What Twenty Years in This Profession Taught Me

In the summer of 2006, I was twenty-two years old and walked into a tennis academy summer camp in Barcelona to work my first job in sports. I had passion, some textbook knowledge, and the kind of confidence that only comes from not yet understanding how little you know.

Twenty years later, I’ve worked with Olympic champions, co-founded a badminton academy, and collaborated with national federations across the world. If you’d told that kid in 2006 any of this, he would have laughed. The truth is, most of what got me here had nothing to do with talent or planning. It had to do with finding something that lit a fire in me, and then refusing to let it go out.

I want to be honest in this piece, because I think honesty is more useful than inspiration.

When I started working full-time in 2008, after finishing my degree in Physical Activity and Sports Science, I liked my job. I was at the Sanchez-Casal Tennis Academy in Barcelona, surrounded by colleagues at the same stage as me. We were all learning the basics, finding our way. It was comfortable. Too comfortable, looking back. There was no culture of challenge around us, no push to go deeper. I did my work, did it reasonably well, and could have stayed on that path for years without ever understanding what this profession really demands from you.

At some point, things shifted. A proper environment started to take shape within the department, one where people challenged each other, where the standard kept rising, where you couldn’t just coast. That environment forced me to ask myself a hard question: do I actually want to be great at this, or am I just here? I chose to go all in. And that changed the trajectory of everything that followed.

I was at Sanchez-Casal for nearly eight years. Year by year, I gained more experience, worked with better athletes, took on more responsibilities. The early mornings, the injured players, the parents with unrealistic expectations, the pressure. All of that taught me things no university course ever could. The biggest one: this job is about people. Every athlete carries a story with them. If you can only see the data and the program, you’re missing the most important part.

In 2016, I moved to China. Nanjing, first. I took over the Sports Performance Department at the Sanchez-Casal branch there. New country, new language, completely different sporting culture. I worked with players of all levels, including professional tennis player Zhang Zhe, and helped the Jiangsu provincial team prepare for the 2017 National Games. They won the championship. But the biggest thing China gave me was perspective. I realized there are many ways to approach training, many ways to see the world, and that mine was just one of them.

Two years later, in 2018, I got an opportunity I never expected: joining the Chinese National Badminton Team as the strength and conditioning and return-to-play coach. I worked with Zheng Siwei and Huang Yaqiong, Wang Yilyu and Huang Dongping, and Chen Yufei. I was the first foreign S&C coach inside the Chinese national team structure.

That came with privilege. It also came with a lot of resistance.

Some people feel attacked when you do things differently. It threatens their beliefs. The road was hard, and there were moments I wondered if it was worth the fight. But I’ve always thought that curiosity drives progress more than defending what you already know. So I kept going.

Between 2018 and the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, we won two World Championships, the Sudirman Cup, and then Olympic gold. Chen Yufei took the women’s singles title. Huang Dongping and Wang Yilyu won the mixed doubles. These were athletes I had worked with every single day, and watching them stand on top of the world was something I’ll carry with me forever.

But here’s where I need to be really honest.

The road to Tokyo was brutal. Injuries piled up. The pandemic hit. Isolation, uncertainty, problems that kept multiplying. By the time we got to the Games, I had nothing left in the tank. I didn’t enjoy the process, and that remains one of my biggest regrets. When the gold medals came, I didn’t feel joy. I felt relief. Like a weight had been lifted, finally, after everything we had been through. The victories were real and I’m eternally grateful for them, for everything I learned, and for those athletes who are still a deeply important part of my career. But that experience taught me something painful: if you don’t enjoy the journey, the destination feels hollow.

I went back to Spain. I was done. I genuinely believed I would never return to China.

Then Zheng Siwei and Huang Yaqiong hit the worst stretch of their careers. Painful defeats, injuries, their partnership falling apart, doubts about whether to even continue. We had built something beyond a professional relationship over the years, and that pulled me back. I came back because I felt I owed something to people who mattered to me.

What happened after was hard to believe. They came back from rock bottom and played the best badminton of their lives in 2022. For Paris, we decided to do everything differently. We built a truly multidisciplinary team where every professional had a voice. Every decision was grounded in evidence. We trained smart. We challenged old methods. We trusted the process when people around us had doubts. And this time, we actually enjoyed it.

In Paris, Zheng Siwei and Huang Yaqiong won gold. I also worked with Marvin Seidel and Anu Opeyori during their Olympic preparation, athletes who trusted me to help them arrive at the Games in peak condition. The gold medal was won in a day. What made it meaningful was the years behind it.

So, twenty years. What have I actually learned?

The thing about experience is that it doesn’t make you more certain. It makes you more doubtful. The longer I do this, the more questions I have, and I think that’s a good sign. Here’s what I’d want someone starting out to hear.

Find what sets you on fire. I spent my early years going through the motions, being competent but never passionate. When the right environment finally pushed me, I realized this profession could be so much more than a paycheck. If you haven’t found that fire yet, keep looking. And when you find it, protect it.

Seek environments where you feel uncomfortable. Every meaningful leap in my career happened when I was out of my depth. That discomfort is where growth lives. If you’re the most knowledgeable person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

Question everything. Including yourself. Especially yourself. What I believed five years ago looks naive to me now. What I believe today will probably look the same five years from here. That’s how it should be. The people who scare me in this profession are the ones who are absolutely sure they’re right. Learn from everyone, and pay special attention to people who think differently from you. The answer might be in the place you least expect.

Don’t rush. I see young graduates desperate to work with elite athletes right out of university. I get it. But it’s like your first car being a Ferrari. You know how to shift gears and park, but you learn to actually drive on busy roads, in chaotic traffic, using all five senses to avoid crashing. Build your foundation first. The shortcuts aren’t worth it.

And here’s something I think a lot about these days. We’re living through an explosion of technology in sports performance. We can measure and quantify almost everything now: load, recovery, heart rate variability, acceleration, deceleration, movement patterns. This is a huge step forward, and technology has genuinely helped us make better decisions. But I think we’ve swung too far in one direction. There’s a growing belief, especially among younger professionals who grew up with this technology, that if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count. Numbers feel safe. They give you certainty. I understand that instinct.

But training is messy. Athletes aren’t machines where you feed in an input and get a predictable output. They’re complex adaptive systems. Emergence, nonlinearity, feedback loops, the constant interaction between biology, psychology, environment. The complexity of what we do goes way beyond what any device or spreadsheet can capture. Perception, decision-making, emotional states, how the athlete interacts with their surroundings: all of this matters enormously, and none of it fits neatly into a number. I’m not arguing against technology. I use it every day. I’m arguing against letting it replace your ability to observe, to think critically, to understand the person standing in front of you. The best coaches I’ve met are the ones who can read the data and then look up from the screen and actually see the athlete.

Be a good person. Seriously. Empathy, teamwork, knowing how to listen. These aren’t optional extras. In this profession, they’re the foundation. When I look back at what matters most from these twenty years, it’s the relationships. The athletes I helped reach their goals, the people who taught me things, the friendships built in training halls across the world. All of that is worth infinitely more than any medal.

Today, I’m the co-founder of Zswing International Badminton Academy in Hangzhou. We’re building a training system for young athletes where education and personal development matter as much as performance on court. I work as an external expert with the Spanish Badminton Federation, support players from different countries remotely, and contribute to research projects. Along the way I also did a Master’s degree, never to collect another title, just because I wanted to keep learning in an academic environment. I’ve had the honor of presenting twice at the BWF Coaching Conference. Every one of these projects challenges me in a different way, and that’s exactly why I keep saying yes to them. After Paris, the easy thing would have been to coast. But that’s never been what drives me.

If you’re at the start of your career and you’ve read this far, here’s the last thing I’ll say. This profession will test you. Progress will feel painfully slow at times. You’ll question your choices. You’ll wonder if you’re good enough. All of that is normal. Stay curious. Stay humble. Remember that we work with people, not just with bodies and data.

I’ve been doing this for twenty years now, and I still don’t know where it’s going next. I’ve stopped pretending that bothers me. It doesn’t. It’s what keeps me going.