Wellington Approves Design For A New Private Campus With Eight Tennis Courts And Four Padel Courts
- Wellington’s Architectural Review Board unanimously approved the design for a new private tennis and padel campus at a former preschool site on Greenbriar Boulevard.
- The four-acre R&B Sports campus will include two indoor tennis courts, six outdoor tennis courts and four glass-walled padel courts inside a Mediterranean-style clubhouse.
- Owners Betsy McCormack and Rodrigo Nascimento say the private club, over a decade in the planning, will center its mission on developing young athletes.
A Decade Of Planning Cleared One Board Meeting
A four-acre lot at the corner of Greenbriar Boulevard and Ousley Farms Road sat as a former preschool site for years. On Tuesday, Sept. 1, Wellington’s Architectural Review Board voted to approve the elevations, colors and materials for what will replace it: a private tennis and padel campus built by a former professional player and a longtime coach who have been chasing this project for more than ten years.
The campus belongs to R&B Sports, co-owned by former professional tennis player Betsy McCormack and coach Rodrigo Nascimento. Their plan calls for two indoor tennis courts, six outdoor tennis courts and four glass-walled padel courts on the same site, a combination that puts Wellington, Florida, among a small but growing list of American communities building padel into a tennis facility from the ground up rather than adding it later.
Wellington already carries a reputation among South Florida players for its equestrian and polo scene, and now the village is adding a purpose-built racket sports address to that list. The Architectural Review Board meeting where the project cleared its design review was, on paper, a routine zoning step. For McCormack, Nascimento and the young players they hope to coach, it was the clearest sign yet that a decade-old plan is finally moving off paper and toward an actual opening date.
Twelve Courts, One Building, A Design Problem
Fitting an indoor tennis court inside a building that still reads as part of the neighborhood turned out to be the hardest part of the design. Keith Spina, CEO of the architecture firm Spina O’Rourke + Partners, walked the board through the process behind the final look.
“The challenging part of this building was clearly how do we get an indoor tennis court inside a building that fits within Wellington and the architecture and the neighborhood,” Spina said. “We looked at a lot of different options, and at the end of the day, we chose what we thought was most effective in a variety of ways.”
The solution is a two-story clubhouse built in a Mediterranean architectural style, finished in brown and off-white tones. Beyond the twelve courts, the building will hold locker rooms, a fitness area, a café and office space, wrapped around an indoor sports facility that comes in at nearly 17,000 square feet. The board unanimously approved the elevations, colors and materials at the Sept. 1 meeting, and developers expect to break ground on the property in December.
Built For Kids, Even As A Private Club
Nascimento told the board the project has been in the works for more than a decade. The campus will operate as a private club, but he was direct about who the facility is really for.
“We want to give back everything that we’ve always gotten back to the kids,” Nascimento said. “Our main focus is going to be the kids. It’s going to be open for everyone, but we want to change kids’ lives.”
McCormack’s background as a former touring pro and Nascimento’s history as a coach are being positioned as the campus’s core asset in a village with a long tradition of youth tennis: a place built around developing junior players rather than simply renting out court time.
Why Four Padel Courts Change The Calculation
Padel is still the newest line item on this kind of blueprint in the United States. The Sports & Fitness Industry Association tracked the sport in its national participation survey for the first time with 2025 data, counting 1,073,000 Americans who played padel that year. Tennis, by comparison, reached 27.3 million U.S. players in 2025, a 6.2% increase year over year and part of a climb of more than 26% dating back to 2020, according to the same report.
Set against those numbers, R&B Sports building four padel courts alongside eight tennis courts on day one, rather than converting existing courts down the road, reflects a shift developers around the country are starting to make: treat padel as a core part of a racket sports campus rather than a later addition squeezed into leftover space.
The Board Signs Off
Board members praised the design at the meeting and said they were glad to see the level of investment coming into the community. Board Member John Greene singled out the project by name.
“I appreciate the investment and vision you have to bring this to Wellington,” Greene said. “It’s a stunning piece of architecture. It’s just nice when we get some good stuff in front of us.”
With elevations, colors and materials cleared, the remaining steps are largely procedural before the site can move from paper to construction. Developers are targeting a December start on construction, which would put the campus on a build timeline stretching into 2027 depending on how work on the indoor courts and clubhouse proceeds.
Village staff and the applicants spent months working through the site plan before it reached the Architectural Review Board, covering everything from parking counts to how the clubhouse’s roofline would sit against neighboring rooflines. That level of review is typical for a private sports facility of this size going into a residential-adjacent corner of the village, and it helps explain why a project Nascimento says has been in the works for over a decade is only now reaching an approved design rather than an open court.
The tennis campus was not the only item the board took up that afternoon. Members also signed off on elevations, materials and building heights for several structures in Village Landing, a separate mixed-use development from Related Ross going up nearby off State Road 7, a reminder that Wellington’s building boom right now runs well beyond racket sports alone even as R&B Sports draws the most attention from local players.
What It Means For Players In The Area
For families in Wellington and the surrounding Palm Beach County suburbs, a twelve-court campus built specifically around junior development gives local players another option beyond public parks and existing private clubs, one designed from its first blueprint to include padel rather than treat it as an afterthought. Players who already split time between tennis and padel, a combination the SFIA data shows is increasingly common among racket sport players nationally, will have a single site built for both instead of driving between separate facilities.
McCormack and Nascimento’s decade-long path from idea to approved design also says something about how long these projects take to clear even a receptive board, a timeline worth keeping in mind for any player hoping to book a court there soon. The next real milestone to watch is the December construction start, and then how quickly R&B Sports opens its doors once building work gets underway on the courts and the two-story clubhouse around them.
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