Wilson and Fernando Belasteguín just gave college padel a name, a map and a season. The Wilson American Collegiate Padel League (ACPL) by Bela launches this fall with Wilson as founding and naming partner and Bela — who retired from competition at the end of 2024 but is still very much Team Wilson — serving as ambassador and chief advisor.

The structure is the story. Season 1 runs Fall 2026: Challenges and Local Invitationals this fall, Regional Championships in November, and National Finals in March. The country is split into four divisions — Atlantic (East Coast), Sunshine (Florida), Lone Star (Texas) and Pacific (West) — with one regional champion from each heading to a two-day Nationals: Saturday is round-robin, and Sunday crowns the first-ever ACPL National Champion.

How big is it on day one? Depends who you ask. The league's own site, joinacpl.com, lists 20+ college clubs and 120+ players. OneFootball's coverage (translated from Spanish) says ACPL is launching in October with around 30 schools and roughly 200 students. Either way, the founding-club list on the site already reads like an admissions brochure: Yale, Babson, UPenn, Drexel, Duke, Columbia and NYU, "...and growing."

This didn't come out of nowhere. ACPL ran pre-league Courtside pop-ups as proof of concept: NYC in February with seven founding schools (Yale took that first event), plus Boulder, Miami's RacquetX, Boston (BC, Northeastern, MIT, BU and Harvard) and LA.

And the price of admission is the part we keep coming back to: $25 a year for players, and registering a school is free. League President Matt Jenkins put it plainly: "College sports should feel welcoming, not intimidating. We built ACPL so every student — first racket or fiftieth — has a place on the court and a real community around it."

Quick housekeeping: this is club-level, student-club padel — not NCAA varsity. And it's a separate effort from the USPA Collegiate program we covered in our Jan 29 exclusive. This one is the Wilson/Bela-branded league.

The Primetime Take: Make no mistake: this is a brand play with a pipeline attached, and we mean that as a compliment. Wilson isn't just sponsoring a tournament; it's putting its name on the front door of the sport for college students — the exact moment players pick a racquet brand, a friend group and a weekend habit that can stick for decades. Bela brings the credibility (the man still leads Miami P1 and is expanding Bela Padel Center), Wilson brings the reach, and a $25 membership removes just about every excuse. We've been saying for months that the U.S. market needs on-ramps, not just more glass. A college league with four regions, a November regional push and a national champion crowned in March is an on-ramp with a scoreboard. The 20-vs-30 school count will sort itself out as the season fills in; what matters is whether these founding clubs turn into real rivalries. Yale already has bragging rights from NYC. Your move, Harvard.

To check out the Wilson ACPL by Bela, click here.

To read the whole article from OneFootball, click here.

Agassi Sports Entertainment Corp., the Las Vegas company built around the Andre Agassi and Stefanie Graf brands — has formed Let's Play, LLC, a wholly-owned facilities subsidiary, and named Jonathan Fornaci President. Fornaci brings 25+ years as a President/COO/CFO/CTO across tech and security, franchising, fitness, ecommerce and real estate, with multiple M&A deals under his belt.

The company laid out four growth pillars, all of them forward-looking: international master license agreements for country-level operators; hotel and resort partnerships; acquiring and converting existing U.S. pickleball and padel clubs (or partnering with select ones); and a planned global Let's Play Membership. Fornaci's pitch: players "are still often stuck with one club and one city at a time," and the goal is "one single membership that travels with them." CEO Ron Boreta says to expect more details "in the very near future."

The Primetime Take: We like the problem they're trying to solve. A membership that travels is exactly what the frequent-flyer padel crowd wants, and Agassi and Graf are about as blue-chip as racquet names get. But make no mistake: this is a plan, not a portfolio. The release names no closed club deals, no dollar figures and no acquired clubs, and it comes from an OTC microcap whose own risk language flags questions, the need to raise capital, a limited operating history and a lack of significant revenues. It's also a pickleball-and-padel play, not a padel-only bet. We'll be watching for the first signed deal. Until then, file it under "Let's see."

To read the whole release from ACCESS Newswire, click here.

October is officially padel's month. The first-ever National Padel Month, led by USA Padel, runs Oct 1–31 and rests on three parts: Learn To Play programs nationwide, the US Open Padel Championships and the first USA Padel Awards. USA Padel CEO Scott Colebourne says the goal is to grow the sport's footprint faster by driving awareness, lowering the barrier for first-timers and unifying clubs, coaches and brands under one October campaign. Why October? It anchors around the US Open, and fall weather is made for outdoor play.

The tentpole already went down: the US Open (USA Padel 2500) ran Oct 2–4 across Padel Haus NYC venues, with Division 1 main draws and all finals at Padel Haus Greenpoint in Brooklyn for the third straight year, plus the first live USA Padel Town Hall on Saturday, Oct 3. (We covered the sponsor and purse announcement back in August; finals streamed on USA Padel's YouTube.) For newcomers, the new Player Program Finder launched with nearly 80 clubs in 25 states (clinics, free trials, multi-week beginner courses and beginner socials) in markets like Brooklyn, Boston, Miami, Austin, Denver, Las Vegas and the Bay Area.

On infrastructure: per USA Padel, there were just over 1,000 courts across 31 states as of April. That's a different snapshot from the 1,110 courts across 38 states in the Misitrano report from last week's Deep Dive. Sanctioned open tournaments jump from 104 in 2025 to 255 on the 2026 schedule. Named partners include NOX, Mejorset, AFP Courts, World Padel Rating, Padel Haus, Van Eck, Sportsfield and Psycho Bunny.

The Primetime Take: Make no mistake: a national month is a marketing calendar, and a marketing calendar is exactly what this sport needed. For years, "padel season" in America meant whatever your local club felt like promoting. Now there's one month, one message and one big event in Brooklyn to rally around. The real hero is the Program Finder: "Where do I even go to try this?" is still the most common question we get, and nearly 80 clubs answering it at once is real progress. Tournament count more than doubling is the other tell.

To read the whole article from World Padel Network, click here.

For USA Padel's US Open details, click here.

Pop's Padel opened Oct 1 at 103 Mill Road in Freeport, NY, turning the former Long Island Sports Complex's indoor turf fields into a five-court, padel-only facility. Owner Jordan Diamond named the club in honor of his late father. A lifelong racket-sport player, he found padel about a year and a half ago while watching it on TV. "It's fast-paced, you can play the balls off the wall, it's so much fun," Diamond said. "It's an easy transition for anyone who played a racket sport." His summary of the sport: tennis plus squash plus racquetball plus pickleball.

Head pro Pepe Miralles, a former college tennis player who has played padel in Spain since he was 7, is focused on getting first-timers on court: "It's a very social sport. It's not as difficult as tennis, it's a little harder than pickleball. But it's very easy to pick up and it's very addictive." The club offers hourly rentals, memberships, and lessons and clinics for newcomers.

The Primetime Take: This is the racquet-mix explainer every metro needs. Miralles' line ("not as difficult as tennis, a little harder than pickleball") is the cleanest elevator pitch for padel we've heard in a while. It tells the tennis player they won't be bored and the pickleballer they won't be lost. Make no mistake: the people filling these five courts won't come from nowhere. They'll be Long Island's tennis, squash and pickle players looking for the next thing, and Pop's is set up to teach them. Turning an existing indoor sports building into glass is the kind of reuse we like, and naming it for your dad is the kind of story that builds a community. "We took a chance and think it's going to grow here," Diamond said. We hope he's right.

To read the whole article from Greater Long Island, click here.

PlaySight has been named Official Streaming & Video Partner for the second edition of the Anglo American Padel Cup, set for Feb 4–6, 2027 at The Replay Club in Palm Beach County, Florida. The concept: Great Britain vs. the United States, pitched in the lineage of the America's Cup, Davis Cup and Ryder Cup. PlaySight will handle Center Court production, live streaming to the Cup's YouTube or PlaySight TV, live digital scoring, sponsor logos and commercials across streams, highlights and replays, and automated highlights. It joins an existing partner stack of Playtomic, Babolat and VanEck.

Organizers report that the inaugural London edition (Oct 2025) reached an audience of 9.1 million across broadcast, digital and online; PlaySight CEO Chen Shachar cited "over 9 million" and called the USA and UK key markets. For 2027, the event expands to Open and Age Group (40s, 50s, 60s) divisions, grows the field from 64 to 104 players, and adds a new University Division.

The Primetime Take: Make no mistake: this is a deal about distribution, not dollars. It's a partnership announcement for an event four months away, not a raise. But it's the right order of operations. Sponsors buy eyeballs, and locking in professional production, live scoring and baked-in sponsor inventory before the first ball is struck is how a rivalry event becomes a property. The organizer-reported London audience gives them a number to sell against; Palm Beach is where they have to prove it on American soil. And that new University Division? Pair it with this week's Deep Dive and you can see the college pipeline starting to find real stages. We'll see you courtside in February, or on the stream.

To read the whole release from Padel 22, click here.