Sebastian: From a Few Words to Coaching Soccer in Japanese

I'm standing on a field an hour outside Yokohama, and I just told a 14-year-old to tuck in on the far post... in Japanese. He does it. Six months ago I couldn't have said that sentence with any confidence at all. Now it's just Tuesday practice.

I didn't come to Japan to coach soccer, and I definitely didn't come here speaking Japanese. That part started years earlier, and almost by accident.

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A Few Words, Just to Surprise Some Friends

Back in 2014, I moved from Colombia to Australia to study English. At the language school there, I met a group of Japanese students for the first time, and something about them stuck with me. It was how friendly they were, how polite, how seriously they took their own studies. I wanted to chat with them, so I asked them to teach me a few Japanese words. That's it. That was the whole plan.

Except it wasn't enough. The more time I spent with them, the more I wanted to actually talk with them, not just perform a few memorized phrases. So I tried teaching myself, piecing things together from whatever I could find online. Four weeks in, I wasn't getting better. I was getting more confused. And when I asked my newly made Japanese friends to explain why something worked the way it did, they genuinely couldn't tell me. They spoke the language, they'd never had to teach it. That's when I realized that I needed an actual course, not just patient friends.

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Eight Years Away

I didn't get there right away, though. My English studies ended, I moved into working life, and my Japanese friends went home to Japan one by one. Without them around every day, the motivation went with them. By 2015, I'd stopped entirely.

I didn't pick it back up again until 2023, almost eight years later, long after I met my Japanese partner and started seriously considering a move to Japan. That's when I decided to enroll as a student at Japademy, and this time, I actually did the thing I'd realized I needed back in 2014... I enrolled in a real course.

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Starting for Real, at Japademy

I placed into Pre-Intermediate 1, worked my way up through Intermediate 3, and I'm currently in the JLPT N4 Prep Course, with the actual exam in December. Along the way, Kanami-sensei, Reimi-sensei, and Yuko-sensei have all taught me at different points, and what's kept me coming back isn't just that they're good teachers, it's that you can tell from how a lesson is built, and what's in the materials, that someone actually wants you to make real progress. Not just finish a course.

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From the Classroom to the Sideline

That progress is the only reason the soccer job exists at all.

When I moved to Japan, I researched academies south of Yokohama, picked the one that felt like the right fit, and showed up in person to talk to the staff. Lucky for me, they spoke English, so the conversation happened. They asked me about my coaching background, my plans in Japan, and one direct question: was I confident enough to coach teenagers in Japanese? I said yes (honestly I wasn't but I wanted the job badly), and they gave me one session to prove it, alongside a native Japanese coach as backup. It went well enough that I could continue coaching and after 2 weeks I took over the U14 team on my own.

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What Six Months of Coaching Actually Taught Me

Six months later, I'm still coaching that team. We've traveled to tournaments around the Kanto region, spent three days camped near Mount Fuji for one of them, and somewhere in there, something shifted that had nothing to do with grammar. I didn't suddenly get better at conjugating verbs. What actually changed is that I stopped being afraid to open my mouth. Whatever vocabulary I have now moves from my brain to my mouth a lot faster than it used to, and I've picked up a whole layer of soccer-specific language just from needing to explain a pressing trap or a set piece to a group of teenagers who are looking at me, waiting.

That's the part I didn't expect going in. This job has taught me almost as much about how Japanese teenagers actually talk and act as any class ever did. It's turned Japan from somewhere I live into somewhere I'm actually part of. I'm not on the outside of my own life here anymore.

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What my future plans look like

The JLPT N4 exam is in December, and I'll take it as a Japademy student, same as I've been since 2023. But if you'd told the version of me in that Australian classroom, the one who just wanted to say a few words like こんにちわ (Konnichiwa) and ありがとう (Arigatou) to impress some new friends, that it would eventually get him a coaching job in Japan, in Japanese, I don't think he'd have believed you.

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Thank you for reading my story and I truly wish you enjoy your time learning Japanese whether it is just as a hobbie or you have a great goal in mind. 日本語がんばってください！

Kindly, Sebastian.