Earlier this summer, Sensa Padel surprised many of us in the U.S. padel world, including me, when they opened their first club in Boston in a somewhat under-the-radar fashion. As Sensa CEO and Founder, Aditya Khilnani, recently explained to me, this was very much by design. But now that their new padel club in Nashville is on the verge of opening, they’re finally ready to start getting the word out in a major way.
During our conversation, Khilnani tells me, “Honestly, up until now, we’ve just been super focused on club and community building and less on press. Our strategy has really just involved a lot of grassroots marketing and getting racket communities on court to come try padel.”
Khilnani further explains that the plan is to informally open their new Nashville courts shortly after Labor Day “with community plays and open events to engage the local community” before a targeted formal launch somewhere around the weekend of September 20th.
“During the next first few weeks of September, while there’s still a little bit of club work going on, we really want to get people onto the courts, get rackets in people’s hands and get them playing games,” he says.
“This is very similar to what we did in Boston, and we had a lot of great learnings from that opening. We feel lucky to already have one club open that is doing well. We honestly just learned so much about how to build a new market in a city that doesn’t have padel yet.”
First to (a New/Old) Market
While there has been a significant amount of press surrounding Padel Haus expanding to Nashville, Sensa Padel will actually be the first padel club to open in both the uber-trendy city of Nashville and the state of Tennessee.
When I ask Khilnani about their proximity to Padel Haus’s upcoming south Nashville location, he tells me, “It’s actually great because we are in completely different neighborhoods, about 20 minutes apart.
We’re in Germantown, which is the eastern part of the city. We feel very lucky. It’s the perfect demographic for us. It’s very young, it’s hip, it’s fun, it’s where all the cool restaurants and bars are. It’s really like the Brooklyn of Nashville.”
He continues, “What we’re really excited about here is the location within Neuhoff — which is a new development that is launching sort of simultaneously and has a lot of history. It was originally a development from the early 1900s and has been through a lot of changes over the years. Underground jazz musicians used to play here, and rumor has it that over the years various people have won and lost property rights during games of poker.”
A New Chapter
As Khilnani further explains, the development is now owned by the Atlanta-based New City Properties, which has brought over a billion dollars in investment to the area over the past decade or so.
He says, “They’ve totally rezoned the whole space to create a campus feel, where you can walk… where you have dog parks… where you have retail, residential, and office space. There will be lots of great restaurants and other great brands going into the space to create sort of a mini city of its own.
They’re really trying to create an experiential community. It’s 14 acres. People live there, work there, eat there, sleep there, and, of course, play padel there. Part of our responsibility within the community is to really be an activation play and really get people out there engaging in and enjoying the area.”
When it opens next month, Sensa Padel Nashville will be home to six outdoor state-of-the-art Wilson padel courts, and will feature partnerships with leading global sports brands including Lacoste, Tecnifibre, and Slazenger.
Of the Wilson partnership in particular, Khilnani adds, “We’ll be collaborating a lot with Wilson here at the facility in terms of marketing, events, open plays, demo days, and those sorts of things. There will be lots of programming.”
Khilnani also proudly tells me that Sensa Nashville will be run by Scott Mitchell, who has over 30 years of experience in the rackets industry. He adds, “You can’t do it without a great team in place, and we have a great team under Scott, so we’re really excited to get started.”
What’s Next?
Knowing that Sensa’s goal has always been to expand nationwide, I feel I have to ask Khilnani about future locations on the horizon despite the fact that their second location hasn’t yet opened.
He quickly responds, “The next one is going to be Austin. We have that under development, but we’re honestly not in a rush to open. We’re looking towards launching maybe end of this year or early next year. I think right now the focus for the company is very much on just continuing to build the community and attract new players in Boston and now Nashville.”
Then he concludes our conversation by telling me, “This is our second site, but this one is really a flagship for us. Being part of Neuhoff is a different kind of experience to Boston, I’d say. But we have the same focus on building the community and having a really great network of coaches. I think the city’s demographics work really well for us. We’re always looking for growing cities and cities on the rise. And I think Nashville has that energy.”
Once open you can visit Sensa Padel Nashville between 7am and 11pm daily at 1312 Adams St, Nashville, TN 37208. For further updates, please visit their website or follow them on Instagram.
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