Words: Thomas Connor
Imagery: Noemie Rodrigues
From the balcony above the courts at Jeu de Paume Club, Henri Saniez has a view most coaches would envy.
Light spills through the glass roof and settles softly on the varnished floors below. In Paris, where sunlight is never guaranteed, it feels like a small daily victory.
“I think I am very lucky,” he says. “I’m able to play with the sunlight every day when there’s sun in Paris.”
It is an image that speaks, quietly but precisely, to the past 12 months of his life. A year ago, Henri was not here. He was in an office, chasing debts, measuring his worth in percentages and overdue invoices. Today, he is the head squash coach at one of the city’s most storied clubs, his days shaped not by spreadsheets but by movement, noise, and the rhythm of a ball striking the front wall.
It is not simply a change of job. It is a reorientation of self.
There is a particular kind of fatigue that comes from work that never quite feels like yours. Henri recognises it now in hindsight.
After finishing school, he followed a path that made sense on paper. Food and health studies in Beauvais. A pivot into finance. Then a role in debt recovery at a fast-growing French startup, chasing payments between major corporations and freelancers. It was, in theory, a position of responsibility.
His portfolio ran into the tens of millions. In practice, it was something else.
“During the day,” he says, “I was sending emails and trying to figure out why big companies were not paying the freelancer.”
It meant calls, escalation, pressure. It meant improvisation too – “trying to find private phone numbers, private email addresses… telling them, ‘If you’re not paying, we go to justice.’”
At first, there was a certain thrill. The freedom to solve problems his own way. The satisfaction of results. But as the company grew, so too did the systems. The oversight. The process.
“They changed that,” he says. “They wanted to know everything about how I was working. And the process was just too….. heavy.”
He pauses, searching for the right phrasing. “They just put me in a jail.”
“My portfolio was about 20 million euros that I needed to recover every month. Every month, the same thing. The same conversations. You are talking, but it is like you are talking to a wall.”
It is not an uncommon story, but it is rarely told with such bluntness. The slow erosion of autonomy. The creeping sense that what you are doing, however well you are doing it, is not quite what you are meant to be doing.
For Henri, the realisation came not as a dramatic epiphany but as a steady accumulation. Work became repetition. Conversation became negotiation. Everything, ultimately, came back to money.
And somewhere in the background, almost unnoticed at first, squash returned.
Henri was born into the sport. His parents were both immersed in it, competing at masters level. His mother, Marie-Hélène, still plays with the same energy now, a reigning French champion in the over-65s category. Squash, in that sense, was always there.
But it was also, for a time, something he rejected.
“As a child, I was going every weekend with my mother and my father,” he says.
“But I didn’t want it to be my sport. It was too much pressure. I needed to choose it myself.”
He drifted instead towards football and badminton, sports that allowed a different kind of freedom, a different relationship with competition.
Squash lingered on the periphery. Weekends at the club. Occasional sessions. A presence rather than a passion.
It was not until his early twenties, in the strange suspended time between lockdowns, that something shifted. He began to play more regularly. Then obsessively.
“Five or six sessions per week,” he says. “I was improving a lot.”
What began as a return became something closer to immersion. He travelled for matches. Played in teams. Chased improvement with a kind of quiet urgency. The competitive instinct, long dormant, resurfaced.
“I love the competition,” he says simply.
But it was not just about playing. It was about understanding. Henri watched the game with forensic attention. Slowing down footage, frame by frame, studying footwork, timing, the subtle mechanics of elite players.
“Every highlight on YouTube, I would watch it frame by frame - I was looking at everything the best players do to try and learn as much as possible,” he says. “Now I can do it at normal speed, but before… I looked at how they move their feet, when they start the swing, when they jump, everything. I wanted to understand, not just play.”
There is something revealing in that. Not just a desire to improve, but a need to decode. To inhabit the sport fully, intellectually as well as physically.
And perhaps, without fully realising it, to reclaim something that had once been taken from him.
The turning point, when it came, was almost disarmingly simple.
At Jeu de Paume, the club manager, Lilian Vilmar de Murs, saw something in him. A seriousness. A presence. The outline of a different kind of future.
“He said, ‘I need a coach full-time. Are you in or not?’” Henri recalls.
It is easy, in retrospect, to frame such moments as destiny. In reality, they are often messier. Henri was not in a particularly stable place. His job no longer satisfied him. His relationship had just ended.
The ground beneath him, in more ways than one, had shifted.
“I was alone,” he says. “So I said, ‘What do I want to do every day of my life?’”
The answer came quickly: “Play squash.”
The logic that followed was both naïve and entirely rational. If he wanted to play squash every day, he would need to build a life around it. Coaching offered a route. A way to turn passion into structure.
“So I said, ‘Okay. I need to become coach of squash.’”
There is courage in that simplicity. Not the grand, cinematic kind, but the quieter version: the willingness to step away from something secure towards something uncertain, guided only by instinct and a sense of alignment.
Henri committed fully. He obtained his qualifications. Threw himself into learning, into teaching, into building something that felt, finally, like his own.
Within a year, he was the club’s head coach.
The transformation is most visible not in titles, but in texture. Henri’s days are now full in a different way. Not with emails and deadlines, but with people. Movement. Conversation. Noise.
On Wednesday afternoons, the junior programme has grown from 15 children to 40. Nearby schools send classes each week. More than 100 children pass through the club regularly, aged between six and seventeen. Many arrive with little knowledge of the sport. Most leave with something closer to enthusiasm.
“The parents come,” he says. “They try squash. They play together. It’s good for the club.”
He works across levels. Beginners and advanced players. Group sessions and private lessons. Competitive teams and social evenings. There is, increasingly, a strong female presence within the programme. A shift, perhaps, in the culture of the club.
And always, there is the same underlying principle.
“I just want to share my passion,” he says. “I want them to have the fun of squash as I see the sport.
“When I coach, I don’t want to just feed balls. I run, I play, I show them how I see squash. I want them to feel it, not just learn it.”
It is easy to dismiss such statements as cliché. In Henri’s case, they feel earned. His coaching is not passive. He does not feed balls from a static position. He runs. Demonstrates. Competes within the session itself.
“I’m not just pushing the ball,” he says. “I run on every point.”
There is a sense that, for now at least, he is living the sport as much as teaching it. That the line between coach and player remains deliberately blurred.
“I know maybe in five years it won’t be possible,” he says. “But for the moment… that’s what I love.”
There are, inevitably, moments when the new life collides with the unexpected.
One morning, Henri arrived at the club to be told he would be coaching a group of actors for an upcoming film. It was, in itself, not unusual. Paris, after all, has a way of folding the cinematic into the everyday.
Then he saw her.
“I say, ‘Okay… it’s Halle Berry. So react normal. Be natural.’”
He laughs at the memory. The attempt at composure. The internal recalibration.
“I go to the bar and I say, ‘Okay, focus. It’s the best thing to happen ever.’
“I was running in front of the court and they said, ‘This is the actress.’ And in my head I was like, ‘Okay, this is Halle Berry… just be normal.’”
For an hour and a half, they played. Later, he was asked to assist further, helping choreograph sequences, feeding balls for camera angles. There is even the promise of a premiere invitation somewhere down the line.
It is, undeniably, a good story. The kind that lends itself to neat narrative arcs. Office worker to coach. Anonymous to, briefly, adjacent to celebrity.
But to focus solely on that would be to miss the point. Because the real transformation is quieter. Less visible. It exists in the accumulation of ordinary days that now feel, to Henri, anything but ordinary.
Back on the balcony, the courts below fill and empty in a steady rhythm. Children, adults, beginners, competitors. Each carrying their own version of the game.
Henri moves between them. Coaching, correcting, encouraging. Occasionally stepping in to play, to demonstrate, to inhabit the rally himself.
He is, by his own admission, still ambitious. There are targets. A desire to break into the top 50 players in France. To coach at a higher level. Perhaps even internationally. These are not idle thoughts, but active directions.
“As a player, I want to see how far I can go. Maybe top 50 in France. And as a coach, maybe one day a national team, maybe another country. I want to try and see how much I can get out of myself while I have this opportnity.”
And yet, there is also a sense of contentment that sits alongside that ambition. A recognition that, for now, he is where he is supposed to be.
The past year has given him something that the previous one could not: alignment.
Work that reflects interest. Effort that produces not just results, but satisfaction. Days that feel, in their own small way, like progress.
“I just want to make this sport more famous,” he says.
“For me now, it’s simple. I wake up, I go to the club, I play squash, I teach squash. That’s my life. And I’m happy with that.”
It is a modest ambition, phrased without grandiosity. But it carries within it the essence of his journey. To take something that once pushed him away, and to return to it on his own terms. To build a life not around obligation, but around choice.
In the end, the story is not about escape, or reinvention, or even success in the conventional sense. It is about recognition.
Of what matters. Of what endures. Of the quiet, persistent pull of something that, once rediscovered, refuses to be ignored.
And on a sunlit court in Paris, that recognition has found its shape.
