Padel in Greenville & Upstate South Carolina: 2026 Guide
Padel in Greenville & Upstate South Carolina: 2026 Guide
Three clubs, five outdoor courts, and the grassroots founders who put South Carolina's first courts inland
Ask around and you'll hear that padel in South Carolina means Charleston. The Lowcountry has the resort courts, the announced clubs and nearly all of the press. But the state's first padel court was never on the coast — it went in behind a converted schoolhouse in Columbia in December 2022. And the first facility in South Carolina built specifically around padel opened in a Greenville suburb, closer to Atlanta than to the ocean, started by an Army infantry veteran who learned the game while traveling in South America.
This guide covers everything outside the Charleston area: three venues, five outdoor courts, what each one costs, and how to actually get on them.
Greenville's padel is real — it just isn't in Greenville
Get this straight before you drive anywhere: there is no padel court inside Greenville city limits. The Upstate's courts sit in two Greenville County towns — Mauldin, about fifteen minutes southeast of downtown, and Marietta, up toward Travelers Rest at the northern edge of the county. When people search for padel in Greenville, Mauldin is the answer.
Columbia is a different region entirely, roughly a hundred miles east in the Midlands, but it belongs in this guide for two reasons. It's where the sport landed in South Carolina first, and it's still the only bookable court between the Upstate and the coast.
Where to play padel in the Upstate and Midlands
40Forty Padel Club
40Forty is the closest thing South Carolina has to a padel clubhouse. Two outdoor panoramic courts sit in a light-industrial pocket of Mauldin off Jenkins Court, with free parking, a food and drink counter and a pro shop attached — the juice bar famously lives inside a converted shipping container. There's also a third bay set up as a ball-machine court, which is rarer than it sounds: almost no US club gives solo players a way to drill without booking three friends.
The crowd skews mixed. Tennis and pickleball converts from the Greenville suburbs make up a lot of the early-evening bookings, and the club leans hard into structured social play rather than leaving newcomers to figure it out alone. Padel 101 sessions run for first-timers on weekend mornings, there's a Tuesday ladies' night, a Wednesday all-level mixer and a Monday evening tournament series for lower-rated players. If you've never held a padel racket, this is the most forgiving front door in the state.
Courts: 2 | Type: Outdoor
Columbia Racquet Club
One court, and it changed the state. Columbia Racquet Club occupies a 3.5-acre former private-school campus on Starlight Drive, northwest of downtown Columbia, and it is genuinely a racquet club in the old sense — squash, badminton and pickleball share the grounds with the padel court. The scale is small and the atmosphere is unmistakably grassroots: no glass tower, no app, no membership funnel.
What's remarkable is how thoroughly padel took over. Owner Harry Miley reckons every single member has played it, and roughly three-quarters now play nothing else. The court is reservation-only and you arrange it by email or by calling Harry directly, which tells you most of what you need to know about how this place runs. If you're driving in from out of town, call ahead rather than turning up.
Courts: 1 | Type: Outdoor
The Cliffs at Mountain Park - Cabin
Two courts in the mountains above Travelers Rest, and the first padel courts inside a private residential community anywhere in South Carolina. They're part of the new Sports Pavilion at Mountain Park, which pairs the padel courts with two tennis courts, four pickleball courts, a 7,000-square-foot pool, cabanas, a covered dining terrace and an outdoor amphitheater.
Set expectations accordingly: this is not a place you can book. Play is limited to Cliffs members and residents, and there is no public or guest-pass route onto the courts. It's included here because it matters to the Upstate's court count and because it's a signal — when luxury developers start putting padel in ahead of more tennis, the sport has stopped being an experiment in this part of the state.
Courts: 2 | Type: Outdoor | Rating: 4.8★
The two men who built South Carolina's first courts
Neither of the state's founding courts came from a chain or a franchise, which is unusual in American padel and worth knowing before you show up.
Harry Miley bought the old Sloan School campus in Columbia in 2015 and built it into a squash-and-racquets community. Then he played padel for the first time at a club in Florida and, by his own account, walked off the court having already decided what he was building next. His court opened in mid-December 2022 — under nine months from first hit to first serve, and the first padel court in South Carolina.
Dan Fitzgerald came at it from a different direction. A Citadel graduate and former Army infantry officer, he found padel while traveling in South America and spent close to two years planning a club, working through business-planning support at Upstate Warrior Solution in Greenville. In late 2025 the Upstate Warrior Catalytic Fund put $25,000 of venture philanthropy behind him, and 40Forty opened in Mauldin — the Upstate's first dedicated padel club, run on an explicitly veteran-led, keep-it-accessible premise.
Two courts, two founders, no outside capital worth mentioning. That's the whole origin story of padel in inland South Carolina.
Booking and what it actually costs
40Forty (Mauldin). Book through Playtomic, on the app or the web. Courts open for reservation seven days ahead, the minimum booking is 60 minutes, and pricing runs $15 per player off-peak and $20 per player at peak times — so a doubles hour is roughly $60 to $80 for the court, already split. No membership is required; anyone can book, which puts 40Forty among the US clubs you can play at without joining anything. Rental rackets are available, so a first visit costs you nothing but the court fee. Current hours are 8am–9pm Monday to Thursday, 8am–10pm Friday and Saturday, and 9am–9pm Sunday.
Columbia Racquet Club. No booking platform. Email the club or phone (803) 315-3095 to reserve the court. Rates aren't published — ask when you call.
The Cliffs at Mountain Park. Members and residents only. There's no visitor rate to inquire about.
For context on how those numbers compare nationally, see our breakdown of what it costs to play padel in the US. And if you get hooked and want to stop renting, our beginner racket guide is the sensible next stop.
Upstate vs. Lowcountry: how the state splits
Padel Browser currently tracks seven South Carolina venues with padel courts, and they fall into two clean clusters with about 200 miles of interstate between them.
Inland — Mauldin, Marietta and Columbia — accounts for five courts, all of them open and playable today. The Charleston area holds the rest: LTP Daniel Island on Daniel Island and the Roy Barth Tennis Center at Kiawah Island are open now, with two more projects announced — The Point Racket and Social Club on Johns Island and pATL Mt. Pleasant's much larger indoor build. We cover those in the Charleston padel guide and in more detail in our report on Charleston's padel boom.
The split is roughly even on open courts today — five inland, five on the coast — but the announced pipeline is overwhelmingly coastal. That's the honest state of play.
One statewide fact worth planning around: every padel court currently open in South Carolina is outdoors. There is no indoor padel anywhere in the state yet. The pATL project in Mount Pleasant would be the first, and it's on the coast. For Upstate players that means summer sessions get pushed to early morning or after sunset, thunderstorms cancel matches outright, and the winter is actually the good season — 40Forty's lights run to 9 or 10pm year-round.
What's next for Upstate padel
40Forty's Mauldin site is deliberately a first step; the club advertises a second location as coming soon, without a confirmed site or date. Given that Greenville proper still has zero courts and Mauldin's two are absorbing the whole metro's demand, an inside-the-city facility is the obvious gap — and the one most likely to close next.
Beyond that, the Cliffs pavilion is the more interesting signal. Private communities across the Upstate watch each other's amenity lists closely, and padel courts are cheaper to build than tennis courts and easier to fill. Expect more of them, and expect most of them to be members-only.
Meanwhile the fastest way onto a court in the Upstate hasn't changed: open Playtomic, look at 40Forty, book an off-peak hour and borrow a racket. For a wider view of how the region is moving, our Southeast padel growth update puts South Carolina in context with Georgia, Florida and North Carolina.
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