A pathway for local players — as a player, and as a coach
The Local Talent Program is how the Pad Thai Padel Academy brings local players in. Three months. Two things at once.
Coming from tennis? You do not need padel experience to start. Racket skills, footwork and court sense carry straight over — we teach you the walls, the positioning and the soft game.
Before anything else, see the place. This is Pad Thai Padel Academy — the courts, the coaches and the sessions you would be joining from your first week.
This is the environment, not a brochure. Real sessions, real players, the coaching staff you would work under, on the courts you would be standing on. Nothing in this clip was staged for it — it is a normal week at the academy.
It matters because the program is taught in person and nowhere else. You are not signing up to a curriculum, a video course or a certificate you print at the end. You are joining a place, and the level of that place is what you inherit — the standard on court, the way sessions are run, the players you warm up against.
Two academies, one method. Bangkok and Bali run the same system, the same session structure and the same level framework, so a coach trained in one can walk onto a court in the other and take a session on day one.
You are on court from the first week. Not observing from a classroom and not waiting for a cohort to fill — the intake is small precisely so that every person in it gets court time, a named mentor and a plan of their own.
Watch the clip with sound on. The coach talking is one of the people who would be training you.
These are the senior coaches across our academies in Thailand and Bali. They are the people who will train your game, and the people whose method you will learn to teach over the three months that follow.
Adrian is a sponsored professional, not a coach on this program — he competes under Pad Thai Padel on the Premier Padel circuit.
Three months, in two phases. Both of them run two tracks at the same time — your own training as a player, and your training as a coach. You never stop being a player here; you simply add coaching to it.
From day one you are working, not observing. You are in the academy helping with sessions, around the students and part of the team from the first week. Your own training runs alongside it, and your coaching moves from shadowing to running whole parts of a session under supervision.
From the start of month 3 you are an official Pad Thai Padel coach. On the team, coaching sessions across our clubs, with the academy’s coaches alongside you. Support steps back as you settle in — and your own training as a player carries on exactly as before.
Developing local talent is not something we started for this program — it is already where the academy puts its money.
Look around a padel court in Thailand and most of the strongest players — and almost all of the coaches — are foreigners. That is no criticism of them. It is simply where the sport is in its first years here. But it should not stay that way.
We want Thai players coaching Thai players, and Thai players competing at the top of Thai padel. So we are building them ourselves, at our own cost, instead of waiting for it to happen. Nobody else in the country runs a program like this — a structured pathway with real performance targets and a job at the end of it, inside the strongest academy in Thailand.
Good for the person who takes it. Good for the sport here.
The Asia Pacific Padel Cup. Thai players walking out behind the Thai flag, in Pad Thai Padel kit, with our coaches in their corner.
We enter them, we kit them, we travel with them and we cover it. When Thailand is represented at this level, the academy is usually standing behind it.
Most of the Thailand national team trains at Pad Thai Padel, and we sponsor the majority of them. That is not a marketing line — it is who is on our courts on a normal week.
This program is the same commitment pointed at the next generation: build the level here rather than import it.
So that is the program, the people and what sits behind it. Here is exactly what each side puts in, and the terms it runs on.
What we ask back: your commitment to the academy — three months of training, coaching from day one, and then your place on the team. Your time, your attention, your energy.
Every hour of mentoring, every court hour, every session you shadow or run is ours to cover — as a player and as a coach. No fee, and nothing else changes hands.
The job, the conditions and the terms are agreed and signed before your first session, so you know from day one what you are training towards and what you will be paid. There is no second negotiation and nothing is left to be decided later.
From month 3 you are an official coach working across our clubs, and you stay there once the three months are up — still an academy player, still training, still competing.
We finish with a session of your own and an honest conversation about how it went — what is working, and what you would still like more time on.
If three months turns out not to be quite enough to be ready, that is completely fine — we simply carry on. There is no deadline to be ready by.
Fill this in and we will read it. Nothing here is a contract — the employment terms are agreed and signed with you in person, after we have met.
We will contact you personally.