The Day It All Started With a Coffee
Before there were 33 clubs in 15 countries, there was a folding chair in Burriana’s town hall, a man who wouldn’t stop talking sense — and a coffee that got interrupted before it really began.
The room was full of folding chairs and one long table, big enough to seat about twenty-five people. Burriana’s town hall had called together the local sports clubs for one of those meetings that happen every so often — the kind where everyone updates everyone else on grants, facilities, and the small, unglamorous machinery that keeps grassroots sport running.
Telmo Tejedo was there as the kayak polo coach, not as anyone’s founder of anything yet. He sat next to Guillermo, the club president at the time, representing Club Kayak Polo Burriana the way he always had: showing up, paying attention, doing the work.
Across the table, a few seats to the left, sat a man representing several different sports entities from the city at once — the local futnet team, the artistic gymnastics club, and a couple of others besides. His name was Carlos Pallarés.
Telmo noticed him before anyone introduced them. Carlos spoke often during the meeting, and when he did, he spoke with the kind of precision that comes from actually knowing the subject — not reciting talking points, but understanding how grants worked, how facilities got funded, how a small club’s paperwork either opened doors or quietly closed them. What struck Telmo most wasn’t that Carlos was defending his own clubs well. It was that he seemed to be arguing for something bigger: for sport in the city as a whole, not just the interests sitting in his own chair.
When the meeting ended, Telmo didn’t wait. He crossed the room and introduced himself, and said — more or less — something he still remembers saying with a strange amount of certainty for someone meeting a stranger:
«I need to be around you. I need to work with you, because I can tell this is going to go well.»
It wasn’t a pitch. There was no plan behind it, no project, nothing to sell. Just a feeling that turned out to be worth following. Carlos gave him his contact details, and they agreed to grab a coffee that same week.
Neither of them knew it yet, but that coffee — messy as it was — would end up being the reason a project now working with 33 clubs in 15 countries exists at all.
The coffee itself was nothing cinematic. They arrived a little late, sat down, and barely got a few sentences into the conversation before Carlos’s phone started going off. It was one of those weeks — grant applications piling up, licenses to sort out, deadlines that don’t wait for anyone to finish their coffee. Telmo’s first real impression of Carlos wasn’t of a visionary or a future co-founder. It was of a very busy man, constantly being pulled in five directions by clubs that needed something from him.
There was no talk of Erasmus+ that day. No mention of international exchanges, of other countries, of travel. Kayak polo barely came up. What they actually talked about was far smaller and far more practical: how to find funding for Telmo’s club, how to improve its access to local and regional grants, what paperwork needed fixing, what boxes needed ticking to unlock a few extra points here and there in the endless bureaucracy that keeps a small club alive.
That practical, unglamorous work became the whole first year of their relationship. Carlos helped Telmo untangle documentation. He explained how the system worked, what mattered and what didn’t, which requirements were worth the effort. And — this is the part Telmo still points to — he did it without asking for anything in return. He simply trusted him, from early on, in a way that didn’t need to be earned twice.
It was only after that first year of grants, paperwork, and slow, patient improvement to Club Kayak Polo Burriana that the conversations between them started to widen. Erasmus+ hadn’t been part of the picture in that first meeting, or in that first coffee, or for most of that first year. It arrived later, almost as a side door opening in a conversation that had started somewhere else entirely — about subsidies, about documents, about how to make one small club in Burriana run a little better.
That’s usually how it goes with the things that end up mattering most. They rarely announce themselves at the start. Someone speaks well in a meeting. Someone else notices. A coffee gets scheduled, gets interrupted, gets finished anyway. And a year later, without either person planning it that way, the real conversation begins.
