"We're adapting with the times, without giving up an ounce of tennis." That's Jonathan Barth, Kiawah Island Golf Resort's Director of Tennis, describing what happened at the Roy Barth Tennis Center over the past twelve months. The quote made the rounds in resort marketing copy tied to the new padel courts. But the courts aren't actually the story. The story is what had to happen structurally before two padel courts could exist at all.
The center's new clubhouse turned one earlier this month. It opened on September 18, 2025, with a pro shop, an outdoor patio built for lingering, a courtside café, and dedicated classroom and fitness space for the Barth-Hawtin Tennis Academy. The two padel courts followed a few weeks later, landing in mid-October. If you've played there this fall and noticed the place feels different, that's why. But the padel courts are the visible part of a longer, quieter consolidation that's easy to miss if you weren't watching the tennis center over the last eight years.
Padel Followed the Pickleball Playbook Exactly
Pickleball didn't arrive at Roy Barth as a dedicated facility. It arrived in 2018 as blended lines painted onto four existing hard tennis courts, a low-commitment way to test whether the sport had staying power on an island built around clay and grass-stroke tennis. It did. The blended lines eventually gave way to purpose-built pickleball courts, and by 2024 the resort had formally expanded the program into what the facility now counts as six dedicated pickleball courts, complete with clinics, round robins, and junior camps.
Padel got the same treatment, compressed into a shorter window. One tennis center write-up put it plainly: what started as a temporary offer to guests and members is now a fully embedded program within the Roy Barth Tennis Center. Two courts, introductory clinics, private lessons, the same rollout logic pickleball used, just faster, because the resort already had a proof of concept sitting on the ledger from the first sport it welcomed in this way.
That's worth knowing if you're wondering whether padel is a passing amenity or something built to last. The facility's own history says the second one.
One Address Instead of Two
Here's the part that actually changes how you book a court, not just what sport you can play on it.
Until 2018, Kiawah's racquet sports were split across two clubs. West Beach had its own tennis center. So did the property now known simply as Roy Barth, on the East Beach side. The West Beach location was demolished that year to make room for West Beach's broader expansion, and its courts were folded into a single, consolidated facility at East Beach. The result, according to a nearby community's own tennis program description, is 24 courts under one roof and one reservation system.
The current tally at Roy Barth breaks down like this:
- 22 tennis courts, including 10 Har-Tru clay
- 6 pickleball courts
- 2 padel courts
Three sports, thirty courts, one phone number to call for any of them (843-768-2838). Before 2018, getting a tennis court and finding pickleball or padel access meant navigating two separate operations with two separate booking calendars. That friction is gone now. If you split your week between clay tennis on Tuesday and a padel clinic on Thursday, you're dealing with one pro shop, one scheduling system, and one parking lot, not two.
The Same Family, Fifty Years In
There's a continuity thread here that the resort's 50th anniversary this year makes easy to see. Roy Barth directed tennis operations at Kiawah from the moment the resort opened its doors in May 1976, the same year the original 78-room Kiawah Island Inn welcomed its first guests. He's a founding member of the ATP Tour. He's now in an emeritus role, occasionally still walking the courts to offer an impromptu tip, but his son Jonathan has run the center's day-to-day tennis operations for years, and it's Jonathan's name attached to both the pickleball expansion and the padel rollout.
Bruce Hawtin directs the Barth-Hawtin Tennis Academy housed in the new clubhouse, and he's described the space as finally giving the academy a turnkey setup: on-court training, academic coursework, and strength and conditioning work all steps apart instead of scattered across the property. For a family that's run this program since the resort's first year, the new building reads less like a renovation and more like consolidation of a legacy that was already 49 years deep before the ribbon got cut.
None of that history is decoration. It's the reason TennisResortsOnline has kept Kiawah on its Top 100 list for more than fifteen years running and currently ranks the resort the number one tennis destination in the world. A facility can add courts. It's harder to add five decades of the same family running the program.
What a Regular Actually Notices
The physical setting hasn't changed much, and that's by design. The courts still sit in a rough semicircle around the pro shop, bordered by pine, palmetto, and oleander, with awning-covered patios between each pair of courts for shade and a water stop between sets. What's different is what happens after you walk off the court.
The old pro shop is gone, replaced by a clubhouse built to hold you there longer: TVs on the outdoor patio, food service that goes beyond a vending machine, a locker room with a calmer finish than the old one. If your afternoon used to be tennis, then straight to the car, the new layout is built for tennis, then a plate of something and a conversation with whoever you just played, then maybe a look at the padel schedule for later in the week.
The tournament crowding that longtime players have complained about for years, courts booked solid for days at a stretch during a big event, hasn't disappeared. That's a function of demand, not layout. But at least now there's a single clubhouse to wait it out in in comfort, rather than a bare-bones shop with nowhere to sit.
What This Means If You Play There
If you haven't been out to Roy Barth since before last September, the difference isn't cosmetic. It's structural. Padel didn't get bolted onto an existing tennis operation as an afterthought. It arrived through the same slow-build process pickleball used starting in 2018, on a facility that had already spent years consolidating from two clubs into one so a change like this could happen under a single roof instead of two.
If you're weighing how island life actually functions day to day, not the version in a brochure but the version where you're deciding whether to squeeze in a Thursday padel clinic before dinner, that's the kind of detail worth knowing before you assume the new courts are just another amenity line on a resort fact sheet.
Details like this, the ones that only show up if you're tracking the island closely, are exactly what Charleston Beach Life follows for people who already call Kiawah home or are thinking about what that would mean. If you want a longer conversation about how the island's amenities, tennis included, actually fit into daily life here, Schedule a Free Consultation.
