The problem

In 2024 I was in my second year of web development at CIPFP Mislata, coaching padel in the afternoons. I lived in two worlds at once and they ignored each other.

Amateur padel gets recorded constantly. Almost nobody watches the footage back. A match lasts ninety minutes and the points worth studying are a handful. Watching ninety minutes to rescue twelve points is something nobody does. Not the player, not the coach.

Professionals have analysts to do that filtering for them. A club player has a huge video file and no time.

Padel was also growing fast, and the serious analysis tools were built for the professional circuit. None of them reached the neighbourhood club.

As a coach I knew the value of seeing the exact point where a match breaks. As a development student I was starting to see that a machine could find it.

The system

Padel IA Analytics was an AI that watched a full match and picked out the best points and moments. It added match statistics on top. It was aimed at amateur players and professionals alike.

The idea was easy to explain and hard to build. The machine watches the whole match. It returns what matters. A club player gets something close to what a professional gets from an analyst.

I built it with Xavier Ribera, my classmate in second year.

We entered the eighth edition of the Fem Futur awards, run by SECOT Valencia and funded by Caixa Popular. First prize. 1,400 euros. May 2024.

The school published a press release and it is still online. The prize was also picked up by Onda Cero, a national radio station.

SECOT is an association of retired senior professionals who mentor young projects. People with entire careers behind them putting a prize on the work of two students was worth more than the money.

We printed team shirts for the award ceremony. We took a class project very seriously.

Six months later I gave my first tech talk at the Sopra Tech Days, streamed live on Twitch. AI applied to sport. I walked through injury prediction by AWS in the NFL, IBM Watson at Wimbledon and Catapult in football. The case I knew best was my own.

What went wrong

Let me say it plainly. This was not a product. It was a vocational school prototype.

It had no customers. No infrastructure to scale. No real business model. It had a working demo and a jury to convince.

I could dress it up as an early startup that never took off. It was not one. Telling it any other way would start this portfolio with a small lie.

The project stayed a demo. I would not show that code today. That is part of telling it honestly too.

We did not know what to do with the prize beyond celebrating it either. No commercial plan, no next step. We were two students with a trophy and exams ahead.

The fair frame is the seed. The video analysis in every session at my academy starts here. The AI and sport talk starts here. The confidence to put real AI inside my CRM two years later starts here. Everything I have built since crosses padel and software, and the crossing began with this prototype.

The prize did not change the project. It changed my ambition. It was the first time someone from outside looked at the odd mix of court and code and gave it value in public. You cannot start a company with 1,400 euros. You can pick a direction with that signal, and I did.