Horseshoe Bay Resort Breaks Ground on 4 Padel Courts

Padel is coming to Lake LBJ

Horseshoe Bay Resort, the golf-and-lake property on Lake LBJ about 50 miles northwest of Austin, has broken ground on a $10 million racquet sports expansion. It adds four dedicated padel courts and a new Racquet Sports Clubhouse, and the resort expects it to open by summer 2027.

One caveat up front: as of late October 2026 the resort's own website still says nothing about padel. Its Mouratoglou Tennis Center page lists six hard and six clay courts, the racquet menu offers only tennis and pickleball, and there is no padel page in the site's 81-page sitemap. Everything below comes from the resort's August 25, 2026 announcement and the coverage that followed.

What's being built

Four courts, purpose-built — not padel squeezed onto a resurfaced tennis court. Israel Castillo, the resort's Director of Racquet Sports, described going "all-in on the specialized, enclosed glass-and-mesh courts required for dedicated padel play."

The clubhouse is the other half of the project: 6,690 square feet of indoor and covered outdoor space, built around a central social lounge with open views onto the courts, plus reception, retail and food and beverage. A 2,632-square-foot covered outdoor lounge faces the courts as well. FAB Studio Inc. is lead architect and John King Construction is building it.

The padel courts are additive: Horseshoe Bay's six hard tennis courts, six red clay courts and 14 dedicated pickleball courts all stay.

One thing the announcement does not settle: whether the courts will be covered. The clubhouse is explicitly described as indoor plus covered outdoor space; the courts are not described either way. We have left facility type unrecorded rather than guess.

Inside a Mouratoglou racquet center

The resort's racquet program operates as the Mouratoglou Tennis Center at Horseshoe Bay, which the resort calls the first American location for a Mouratoglou Tennis Center. Coaches are certified in the academy's methodology, and the padel expansion is pitched as an extension of that partnership.

Two brands share that name. Mouratoglou's tennis academy is one; M Padel, its padel arm, is another. M Padel publishes six US club pages — Malden MA, Noblesville IN, Cincinnati OH, San Antonio TX, Zephyrhills FL and Minneapolis MN — and Horseshoe Bay is not one of them. The padel here is a resort project inside a Mouratoglou-branded tennis center, not an M Padel club.

The brand's US padel record so far is mixed. Mouratoglou Academy in Zephyrhills, Florida is open with five courts. Mouratoglou Noblesville passed its September 2026 target without opening and is still gated behind a memberships portal — we covered that in our Noblesville update. M Padel Malden outside Boston is selling founding memberships with no published opening date. Summer 2027 is a long runway, and resort timelines move.

Members, guests, and what "members only" means here

We list Horseshoe Bay Resort as members-only, which needs context at a resort. Both the announcement and the resort's existing racquet pages describe two audiences: club members, who get an all-inclusive racquet experience, and resort guests, who get it as a hotel amenity. The current tennis program already works that way — round-robins, clinics, cardio tennis, private and group lessons, and weekend camps are open to guests and members alike.

What it is not is a public drop-in court. There is no booking link today and no padel pricing published. For scale, current tennis instruction runs $140 per hour with a tennis professional and $160 with the Director of Racquet Sports. To play padel here in 2027, the practical route is a room reservation or a membership.

Hill Country padel, mapped

Horseshoe Bay has no padel today, and the Hill Country around it is thin. Nearest open courts, by straight-line distance:

• Trosky Sports Club — 2 outdoor courts, about 29 miles
• Dripping Springs Racquet Club — 3 outdoor courts, about 33 miles
• Padel39 — 6 outdoor courts, about 41 miles, where the Austin cluster begins
• Pick and Padel in Bulverde — 3 outdoor courts, about 56 miles
• John Newcombe Country Club in New Braunfels — 2 outdoor courts, members-only, about 58 miles
• The Courthouse — 4 outdoor courts, about 60 miles

Austin is the real density — a dozen tracked clubs inside 46 miles, including Austin Padel Center and Padel Club Austin at nine courts each. Our Austin guide covers that cluster in full.

Resort padel in the US

Texas now has 76 tracked clubs and 356 courts, 66 of them open, with ten more in the pipeline. Only six Texas clubs are members-only — mostly country clubs and city athletic clubs. Horseshoe Bay joins them as the first attached to a destination lake-and-golf resort.

That resort category is still young here — we track padel at 19 US resorts and hotels, most of those courts added in the last two years. Horseshoe Bay tests whether the amenity travels inland: no beach, no existing padel culture, and a $10 million bet that guests will book a lake trip partly to play.

We will update the listing when the resort publishes a padel page, an opening date or pricing. Until then the groundbreaking is the only hard fact, and summer 2027 is a target, not a promise.