In 1989 I launched the International Coaches Institute (ICI) with the aim of offering educational programmes, professional certification and related services to sports professionals in their respective professional areas: tennis (RPT) padel (RPP) golf (RPG), fitness (RPF) and pickleball (RPPk).
In 1998 my friend Emilio Sánchez Vicario world number seven in singles, world number one in doubles and silver medal in the Seoul Olympics, founded a tennis academy in Barcelona. The idea was to create opportunities not just in tennis, but in sports education and wider life skills. Many players train and study there every day to reach their dreams and some, such as Andy Murray, Kuznetsova, Mónaco and Dimitrov, have already succeeded, and others, thanks to their academic and athletic program, secured scholarships at prestigious American Universities.
Together we’ve developed many courses for tennis coaches, helping them to produce and develop junior players (12-18) and ATP and WTA professionals.
Emilio opened a new academy, the Emilio Sánchez Academy in Naples (Florida, USA) and in 2008, after carrying out a workshop for an important American multinational, we decided to put these ideas into action and create a training program ‘exclusively’ for managers and company directors. This had the aim of increasing their performance: taking the tools of top competitive sport and transferring them to the corporate world so that they could all reach an Ideal Competitive State.
During the return trip we took the decision to develop and offer courses for executives from around the world, and from this Corporate Athlete was born. Joining us were Gabriele Burgio, another good friend with a great deal of experience in the corporate world.
From then on, we created the rest of the team with the addition of Siw Viktoria Johansen, John Vigdal, Derek Touchette, Sergio Bonillo… We continued developing the methodology of the different formats we planned to offer under the Corporate Athlete brand: AC Full (2 days), AC Peak (1 day), AC Short (4h) and AC Keynote (2h).
During the last 17 years we are proud to have developed a Unique Corporate Experience in which more than 16.000 Senior Managers & Professionals from companies of all sizes have graduated.
Our mission remains the same: to continue training Corporate Athletes. That is: to help company professionals to reach a greater performance level, maximising their energy and developing a psychophysical state without sacrificing their personal life or health.
During 2024, another turning point occurs through two friends, Carlos Alonso and Emilio Colomina, whom we met through the padel industry. They introduced us to the team at People Excellence, a leading human resources consultancy. Together with Gianluca Balocco, Reyes Minaya, Francisco Iborra, and Marcos García, we have developed new programs and methodologies that will be launched in 2025 through the Corporate Training Institute.
We have outlined an ambitious growth plan in the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Asia… and we look forward to seeing you soon in one of our programs.
Luis Mediero
Corporate Athlete
Mission
Our mission is to offer executives the tools they need to develop and achieve their Ideal Competitive State and cope more effectively in high-stress environments, without sacrificing their personal life or health.
Vision
In a globalised world, professionals are the victims of an energy crisis: 24-hour days and 7-day weeks, combined with non-stop pressure. This means they have to make decisions anytime, anywhere and they need enough energy to carry this out successfully.
Our recipe is to manage your energy not your time. This is the key to getting extraordinary results, and in order to reach this in an effective way you have to train like an athlete, not an athlete on the sports field but a Corporate Athlete.
Our values
After more than 36 years training coaches in tennis, padel, golf, fitness and pickleball with +130,000 coaches in 131 countries, as well as producing players of world renown and prize-winning Davis Cup teams.
We have developed a series of training programs for executives and professionals, aimed at helping them achieve a higher level of performance and bring out their best every day.
Developing a complete range of materials and programmes, we’ve registered 20 educational patents which we’ve made available to Senior Managers and Professionals.
Always active in the development of sport, education and health, we have a team who are highly qualified in all the different aspects of these disciplines, now applied to the corporate world.
Our organisation offers executives the tools necessary to cope in highly stressed environments without sacrificing their personal life or health.
Our results show that more than 80% of executives who have attended our Corporate Athlete Programme have been able to make a significant change in their personal and professional lives.