Denver’s First Padel Club Draws 130 Members In One Month As Owners Plan Colorado And Texas Expansion
- Arenna Padel opened a month ago near 8th Avenue and I-25 in Denver’s Sun Valley neighborhood and has already signed up 130 members.
- The $1.2 million, 25,000-square-foot club has six courts and membership tiers ranging from $90 to $187 a month, with non-members paying $17.50 to $25 an hour.
- Owners Juanma Quiroz, Luis Rance and Fernando Orozca plan to open more locations in Colorado and Texas and will take over the padel courts at Parker Racquet Club by the end of next year.
A club built by players who came to Denver looking for a court that didn’t exist yet
Juanma Quiroz moved to Denver four years ago and brought his padel racquet with him. He didn’t have anywhere to use it.
“I came here with my racquet and there was nothing,” the Mexico City native told BusinessDen.
That gap is now filled. Quiroz runs Arenna Padel at 2535 W. Barberry Pl., a six-court club that opened a month ago near 8th Avenue and Interstate 25. Padel blends elements of tennis and squash, with walls that stay in play throughout a point, and Quiroz has spent the past several weeks watching newcomers pick it up fast.
“It’s crazy just in a month how many people we’ve connected with,” Quiroz said. He grew up playing soccer and got hooked on padel in 2020, when the pandemic left him with little else to do. “If you get some guidance, it’s super easy to learn. After 15 minutes you’re having fun.”
Membership pricing built around getting people through the door
Quiroz and his business partners, Luis Rance, Fernando Orozca and local investor Steve Young, have built the club’s membership to 130 people in that first month. Arenna offers three membership tiers at $90, $127 and $187 a month, with the pricier levels unlocking bigger discounts on court time.
A non-member pays $25 an hour at peak times and $17.50 in off-peak hours. The $187 “Elite” tier drops that to $20 for a peak court and $3.25 for an off-peak court, a discount steep enough that a regular player can recoup the membership fee in just a handful of visits. Clinics range from $30 to $70 per player depending on group size, giving newcomers a lower-cost entry point before they commit to a monthly plan.
Racquets and balls come free with a court rental for now, though players can also buy gear or Arenna merchandise from the club’s in-house store.
“The goal is to get people to try it,” Quiroz said. “There’d be friction if we charged $10 to rent that stuff when the court is already expensive.”
Three padel players with real estate and private equity backgrounds behind the buildout
The four partners were introduced through Barry Riddle, who owns Parker Racquet Club and was the first to put padel courts in Colorado years ago. Rance and Orozca, both Mexican, had careers in private equity and real estate investment before jumping into padel.
“Fernando owned a padel club in Mexico, so we started discussing the opportunity and very rapidly got hooked and got into the rabbit hole of, ‘Why not padel?'” Rance said. “It’s been doubling each year in the U.S., and racquet sports as a whole are all growing.”
The group spent $1.2 million building out the 25,000-square-foot space in Sun Valley, west of I-25, and signed a five-year lease. The build-out is ongoing, with a café planned for the main lobby. Quiroz said a club member wants to revamp an outdoor area on the building’s east side into a Brazilian restaurant.
More Colorado and Texas locations already in the works
The Sun Valley location is the first of what the partners hope will become several clubs across Colorado and Texas, where they already have two additional spots in progress. The group will also rebrand and operate the padel courts at Parker Racquet Club by the end of next year, though Quiroz and Young won’t be involved in running those.
Arenna is opening into a Denver padel scene that Quiroz described as increasingly crowded, with new clubs also appearing in RiNo and Five Points. He said Arenna’s more laidback vibe should help it stand out, and that the competition isn’t necessarily bad for the sport.
“It’s a great opportunity for me,” Quiroz said. “I love this.”
Part of a sport still new enough to just be showing up in the national numbers
Padel is young enough in the United States that 2025 marked the first year it appeared as its own category in the SFIA’s national participation research, cited in the USTA’s 2026 U.S. Tennis Participation Report. That count put U.S. padel players at just over 1 million for 2025, a small fraction of the 27.3 million tennis players and 24.3 million pickleball players tracked the same year, but a real enough number to support clubs the size of Arenna.
That’s the bet behind Arenna’s model: memberships and clinics, not one-time novelty visits, are what keep a six-court club full on a Tuesday night. Denver’s Board of Adjustment has separately reviewed a proposal for five indoor and two outdoor courts at 1812 35th Street, a sign the city’s padel supply is expanding beyond Sun Valley even as the sport’s national player base is still being counted for the first time. Between that project, Arenna, and the newer clubs Quiroz named in RiNo and Five Points, Denver now has enough padel courts scattered across the city that a player can reasonably choose a location close to home rather than driving across town for the nearest option.
For players who grew up watching the sport from outside the U.S., like Quiroz and Rance, that early-stage number is part of the appeal rather than a warning sign. Quiroz said he hopes Denver eventually builds the kind of padel culture he saw growing up in Mexico.
What it means for anyone looking to try the sport
For a Denver player curious about padel but intimidated by walls in play and a scoring system borrowed from tennis, Arenna’s pitch is that the learning curve is shorter than it looks. Free racquets and balls with a court rental remove the biggest barrier to a first session, and clinics give beginners structured instruction rather than a cold start against strangers.
With two more Colorado and Texas locations already being planned and a second Denver property in the pipeline at Parker Racquet Club, players who try the sport now are getting in early on a business that its own owners expect to keep doubling. Quiroz’s own path into the sport, a Mexico City transplant who couldn’t find a court four years ago and now runs one of the city’s newer clubs, is itself a small preview of where the partners think Denver’s padel scene is headed next.
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Image: Depositphotos
