For much of the 20th century the Delaware Power Station in Philadelphia supplied electricity to the city. Completed in 1923, it closed in 2008, leaving the main turbine hall of its beaux-arts building abandoned — until last year, when it became a place to play padel.
The build-out
The 55,000-square-foot hall, lit by gaping skylights in its 75-foot ceilings, reopened in November as Ballers, a sports club with three glass-and-mesh-enclosed padel courts alongside golf simulators and courts for squash and pickleball. “The real anchors are the pickle and the padel,” said founder David Gutstadt, 50, a former Equinox executive. The Philadelphia club has some 700 members paying between $110 and $457 a month. Gutstadt has also opened a Ballers in Boston and is developing a Los Angeles location.
The participation numbers are early but real. Padel drew one million players domestically last year, according to the U.S. Tennis Association, which began tracking the sport in 2025. USA Padel, the sport’s governing body in America, said its club and individual memberships grew by about 50% year over year in 2025.
Why a racket sport is in a markets letter
Because the last one was a capital-expenditure cycle wearing shorts. Pickleball built courts, clubs, apparel lines and $250 paddles, and it moved real money through real companies before anyone agreed it was a sport. Padel is making a different bet: not mass participation but scarcity. A padel court needs glass walls, enclosure and height, which means it cannot be painted onto a tennis court on a Saturday. That constraint is the business model — it keeps supply low and lets a club charge like a gym rather than a park.
There is no trade here and we are not going to invent one. It is a useful reminder that consumer capex cycles start in converted buildings before they show up in anyone’s revenue line, and an excellent hedge at a cocktail party where somebody has just discovered the sport.
No trade. Filed as a consumer-behavior observation with a long fuse. The pickleball build-out was a genuine capital cycle — courts, clubs, equipment, apparel — that showed up in small-cap consumer revenue before the financial press took it seriously. Padel is structurally different: the enclosure requirement caps supply and supports membership pricing, which is a better margin story and a worse volume story. We own the category the way we own most consumer fads, which is to say inside broad index exposure and without a view. If a listed operator ever attaches durable membership economics to it, we will look then.
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