Girls from youth teams have taken part in training sessions with similar-aged basketball players
A fun day out for the young Yellows! Girls from the Villarreal academy teams enjoyed a training session with their Vila-real Bàsquet Club peers at the local Bancaixa Pavilion, where the girls from the basketball club usually play and train. The Yellows had a great time, but this partnership does not end here. The basketball players will soon be going to the José Manuel Llaneza Training Ground to try their hand at football.
The day was great fun for both teams. “We have come to share space and training. I think it’s a great experience for our players. They’ve had a lot of fun and have been asking when the basketball girls are coming to train with us,” said Villarreal Women’s psychologist Jahel Molina. For her part, the sports director of Vila-real BC, Trini Bou, agreed with Molina in this aspect: “It has been a spectacular day. It is a huge commitment to female sport. It is one of the practices that will make girls want to do sport. They had been training for an hour and hadn’t even asked for water, a sign that they were having a great time.
Early specialisation or multi-sport?
The debate about whether youth sport should be based on the early specialisation of children in a particular discipline or whether they should play a variety of sports is an ongoing one. Rubén Calvo is a fitness coach of both clubs, Vila-real BC and in the girls’ section of the Submarine’s academy. Calvo said during the session that “the training we are proposing benefits the overall development of the girls because it has been proven that early specialisation can lead to injuries and does not benefit development as much as facing many stimuli. Here, for example, the use of the hands. This can be extrapolated to any sporting discipline. We believe that sessions like this benefit the players of both clubs.”
Molina also saw this practice as “a very good opportunity for us because it brings us closer to learning about other sports that can be beneficial for the growth of our players, both in terms of movements and knowing how they work, especially in these early stages.”
Endavant Vila-real BC
This recreational action was part of the Endavant project, of which the basketball club is a member: “Thanks to the Endavant project we can do things like this. Obviously, they provide us with an economic part that makes us grow and gives small clubs like this one an important boost, as well as activities like this one, which the girls have a great time with,” said a grateful Bou.
It is worth remembering that the Vila-real Bàsquet Club, the only women’s club in the city of Vila-real, which was founded in 1993 with the aim of welcoming girls who wanted to play basketball in the town, is one of the clubs integrated in the Endavant Esports project and has the support of Villarreal CF. When it was born, Vila-real had not had a women’s basketball team for five years, which is why the entity recovered this collective sports service for young basketball players in the town. It currently has 13 teams in eight different sides, including the incrEDIbles team, for users with intellectual disabilities.
