Mediterra Sports Lifestyle Center Update: What to Know

Walk the cart path past the Piazza this month and the construction fencing is impossible to miss. Six months ago this was open ground next to the Sports Club. Today it's an active build site for a $38 million project the club started in February. If you're a Mediterra resident, you've probably already asked the obvious question. What happens to my tennis lesson, my Tuesday lap swim, my dinner reservation at the Tavern while all of this goes up?

The short answer, based on how the club has sequenced the work and how it has handled every expansion before this one, is: less than you'd think. That's the part of this story that hasn't been told yet, and it's the part that actually matters if you live here.

What's Actually Under Construction

The Club at Mediterra broke ground on its new Sports & Lifestyle Center on February 23, 2026, with crews beginning excavation and pouring foundation footings and walls in the Piazza area. By mid-March, the club's leadership, including General Manager and COO Carmen Mauceri, was describing the project publicly as a long-term investment in member experience, with foundational work continuing as the complex's first phases took shape.

The finished complex, targeted for completion by summer 2028, is being built by the commercial contractor BUILD, with architecture from David Corban Architects, interiors from HINT | Harris Interiors, and landscape design from LJA Engineering. It's a two-phase project:

• A roughly 27,000-square-foot Fitness & Wellness building in the Piazza, with a 5,600-square-foot fitness center, dedicated yoga, spin, and Pilates studios, a physical therapy and training studio, and a 2,000-square-foot spa with treatment rooms, infrared saunas, and a cold plunge pool.
• A second building of about 6,000 square feet built on part of the existing Sports Club site, adding a resort-style pool, a casual dining and bar area, and room for future racquet court expansion.

Outside, the plans call for a new bocce garden, covered and uncovered terraces overlooking the grand lawn, an outdoor fitness area, and an entrance sequence with a porte cochere, a grand staircase, and a cupola that echoes the rest of the community's European detailing.

Why the Pool Didn't Close

Here's the detail that explains why most members haven't felt this project yet. Phase 1, the Fitness & Wellness building, is going up on open Piazza ground. It doesn't touch the current Sports Club or its pool at all. Only in Phase 2 does construction move onto the existing Sports Club's footprint, and even then it occupies about 36 percent of that site, not the whole thing.

That sequencing is why Phase 1 has been described in the club's own project materials as not disrupting use of the current Sports Club and pool at all. It's a deliberate build order, not a lucky accident. You don't touch the amenity people use every day until the replacement for it is far enough along that the gap barely registers.

Mauceri put the intent behind the project simply: it's designed, in her words, to reflect "how our members live today." Reading the phasing plan, that's not just marketing language. Somebody sat down and mapped which buildings could go up without ever pulling a court or a pool out of daily rotation.

This Isn't the Club's First Expansion, and That's the Point

Residents who've been here more than a few years have watched this pattern before. The Tavern, the casual outdoor dining spot by the 19th hole, was added in 2008. The kitchen and Grille Room were updated in 2013. Both golf courses got playability and durability work in 2016. A two-phase clubhouse expansion added roughly 24,000 square feet in one phase, with a further 7,000-square-foot renovation of existing space following. The Tavern Terrace itself later doubled in size, adding about 1,400 square feet and swapping a temporary awning for a permanent roof with a clerestory that lets in natural light.

Every one of those projects was funded through the club's reserves rather than a special assessment on members. That funding model matters more than the square footage totals, because it tells you how the club thinks about paying for amenities: steadily, from money already set aside, rather than through a surprise bill tied to a specific project. The Sports & Lifestyle Center is being built the same way its predecessors were. If you're wondering whether this expansion means a knock on your door asking for a check, the club's own history says that's not how it operates.

What This Actually Changes for a Regular Week

For most members, the visible difference right now is limited to fencing, a rerouted path near the Sports Club, and the sound of steel going up if your morning walk takes you past the Piazza. The courts you use, the pool you swim in, and the Tavern where you grab lunch after nine holes are all still there, doing what they've always done.

That matters because Mediterra's daily rhythm depends on those spaces staying in use. Tennis alone draws nearly 200 members playing on a regular basis across the club's eight Har-Tru courts, including a stadium court and a coliseum court. The bocce program, with courts built by noted court designer Tony Ritzman, has drawn more than 500 members a year since it started in 2010. None of that traffic gets displaced by a project engineered to avoid displacing it.

What does change, gradually, is what's available once the doors open. A dedicated spa with a cold plunge and infrared saunas. Studio space built specifically for group fitness instead of retrofitted into whatever room was free. A second pool built for both exercise laps and casual recreation, something the current single pool has always had to split. None of that replaces what's here today. It adds to it, on a timeline that stretches out to 2028 rather than landing all at once.

The Rest of the Neighborhood Hasn't Paused

It's worth remembering that the Piazza is one corner of a much larger community that hasn't slowed down for any of this. The eight miles of trails still loop past Parque Celestial, the three-acre park where a spiral labyrinth and an interactive sundial sit under a stargazing pavilion with an open metalwork ceiling. Parterre Garden's reflecting pool, ringed by eighteen frog fountains, is still there for anyone who wants a quiet bench and a book. Calusa Play Park, built around a protected archaeological site honoring the Calusa people who lived on this land first, still has kids digging through shell mounds for shark teeth on weekend mornings.

Construction fencing around one building doesn't change the walk you take before breakfast or the spot where your kids dig for fossils on a Saturday. It's a multi-year project happening inside a community that's been adding to itself in careful stages for close to two decades, and so far it's following that same pattern almost exactly.

If you're curious about what a project like this means for property values or timing a sale in the years ahead, that's a longer conversation, and one Michelle Trawick has with Mediterra owners regularly. For now, if you just wanted to know whether your Tuesday tennis match is safe, it is. Let's Connect if you'd like to talk through what's next for the neighborhood, on your schedule, no pressure attached.