Taking padel to America’s suburbs is no easy task. We talk with Sabah Alsabah about construction, finance, luck and misfortune.
WORDS
Padel Magazine
PHOTOGRAPHY
Courtesy of Padel Up
If you drive 25 miles northwest of Washington, D.C., the capital’s sprawling metropolis begins to fade into open countryside. This stretch of Northern Virginia is best known for its massive server facilities that route over 70% of global internet traffic. Nearby, Washington Dulles International Airport and world-class golf courses bring a slew of powerful politicians and wealthy business types to the area on a daily basis. If you’re used to the urban, club- and spa-like facilities of New York City or Miami, this may not seem like a great place to open a padel business. But it is: a large international community with disposable income and a deep love of racquet sports. What more could you ask for?
Sabah Alsabah, a second-generation Kuwaiti immigrant, saw this early. Growing up nearby, he learned the importance of sports, community and an openness to new things at a young age. Now, over two years since he first got the idea, his padel club, Padel Up, is open and thriving, providing sport and community to this part of the country. All that’s left is getting the rest of Virginia to fall in love with the game the same way he has.
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Padel Magazine: Thanks for agreeing to talk with me - I really appreciate it. The goal here is obviously to get to know you and Padel Up a bit better. Starting from the beginning: I know that you're Kuwaiti, but were you born here or there?
Sabah Alsabah: I was born here. My dad was working here when I was born. I grew up and lived here my entire life, pretty much. I lived in Kuwait for a few years to start my family: got married, had my first two kids there and then came back. Kuwait is where I really discovered padel. I heard about it over there, tried it out, got addicted, like everyone else, despite being a life-long tennis player. When I came back to D.C. I searched where I could play around here, and the closest at the time was Philadelphia. Really saw a business opportunity there. And that's how this all came about.
PM: What do you remember about your first time playing padel? Where was that? Who were you with?
SA: I was in Kuwait. I was with three friends who needed a fourth and they invited me to come out. I was hesitant the first couple times because I'm a tennis enthusiast, and other racquet sports haven't really been what I was looking for. They convinced me to come and try it - I did - and I was thankful for that because I was immediately hooked. I just remember, you know, as any tennis player, I had to stop picking the ball up at my feet and just be patient, letting it bounce off the back wall. I have some time to think about what I'm going to do. And it's all about placement and setting up your next three, four, five shots in that rally, rather than trying to hit winners like you do in tennis.
PM: You struggled with the walls like every other tennis player?
SA: I still struggle.
PM: Do you get to play a lot?
SA: Not as much as I'd like. I mean, I'm here at the club all the time. If I don't have a lot going on, I will try to get a match going. And then a lot of times a fourth doesn't show for a group, so I'll try my best to go fill in.
PM: What were you doing before you Padel Up? Were you always into sports?
SA: I was always into sports, but I was never in sports. I played tennis and hockey my whole life. I’m a big hockey guy, still coach my kids’ hockey team. I was a serial entrepreneur before this: ran a digital media agency for 14 years, had a fast-casual Mexican restaurant, too. I guess I have something with Mexican creations. First it was a fast-casual burrito place, and now a sport of Mexican origin. Got out of both in 2018 and have just been an investor since. I established this business in 2022 but it took me three years to find a location. The business was ready to go, but real estate is really hard to come by, especially with the specific needs of a padel facility. You need really high ceilings, you need wide column spacing. You need the place to be zoned for recreation use. So, that was the big hold up. But once I found this location, things really started to roll pretty quickly.
PM: I have some questions about real estate, and we’ll get to them in a second. But first: do you see any crossover between hospitality and padel facilities? You're inviting guests in, you're kind of advertising the same way. It seems like there would be a lot of similarities there.
SA: I’m in the hospitality business, it's not really a sports business. You're providing an experience for people when they're in your facility. And that experience, to me is everything from playing the sport itself to the lounge area to the smoothie and coffee offerings. It's kind of an all in experience, not just coming into play and then leaving.
PM: Continuing with our restaurant analogy: on one end of the spectrum there's fast food restaurants on the other end you've got your fancy Michelin Star restaurants. Do you think that could happen in the padel world? Where there's going to be the bare bones, automated facilities with courts and nothing else, and then high-end spa-type, heavily amenitized sort of experience?
SA: Absolutely, I think we already do see that. Places like [Reserve Seaplane] in Miami: that's a totally different experience, right? That’s almost like it's a nightclub with padel courts attached. That's a whole different experience than what I'm offering, which is a padel club that also has a couple of small hospitality features. But, yeah, I mean, if you're looking to play padel I would look at padel clubs if you're looking to have an all around experience in a bar with a DJ, all that stuff, Reserve is pretty impressive in that sense. But, I mean, Miami is just different, right? It's not suburban DC, it's a different crowd. There's a different demand there for different things, I would say.
PM: The game in Miami seems to be so elevated. What kind of players do you have coming into your club? Did you get a lot of intermediate and advanced players? Or are you getting mainly beginners?
SA: We have everything. Our head pro, Daniel Fernandez is a top player in the US and he attracts a lot of our higher level players to come train and play with him. You know, he's like a in Playbypoint, like a 5.85 and we have a few, you know, four and a halfs to 4.7 fives who come and train with him and play with him. And they’re great matches to watch. Actually, the first people to come in were really high-level players. They are players from Spain, from Argentina, ones who have been playing for many, many years. They know the sport, they love the sport, but didn’t have a place in DC to play. So as soon as we opened, they were the first ones in - they had been itching and waiting for a padel club to open. The next wave was all the beginners, like ‘Oh, what is the sport?’ and ‘You know, this place just opened in DC. I've heard about it a couple times. I'm not really familiar with it. Is it pickleball? Is it this? Is it that?’ That wave of new players filled our beginner clinics and our padel one-on-one clinics. Teaching them just the rules of the game, basic strategies, basic skills. And then we've seen those players now over the past 6 months become intermediate players, and that's great. They love the game and continue to develop their skills. So that's the kind of the progression we saw. The advanced, experienced players all came in in the beginning, and then the slower beginner level growth started after that.
PM: Do you see them building a community, outside of Padel Up. Do you know if they're hanging out outside of the club, or if they're organizing their own tournaments and matches?
SA: Great question. l follow some of our more frequent customers and all members on Instagram and we'll interact on social media, and I’ll see people who I know met at my club and now they hang out socially, they have dinners together and it warms my heart, it really does. It hammers home the fact that this is a community that I'm building, and not just, a business with a bottom line. It's about building this community and growing the sport. So I love seeing that. I love following them and saying, ‘These four people and their wives all met at my club, and now they're all going out to dinner together.’ Like, it's great.
“I tell people it's kind of a blessing and a curse to be the first … if anyone wants to play, they have come to me.”
PM: Let's talk a little bit more about the real estate aspect. Everybody I talk to says the same thing: ‘Real estate is really expensive, zoning can be prohibitive.’ For some context, what was in your building before it was yours?
SA: So it was an indoor ropes course, and it had these gigantic floor-to-ceiling steel columns with all this climbing equipment and zip lines and rope courses. Obviously it was zoned for recreation. Unfortunately they went bankrupt, I think they opened right before COVID - timing was bad and they didn't make it. So, you know, it worked out in my favor, I was able to come in and take it as-is. But, because it was a brand new build the landlord said, ‘You get no TI [tenant improvement] money. This is a perfectly nice place. Why don't you just open an indoor ropes course?’ And I said, Well, that's not my concept, and, clearly, it didn't work here.
PM: Yeah, what terrible advice.
SA: Yeah, I mean, no TI money. Just take it as-is. And I had to fund the massive demolition of this place, and the pushing out a little bit of the storefront to fit a fourth court in here as well. Because the way it was, we were limited to only three courts, but to shift some stuff around, break open the storefront and push it out to the sidewalk allowed for a fourth court. I had been close on a couple of other locations in the past two years. One didn't end up working because of zoning. It was a good space and a good location, great ceiling heights, good column spacing, it was a mobile phone accessory warehouse. Basically anytime you needed a part for an iPhone or anything, it was in there. But it would have required at least nine months and hundreds of thousands of dollars of rezoning, doing special use permits and all that stuff.
PM: You're the first padel facility in NoVa [Northern Virginia] and being the first is kind of a pain, because you don't have just the burden of just running your business. You also have to go out and educate the public. When you first opened, you had some people who knew about the sport, but, I mean, 99% of people in the area don't. It's got to be hard to tell investors and landlords, ‘Hey, I'm gonna open this business. Nobody knows what it is, but I promise it's super fun.’ That can't be a great sales pitch. How did you negotiate that?
SA: I tell people it's kind of a blessing and a curse to be the first. Because if anyone knows the sport, and anyone wants to play the sport, they have to come to me. I have people coming from Baltimore, from Bethesda, from Rockville - these are 1 hour commutes. But yeah, that education is expensive. There's a lot of ad buys to educate people on what the actual sport is, and why we're not just another pickleball facility or whatever, because that boom has been huge in this area and across America for past five years so as soon as someone sees another one opening, they just immediately think ‘pickleball’ and that education process is tough. Whether it's offering, you know, free clinics or whatever, that first time, just to get them to experience it. And you said, to convince investors, I have no investors, I'm all in on the sport myself. I fully believe in the sport, and I'm all in on the sport. I was adamant about doing it myself and really making it work. But it's, you know, it's all about getting them in and getting them hopefully hooked. Like what happened to me the first time I played it. It's an ongoing process. Like, even though we've been around for six months that education doesn't stop. We keep educating and we keep having new people. There are a couple of new clubs that are coming up in the area, and that will help me in the long run. The more people hear about the sport, the more people realize that, ‘Oh, there’s actually is one that's really close to me,’ and they become customers.
PM: Competition validates your thesis, and I think you've already established yourself as a market leader there, so more and more clubs would be nothing but good for you.
SA: Yeah, I agree.
PM: What do you think about the demographics in NoVa? Do you think it can support a lot of padel? Do you think that padel can be really big, like it is, say, in Miami?
SA: Yeah, absolutely. It already supports hobbies and sports that are very expensive to play. I'm in Loudoun County, which is, by the last census, the richest County in America. You know sports like golf, hockey, other country club sports, platform tennis, those really expensive sports to play? They're flourishing in Northern Virginia. So I think there's plenty of room for padel to grow in here. I think it's also the most active and healthy community in America according to the last census. So, you know, people, people like to stay active, people like to be healthy, and they have disposable income to allow for that as well.
PM: Yeah, I've always been bullish on Northern Virginia. Switching topics, you mentioned elsewhere you had some guys come and just play ping pong. And what other surprising behaviors have you seen from your customers? Every time a business opens, people come in and kind of make it their own, in their own way.
SA: Surprises? Yeah. Certainly that story about the group that was coming in just to play ping pong. I have a ping pong table just for members to warm up on and play around on before or after their reservations. But this group of Croats and Serbs were coming in and I said, ‘this is kind of just an added perk for people who are reserving a court,’ and they're like, ‘Oh, we're so sorry. We'll get some coffees.’ And then they ended up loving the coffee. And now they come for coffee and just to sit around and play ping pong.
I open at 7am so I have the morning crowd that comes before work. But then I have some members who, come in at seven, play for an hour and a half or two hours, and then sit around on their laptops, do some work, hang out kind of all day there. Kind of make it their own. We talk about third spaces and whatnot. This is their third space, and they hang out. An other surprise would be, just how warm and welcoming the community is.
I tell a story about a Bolivian guy, who’s a construction worker, and he drives by [our location] every day. And when my exterior sign went up about a month before I opened, he saw ‘padel’ so he pulled in. He was like, ‘wait, wait, wait, what is this? Are you serious? Like, is this real padel?’ Everything was still boarded up, doors weren't even open. It was heavy construction going on. But he was knocking, knocking, knocking. And he's like, ‘Is this… is this true.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m building padel courts’ and he just starts crying and gives me a big hug. He told me, ‘I moved here 35 years ago from Bolivia. I used to play as a kid. It was my favorite thing to do my whole life. And I haven't been able to do it. And now that you're here, I can do it and share it and share it with my children.’ And he was just crying, it was awesome.
PM: So do you see him? Does he come and play?
SA: Yeah, he comes in all the time.
PM: Speaking of construction, you were talking about how you had to add that fourth court. When you're underwriting a project like this, is it financially viable at three or two courts? Is more always better? Would you like to have a fifth and sixth court right now?
SA: Four is plenty based on occupancy numbers and the fact that we’re in the very infancy of the sport in this area. We're at 100% capacity only during prime times, which is, weeknights between 7 and 10pm. Some weekend mornings usually between 9 and 11am will be pretty packed. Other than that you can get a court whenever you'd like. So four courts is more than enough for now. My gamble on this is that it will take off like it did everywhere else in the world, and when it does, four courts won't be enough and I'll be running at much closer to a full capacity when that happens.
PM: Are you working on a second location? Are you thinking about it? Thinking about it, but not actively working on it yet?
SA: I’m working on making this work. And you know, if it projects out as I'm hoping it does, then maybe in the next year or two, we'll start looking for new locations.
“[My customers] kind of make it their own. We talk about third spaces and whatnot. This is their third space.”
PM: A big problem, at least here in New York, is getting qualified coaches, and I think that's probably an issue for a lot of other people around the country. Up here, they import their coaches from abroad. We get amazingly talented coaches, but that presents visa issues. There's some turnover. We love our coaches, they’re talented and they're great guys and girls. We all become close friends, but unfortunately, they end up back in Spain, or they get a job in Abu Dhabi or somewhere with easier immigration laws. Are you having an issue with finding coaches?
SA: Luckily, they all came to me. They're all local. Daniel just happened to live 15 minutes away. He just moved here with his wife. so it was pretty incredible that I was able to get such a high, talented head pro that had been waiting for a padel club to open here. Yeah, it was one of the first people to reach out to me. Arturo [another coach at the club] is from Spain, but he’s an airplane engineer, right at Dulles airport. So, yeah, he's like an aeronautical engineer, brilliant guy, and works five minutes away. And Taka is now our general manager, and she is getting certified from Marcos del Pilar for the RSPA coaching certification. She's an ex professional tennis player and professional tennis coach, so she picked it up really quickly. So these are all people who were local and great and just kind of found their way to me. I do get contacted constantly by people in Mexico, Spain, Argentina who want to be flown in and sponsored. But, I'm only hiring locally.
PM: You mentioned that Taka was a former tennis player. It seems like former tennis players might be the path forward in the United States for a lot of clubs. They're going to be the best padel players. They're obviously going to be the coaches. I think if I was opening a club, I would try and get some old tennis pros, or D1 college players, put them through a program, get them trained. That seems to be a great path forward. Would you agree?
SA: I absolutely agree, they're our best players and our best members. There's a ton of tennis players in our area. Squash players as well. We have some world renowned British squash players who come and play all the time, and they're the only ones who can really keep up with Daniel.
PM: We’ve been talking mainly locally. Let's go a little more globally. You mentioned padel was big in Kuwait and actually all the Gulf states.
SA: Yes, correct.
PM: Why do you think it's so big? Padel exploding in the Gulf states, that was kind of a surprise to me.
SA: European influence. There are a lot of things there that are influenced by European countries. Just like soccer, Formula 1 and tennis - these major European sports. Padel is in that group. So, like, I had a TV ad running here for three months, and I only ran it during soccer games, Formula 1 races and tennis matches. And that's kind of the padel market, right? People who like soccer, tennis and F1 tend to be more European, and that's kind of the trend with padel as well. So I think that's why it made it big.
Also, I think COVID really created a need for people to stay active and healthy somehow, and padel provided that. I also think at least in Gulf countries weather isn't an issue. Obviously, it's so hot, it's dusty, and putting these courts around that require little to no maintenance, versus other options, which, you know, need a lot more maintenance, they kind of made more sense for people to just plop these courts around. All you needed was a little tent on top, just to guard you from the sun. But yeah, it really, really boomed. And, you know, in Kuwait, at least, it's following the path of Sweden, where half the clubs had to close because they just oversaturated the market. And Kuwait is kind of like that now, where only really the top, most luxurious clubs are still around. The people who just haphazardly plopped a court out in the middle of a field, they're all closed now.
PM: Yeah, I guess that's one of the benefits of it being so hard to build in the United States: we kind of force this, like, constrained supply. We're probably not gonna get the boom at the same speed, but we're not gonna get that bust either. So maybe it promotes, hopefully, some more responsible growth.
SA: Yeah, great point. I hope so.
PM: When you look at padel across the United States, what do you see as the main barrier to growth? Besides what we've covered (real estate and the zoning and stuff like that), do you see any demographic or cultural issues that would stop it from booming in places like Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles? I'm always surprised that the scene is not bigger in LA.
SA: Yeah, cost. That’s really it. That's the main barrier. I would love to charge five euro a person, because that's what they're used to paying in Portugal and Spain and wherever my members are coming from. They get sticker shock because retail and labor are way more expensive here, real estate is way more expensive. And the only way to make it work is by charging more. And I think I charge a very, very fair price of $30 a person, but it's still sticker shock for them, that’s six times more than what they're used to paying. If somehow magically, real estate prices and labor prices come down, then I'm happy to charge less. ✸
ABOUT THE CLUB
Padel Up
Located in Sterling, VA, Padel Up is the first padel facility in Northern Virginia. The founder is passionate about padel, great coffee, and clean eating. This facility brings all those things together for a one-of-a-kind experience for our customers and their entire families.
