Epic Athletic Club: Padel Courts Near Richmond, VA
Epic Athletic Club: Padel Courts Near Richmond, VA
Epic Padel has bought Midlothian Tennis Club, is rebranding it Epic Athletic Club, and will turn some of its clay courts into four outdoor padel courts by the first quarter of 2027.
Virginia's padel map just picked up a seventh club, and metro Richmond now has two.
Epic Padel, the Arlington-based operator, has bought Midlothian Tennis Club in Chesterfield County and is renaming it Epic Athletic Club. Phase one puts four outdoor padel courts on a site that currently holds 16 tennis courts, targeted for the first quarter of 2027.
That makes it the Richmond region's second padel venue — Padel Plant got there first, opening downtown last year — and the first in the city's southwestern suburbs.
What's being built
The plan is deliberately incremental: cosmetic work on the 20-year-old club's facilities plus four outdoor padel courts by the first quarter of 2027. More padel follows over time, while some tennis survives and Epic adds amenities, upgraded food and beverage, and pickleball.
Nothing about the club looks like padel yet. Its website still carries the tennis club's name and tagline and never mentions padel — though the homepage now leads with "UPDATE!!! We are now Epic Athletic Club!" and promises details to come. Staff and members stay put: Epic told Richmond BizSense that the club's five full-time and 15 part-time employees all remain, and its roughly 250 active members transfer into Epic's systems.
Epic Athletic Club
A 20-year-old tennis club tucked into the Brandermill neighborhood, next door to Brandermill Country Club and about half an hour southwest of downtown Richmond. Its membership is local and family-oriented — the old tagline was "Where Friends and Family Play" — which makes it an unusual padel launchpad. Most new US clubs chase a young urban crowd; Epic is inheriting several hundred suburban racquet players who already drive to this address every week. Padel here lands in front of an audience instead of recruiting one.
Courts: 4 | Type: Outdoor
The deal behind it
Epic paid $900,000 for the club's five-acre property at 3650 Brandermill Parkway, next to Brandermill Country Club, according to Chesterfield County property records reported by Richmond BizSense. The sale closed on 13 July 2026. Additional money changed hands for the club's business assets but was not disclosed.
The sellers were local residents who bought the facility from Brandermill Country Club about two decades ago. Ken Baker, one of them, described a club squeezed between declining tennis and the pickleball boom: his group considered outdoor pickleball courts but worried neighbors would object to the noise, then priced an indoor pickleball facility and found it prohibitive. "We decided about two years ago the best thing is to sell the club and let someone else make a go of it," Baker told BizSense.
Clay courts become padel courts
The existing setup is four indoor and 12 outdoor clay courts, four of the outdoor courts lighted. Some of that clay is what becomes padel.
This is the conversion math that keeps putting tennis clubs in padel headlines. A padel court is enclosed in glass and takes roughly a third of the ground a tennis court does, so an existing clay court can absorb padel without new construction — no roof, no slab, no rezoning. For a club with 12 outdoor courts it struggles to fill, that is a far cheaper experiment than the indoor pickleball building Baker's group walked away from. We looked at the broader pattern in why country clubs are adding padel courts.
Where Midlothian sits on Epic's map
Epic counts Midlothian as its third US property: it began by adding five courts to an existing club in Charlotte and treats its Milwaukee warehouse conversion as the flagship. Our directory tracks a fourth Epic project too — the six-court Epic Padel Tysons in Northern Virginia, still in the pipeline. We covered that earlier rollout in Epic Padel's US expansion.
Founded about three years ago and based in Arlington, Epic has raised around $10 million. Chief business operations officer Jason Wnuk said the company is hunting nationally for properties that suit padel — warehouses as in Milwaukee, existing racquet clubs as in Midlothian — and is pointedly not starting with the biggest cities. "We're trying to avoid the mistake of how tennis became very elite very early and we're looking at second-tier cities," he told BizSense. Epic also builds the club-management app it uses in its own venues and sells to other clubs, which puts it in a small group of US multi-club padel operators running more than one business line.
Where to play padel in Virginia now
Four Virginia clubs are open today, and the closest one to Midlothian is in downtown Richmond.
Padel Plant
Richmond's original: five indoor courts under 35-foot ceilings inside a 124-year-old hydroelectric plant on the Canal Walk, with two pickleball courts, a pizza kitchen and a bar attached. It is one of the larger dedicated padel rooms on the East Coast, and the all-day social-club format draws beginners and league players in roughly equal measure. Until 2027 it is the only place to play padel in Richmond.
Address: 1201 Haxall Point, Richmond, VA 23219 | Phone: 804-715-5760
Courts: 5 | Type: Indoor | Ceiling: 35ft
Elsewhere in the state, Padel Up runs four indoor courts in Sterling as the DC area's first dedicated padel club — more on that market in our DMV padel update. In Charlottesville, Boar's Head Sports Club lists padel alongside tennis, squash and pickleball and runs a learn-to-play program, while the private Greencroft Club keeps one court for members only.
Behind Midlothian sit two more pipeline clubs: the six-court Epic Padel Tysons and the seven-court BIVI Padel Virginia Beach, which would give Hampton Roads its first indoor padel. Every club in the state is in our guide to padel in Virginia, and booking runs through each venue directly — call the club before you make the drive.
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