The other clubhouse.

■ Your words, not ours

“While Augusta is our flagship event, we leverage our core competency in hospitality through smaller, curated experiences throughout the year. These experiences reinforce customer loyalty, expand engagement with new partners, grow our brand, and highlight the differentiated nature of the Wheels Up offering.”

George Mattson · Q1 2026 Investor Letter, filed 11 May 2026

This is a proposal for one of those. Augusta is a week in April, in Georgia, built around golf. We are eight weeks in June and July, in Atlanta, twelve miles from your building — in the season your own 10-K names as your busiest, feeding the quarter it names as the one in which members buy.

“Our operations, including Flight revenue, have historically been favorably affected by increased utilization of our services in the summer months… we have historically experienced the highest volume of Membership Fund purchases in the fourth quarter of each calendar year.” — Wheels Up FY2025 Form 10-K.

■ The empty square

The word appears once in everything Wheels Up has ever filed.

Kenny Dichter, on an investor call in 2021, reaching for a way to describe the cheapest membership tier: “We think of it like a tennis membership at the golf club.” That is the entire tennis footprint of this company, and it was a metaphor.

Flexjet has tested this and doubled down. They joined the Laver Cup as a sponsor in June 2025 — their CMO saying the sport “resonates powerfully with our ultra-high net worth clientele” — and in June 2026 they came back and took the category title outright, as Official Private Aviation Sponsor. A year of evidence, then a bigger cheque.

NetJets is the tell in the other direction. Their only tennis page is about Owners who are competing in the US Open — they already fly the players, and they have never bought the sport.

Full-text search of every Wheels Up filing on EDGAR: “tennis” — one result. “Golf” — eighteen.

■ The city you moved to

Atlanta plays more league tennis than anywhere in the country, and has had no professional tennis since 2024.

The Atlanta Lawn Tennis Association was founded here in 1934 and describes itself as the largest tennis-based community organisation in the world, with roughly 60,000 members across the metro. Nationally, 27.3 million Americans played tennis last year and 39% of them live in households above $125,000 — an index of 147 against the general population, and about 10.6 million people.

The ATP’s Atlanta Open ran here for fourteen years and was gone from the calendar after July 2024. Since then this city has had no professional tennis at all, except ours — and this month Nielsen put Atlanta fifth on the list it published of America’s strongest tennis markets, behind New York, Miami, Palm Springs and West Palm Beach, on a nine-factor index covering US Open viewership, live attendance, participation and tennis-related travel.

Against golf, on the only scorecard neither sport wrote.

Both bodies publish flattering numbers about their own participants — ours included, and you should discount them accordingly. So here is the last occasion on which golf and tennis were measured on a single instrument and the household-income cross-tab was published openly: the National Sporting Goods Association’s participation study, reproduced by the US Census Bureau in its Statistical Abstract of the United States.

Tennis players were more concentrated in six-figure households than golfers, and third of the thirty-five activities measured. At $75,000 and above the two sports were a dead heat.

The number that argues against us is worth putting up too, because your team will find it: 39% of American tennis players play mainly in a public park, and only 17% at a private or country club. Tennis out-indexes golf on affluence while being played mostly on free courts — which is a stranger and more useful fact than the one a rate card would give you.

US Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2012, Table 1249, from NSGA Sports Participation — a questionnaire mailed to 10,000 households, participants aged 7+. The data year is 2009, and it is the most recent like-for-like measurement in open publication; the National Golf Foundation holds current golfer income behind membership. Venue and $125,000+ figures are the USTA’s 2026 participation report, drawn from the Physical Activity Council study — 18,000 interviews, independently fielded, though the USTA chooses which cut to publish.

■ What this actually is

Three women and three men, one score, an hour and forty minutes.

Every point counts the same whoever wins it, so the scoreboard never stops and the finish is rarely settled early. Two Arcs last season were decided by a single point. Forty-three Pro Arcs in 2026, sixty-five in 2027, every one carried live, inside a wider season of fifty-four Arcs.

The court is small and the crowd is on top of it. That is the part that matters for you: there is no upper bowl, no distance, no bad seat. It is a room, not a stadium — which is the only kind of venue where hospitality is the product rather than an add-on.

■ The proposal

A second clubhouse, and it runs for eight weeks instead of one.

Not a perimeter board. A member programme, built the way you already build them — and the reason to buy it is retention, not awareness.

VistaJet runs Vista House at Augusta and calls it “an intimate clubhouse” for members. You run yours in the same town in the same week. Both are four days, once a year, in a market with almost no commercial lift. This is the inverse trade — a lower peak, far more often, in a city you already operate from.

Signature entry is a $200,000 fund. On your own published spend model that is the entire annual private-flying budget of a household in the $10–50 million band. One member pays for a season of this several times over — which is the arithmetic that makes it a sales line rather than a marketing line.

■ The Delta question

You already share a building with them without sharing a deal.

Delta is your largest shareholder and lead strategic investor, with roughly 36% of the equity and voting rights capped at 29.9%. You served eleven years on that board and chaired its Finance Committee. So the obvious question about any sponsorship is whether it tangles with theirs.

It is already answered, by you. Inside State Farm Arena, Delta holds the Fly-Through Lanes and Wheels Up holds the courtside VIP entrance — two partners, one venue, different assets, different audiences. Delta buys the whole building. You buy the door only some people walk through.

Delta is the official airline of the Braves, the Falcons, Atlanta United, Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the Hawks, Georgia and Georgia Tech, and the official global airline of the PGA Tour. There is no tennis anywhere in that portfolio. We have written to them separately about the league; the two conversations do not depend on each other.

■ Who is already inside it

Every team carries a person, for the season.

When you signed Ben Griffin in January you did not talk about glamour. You talked about “a flexible travel approach that adapts to his life, whether navigating a demanding schedule or ensuring family can be by his side.” That is a description of almost everyone below — people who move constantly, for work, with families who would rather they did not.

A Pulse Partner is attached to one team, all season, in public. They are at the Arcs, they are in the room, and their audiences follow them there.

■ The ask

An hour, and we will bring the room plan.

You have said the hospitality platform is looking for new partners. This is one that sits in your own city, in your own season, in the only premium category your portfolio does not touch — and it is unclaimed because nobody has built professional tennis here before.

If it is worth a conversation, we will come with the full inventory, what each asset delivered in 2026 where we can prove it, and what a member programme would look like costed.