Hiring a padel coach before your club is built

When José Maestro signed his contract, the club he had signed for did not exist yet. It was still being built, and then the build ran late. He moved anyway, he is still there, and he now runs their junior programme. That sequence is worth pulling apart, because hiring a padel coach before you have a court to show them is the position half of the new clubs in Asia and the Gulf are in. He answered our questions in Spanish and the quotations here are translated.

Hiring a padel coach who is bored, not desperate

"I was working at a club near home and I fancied a change of scene because it was getting very monotonous."

He was not underpaid, out of contract, or stuck. He had a stable job twenty minutes from his family and he was bored of it.

That is a large and mostly invisible part of the market. Nobody writes "I was bored" on an application, so clubs rarely see it, and it does not produce the urgency that makes a coach chase work. It does make them look, occasionally, at what exists. Whether your role is one of the things that exists at that moment is the entire game.

It also tells you what to put in the ad. A coach leaving monotony is not shopping for a bigger salary, they are shopping for different work: a new programme, a country they have never coached in, an age group they have not built before. Those are cheap things to offer and most listings omit them.

Two or three applications, and everyone replied

"I applied to 2 or 3, I do not remember, and all 2 or 3 contacted me, and two weeks or two and a half passed from applying to receiving the offer."

Every club he applied to came back, and the winner had an offer out in under three weeks. That puts it alongside the fastest sequence we have published, a Kuala Lumpur club that made an offer in fifteen days.

The lesson for the club that got him is not that they were lucky. Two or three clubs were interested in the same coach at the same time, and the one that got from application to offer in two and a half weeks is the one now running a junior programme with him in it. When several clubs want the same person, the process itself is the differentiator, and it is the only part of the competition you fully control.

He was hired on his attitude to the project, so have a project

"I did a couple of interviews with the owners and one more with the head coach, all by video call. I think they chose me because of my attitude towards the project they were proposing."

Read the second half of that. Not his attitude in general: his attitude towards the project they were proposing. They had described something specific enough to have an attitude about, and they picked the candidate who engaged with it.

A club with no courts yet cannot sell facilities, salary comparisons or a member base. What it can sell is the thing being built, and that turns out to be a real filter. Say what you are building, for whom, by when, and with how many courts, and candidates sort themselves: some respond to the plan and some only respond to the package. The first group is who you want when the opening date is uncertain.

Note the panel as well. Two conversations with the owners, one with the head coach, nobody else. That is most of why it was quick. The people who could say yes were the people in the room, which is a structural advantage a pre-opening club has and usually squanders.

Then the build slipped, and it did not cost them the coach

"It took a bit of time to move here because the club's construction was delayed a little. Nothing took me by surprise, it was all great and explained."

This is the sentence to take away.

Construction delays are not a risk to manage down to zero, they are the base case. The risk you can actually manage is the coach quietly re-entering the market during the gap, and the club that keeps them does one thing: it says what is happening before being asked.

Concretely, work out the answers to these before your first interview, because a good candidate will ask and a great one will judge you on the reply. If the opening moves by a month or two, who pays for their accommodation in the meantime? When does the contract start, the signature date or the opening date? What are they doing during the gap, and are they paid for it? Who tells them the schedule has moved, and how often do they hear from you between signing and flying?

A club that has thought about this answers in one go. A club that has not says the opening will not slip. Candidates who have done this before can tell the difference, and the ones who cannot are not the ones you want holding your programme together through a delayed launch.

The landing went well, which is not the same as it being easy

"The first weeks were a bit of a shock because of the cultural difference, but I was surprised by how nice people are here, and within a few weeks I felt like one of them."

Set that beside the coach who moved to Japan, whose first weeks were very difficult and who says some things are still complicated today. Two Spanish coaches, two Asian countries, two completely different landings.

So do not plan the arrival on the basis of what happened with your last hire, or on a general sense that a region is easy or hard. Plan it on the assumption that the first weeks will be a shock and be pleasantly wrong. What made this one work was other people being welcoming, which is not luck you can rely on but is something a club can arrange: the first thirty days of onboarding a foreign coach is the practical version.

What keeps him there is the junior programme

"My day to day is all kinds of classes, mostly children, and what I like most is the children's project because they have a lot of potential and it is very rewarding to help them however I can and be part of their journey."

"It has changed everything. Professionally, working in an academy is very different from a club. Financially the change has been incredible, and personally I think I am growing a lot too."

The money is good, and he mentions it second.

What he talks about first is a programme he can see progressing, which is worth noting if you are writing a role right now. Retention of a relocated coach is mostly a question of whether the job gets more interesting in year two, and "kids classes" and "a junior programme you will build" are the same hours described two ways. Only one of them survives a bad month.

Give the coach something that is theirs, name it in the listing, and give them a say in how it is run. That costs nothing and it is most of the reason a good coach stays after the novelty of the country wears off.

Where this leaves you

He would change nothing about it, and the only thing he wishes is that he had left his comfort zone sooner. From your side, none of what won him was expensive: a project described clearly enough to have an opinion about, a decision made by the people who could make it, an offer inside three weeks, and honest updates when the courts were late.

How hiring works for clubs covers what to put in a role before it goes live, and posting it works the same whether your courts are finished or still going up.