"In Romania, girls want to play handball for a living. Here, I couldn't even consider it."

GranollersJudith Vizuete (Granollers, 1995) is preparing for the season in which she will return to play handball for the club in her hometown, where she trained, after six years. With her signing, BM Granollers has announced the return of the club's all-time leading scorer, In her last season at Vallès, she was the highest-scoring player in the women's premier league. She reiterates that she's eager to "return home" and admits to feeling "proud" to have been welcomed with open arms. During this time away from Granollers, she has made the leap to professional handball, first in the Canary Islands, with BM Salud de Tenerife, and then in Romania, with Cluj-Napoca, CS Mioveni, and CS Magura Cisnadei.

Being able to dedicate herself to handball professionally was what sent her to Tenerife and later to Romania, a country where she has found a firm commitment from clubs to women's teams: "There, girls, from a young age, want to play handball because they know that men are paid better and the desire is more like their lives, the players are ...

In any case, a very different reality from that of Catalan women's handball and that of first division players throughout Spain: "In Romania, the youngest player, who has just started in the first team, already earns around 1,000 euros. I think back to when I was 17 or 18 and played for Granollers, and I played for Granollers, and it would have allowed me to focus only on this."

However, she says that since she left, she was clear that it would be temporary. "Everywhere I've gone, I've said I'm from Granollers, 25 minutes away in Barcelona, and everyone tells me 'how great, what a great life you have there.' Yes, but in Granollers, I couldn't even consider making a living from handball. With the offer from Tenerife, that weighed heavily, because I understood that that way I could achieve it."

The word she repeats most often to explain what it's like to play in the Romanian first division is "pressure." The emotional part of training has been the hardest, and she believes her Romanian teammates were already "sufficiently accustomed to it, having grown up with more authoritarian coaches" than the ones she had had. She remembers being booed for not getting the expected results and threats to "cut off the tap" to the players and leave them without pay. "If we lost a match, the mayor would come and scold us." The mayor, because some cities allocate a significant portion of their municipal budget to funding local clubs. "At first, luckily, I didn't understand much of what they were saying to us because I didn't speak the language," and she jokes that her teammates didn't translate literally, but rather more gently.

Having already learned Romanian, she came across someone she doesn't hesitate to describe as the worst coach of her life. "He put a lot of pressure on me and didn't trust me. That destroyed me. Sometimes I would call my mother and say, 'I don't want to be here anymore.' Little by little, he trusted me more, and I played entire matches, but there were even games where I didn't play a single minute. That had never happened to me in my life. 'What am I doing in this team?'"

Vizuete is aware that there are high expectations for her return—"even friends have told me that there might be a lot of demands"—but she believes that's what's needed. "We're professionals. Granollers is trying to make the players 100% professional, and I think that's how it should be."