How to hire a padel coach who is not looking for a job

The padel coach you most want to hire is almost certainly employed right now, and reasonably happy about it. Antonio Jiménez was coaching in Italy, had already worked abroad once and had no complaints worth acting on. A club in Japan hired him anyway, on slightly less money than he was already earning, and he is now their head coach. He answered our questions in Spanish and the quotations here are translated.

The padel coach worth hiring is rarely the one hunting for work

"Before coming to Japan I was working as a padel coach in Italy. I already had international experience and I was doing fine, but I felt a bit stuck and I wanted to aim for something different and better."

"Doing fine, but stuck" is the market you are actually recruiting from. A coach in real trouble will find you on their own. A coach with fifteen years behind them and a job they are content in never writes to you speculatively, and does not search every week either. They look up occasionally, in a mood that lasts a few days, and see whatever is visible at that moment. If your role is not posted then, it does not exist as far as they are concerned. Clubs that only advertise during a crisis are fishing in the small pool of coaches who are also in a crisis.

He applied to exactly one club

"It was quite fast, honestly. I saw a listing on The Net, decided to try, and that was the first club I applied to. In about a month I had the offer on the table."

One application. The first one.

He was not comparing twelve offers and picking yours on salary. He was not in a process at all until a specific advertised role appeared in front of a coach who had been vaguely restless for a while. That also changes who you compete with: a coach applying to one club is comparing you with staying put, and staying put is beatable with a well described job.

Four interviews did not slow anything down

"I did three or four interviews and it all went very well."

"The whole process took about two months and there were no significant surprises, it was exactly as I expected."

Four conversations, two months, done. Compare that with the Kuala Lumpur hire that ran on two video calls and it is tempting to call this club slower. It was not. The number of calls is rarely what stretches a hire out; the gaps between them are. Four stages are defensible when the bet is this large, as long as you decide in advance what each one is for and keep the person who can approve the cost involved from the start. If you cannot name what a call tests that the previous call did not, cut it. The interview questions that reveal teaching ability covers what to spend those conversations on.

They chose him for being straight with them

"I think they chose me because I was direct and honest, and also because I had spent many years training and working."

He puts honesty first, ahead of fifteen years of experience, and that is a comment on your interview process as much as on him.

Across a video call, with an accent and a bad connection, what you can genuinely assess is narrow. Playing level does not come through. Court presence does not come through. What does come through is whether the candidate will tell you what they cannot do. "I have never run a performance group, but I have built two beginner schools from nothing" is checkable. A coach who says yes to everything has given you nothing, and yes-to-everything is what a badly run interview rewards. If every one of your questions can be answered with a confident yes, you are testing confidence.

Fifteen years, including the part-time ones

"I got my coaching qualification at 16, I am 31 now, and for practically my whole life I have combined studying and working while teaching, first part-time and then full-time."

That was the second reason the club gave him, and most CVs hide half of it. Coaches typically start theirs at the first full-time job and delete everything before it, but the Saturday-morning groups taught at nineteen while at university are where somebody learns to hold a court of beginners together unsupervised, which is the exact skill a club in a young padel market needs most. If a candidate's CV starts at 25, ask what they were doing at 19. None of the four coach stories we have published was chosen for playing level.

A clean process does not buy you a settled coach

"The first weeks were very difficult. Adapting to Japan is hard because the culture is completely different from the European one. Even today there are still things that are complicated, but little by little you get used to it."

Set that beside "no significant surprises, exactly as I expected" and you have the most useful pair of sentences in the interview. Your process behaved. The country did not. Doing the first well buys you nothing on the second. Note also that he had already worked abroad, and Italy did not prepare him for this, because Japan is not "abroad, further away", it is a different set of unwritten rules. If your instinct is that an experienced expat coach will settle themselves, drop it.

The club's job therefore does not end at the airport, and the things that help are unglamorous: someone whose job it is to be that person's problem for the first month, an introduction to another foreigner who has already done it, help with the bank and the phone contract, and a first-weeks schedule with room in it for the admin of existing in a new country. The first thirty days of onboarding a foreign coach puts dates on that. He told us it is still complicated today, and he is still there, running the coaching. Difficult first months are not a failed hire; being surprised by them is how clubs lose a coach in month four.

He took a pay cut, and it worked

"I am head coach now. I work five days a week, two off, and my job is teaching and managing part of the section. What I like most is the freedom I have to work and organise myself."

"Professionally I have more responsibility and personally I am much less physically tired than before. Financially I earn slightly less, but in exchange my quality of life has improved."

This is the first story we have published where the coach earns less than before the move, and it is the most useful thing here for any club that cannot win on salary.

Look at what he was paid in instead: two days off a week, materially less physical load, the head coach title with real responsibility, and autonomy over how he organises his work. Those cost far less than a bigger salary and are worth more to a coach of 31 with fifteen years on court than most clubs realise. Court hours are what ends coaching careers, and a role converting some of them into responsibility is scarce.

Almost no listing mentions any of this. If you are competing against markets that pay better, put the days off, the title, the split between teaching and managing, and the autonomy into the role in writing, because they are the reason a coach who is doing fine would take your offer.

The money he did not negotiate is your risk too

"I would negotiate the financial conditions a bit more before coming. I would also have liked to understand better how the market works here. Things like taxes and the yen exchange rate matter."

Read that as a warning about your own hire, not just about his.

A coach who works out six months in that the number was worse than they understood is a coach who resigns in month ten, and you pay for that twice: the flight and visa already spent, and the season you spend replacing them. He is content, and he is still telling you the financial conversation was the thin part of an otherwise good process.

Volunteering this costs nothing and closes candidates. Give the net figure rather than the gross, say who withholds what and from when, and tell them what a coach at their level typically earns locally so the number has a reference point. If they will send money home or plan to return, say out loud that the exchange rate moves and their salary in euros moves with it. His own advice to coaches is to settle salary, housing, taxes and everything contractual before signing, and a club with those four answers ready in the second interview looks like one that has done this before.

Where this leaves you

Nothing in this hire was clever. A role that was visible when a settled coach happened to look, four conversations with a purpose, an honest description of the process, and a package that traded salary for time and responsibility. The one part he would redo is the money conversation, and that one is free to fix.

How hiring works for clubs sets out what a role should contain before it goes live. If the position is already clear in your head, posting it is what puts it in front of the coach who was not otherwise going to write to you.