs rather than becoming a sport with public courts of its own. Miami's Argentine and Spanish communities had been playing informally long before any organised American scene existed, and it was not until 2016 that Spanish professional Belén Salcedo opened iPadel Houston, generally counted as the country's first dedicated padel club rather than a court attached to an existing facility.

The building boom of the 2020s

The sport's shape changed after the pandemic. Padel Haus, opened in New York in 2022 by Mexican entrepreneur Santiago Gomez, and Reserve Padel both drew institutional investment between 2022 and 2025, capital that funded a rapid build-out of dedicated clubs rather than the single-court additions of earlier decades. The count of courts nationally went from fewer than fifty in 2020 to the country's thousandth by 2026, with more than half of the courts standing in mid-2025 built since January 2024 alone. Florida led the build-out, followed by Texas, California and New York. Analysts have compared the pace to markets such as Sweden and the United Kingdom, where similarly rapid court-building preceded sharp corrections and club closures; the American market had not been through a comparable correction by the time of writing, but the comparison is made often enough to be worth recording.

The first professional generation

The building boom produced spectators and amateur players well before it produced tour-level professionals. Brittany Dubins, a Miami native who studied law at the University of Miami before leaving a tennis career for padel, became the first American, man or woman, to win a CUPRA FIP Tour title when she took the FIP Bronze event in Aveiro, Portugal, partnering Margarida Fernandes. She followed it with a FIP Silver title in San Diego alongside Anna Cortiles, results that established her as the country's leading woman. The men's game has produced ranked players such as Vinny Nahuel Di Francesco and Matias Segura but has not yet matched Dubins' breakthrough with a tour title of its own.

The national team on the world stage

At the 2024 FIP World Championships in Doha, the United States fielded both a men's and a women's team. The women's side beat Egypt in straight matches and pushed a strong Germany team before finishing 15th globally; the men's side beat Mexico and Paraguay on the way to 13th. Head coach Luis Fernando Ramirez described the squad leaving Doha "united and hungrier than ever to push ourselves," a fair description of a national programme still building toward its first major placement rather than defending one.

Where the sport stands now

Premier Padel's decision to stage its Miami event at the Miami Beach Convention Center in 2025, and to return in 2026, gave the United States a place on padel's top tour for the first time since the sport arrived in 1993. FIP Silver events have since reached Texas, California and elsewhere, widening the domestic calendar beyond the handful of clubs where the sport began. USA Padel has stated an ambition to reach ten million players and thirty thousand courts by 2030; that is the federation's own target rather than an established fact, and the gap between the sport's current base and that goal is, on the numbers above, still considerable.