Alberto Ferreras | Zamora (EFE).- In the bar of La Bóveda de Toro, a Zamoran municipality of just over 600 inhabitants, the league cheer this season was held each week with the results of Real Madrid and the local women’s soccer team, which After two years of existence in which it has risen both seasons in the category, it will compete next season in First National.
Soccer has served to empower women in this enclave of the so-called emptied Spain, which has been the epicenter of the sporting aspirations of a group of girls with an average age of 18 who have involved an entire town in their feat.
Football improvement against inexperience
The most veteran of the team and captain, Clara Lorenzo, a 27-year-old pharmacist with little experience in soccer competition before joining the Unión Deportiva Bovedana, offers the keys that have made this team make the leap to the national category and compete the next campaign in one of the six groups provided.
All the players have known how to unite and get along “and it shows on the field”, in addition to the fact that the group “is very good in football”.
To this he adds a second pillar, the support from “minute one” of the population of La Bóveda de Toro against the prejudices that could be thought to emerge when a women’s soccer team was the one that made the town great in sporting terms.
In fact, the matches of the local women’s soccer club have been “a leisure alternative” in the winter for the elderly in a town that at that time of year barely has half a thousand residents.
For the players, being a rural team has not been easy either because although some live in La Bóveda de Toro and nearby towns such as Fuentesaúco or Toro, the majority live in Zamora and Salamanca, cities located half an hour away; some soccer player travels from Valladolid, an hour away; and even a player is from Vitigudino (Salamanca), an hour and a half away.
This has not been an obstacle for the twenty members of the squad to have been punctual throughout the season for training sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays and for the weekend games.
“It’s something that says a lot about them, they have to travel and invest time,” one of the team’s founders, Javier Sánchez Casas, told EFE.
One board per football bench
He also highlights the merit of playing on “a natural grass field that the people of the town take care of, with a bench that is made up of two pieces of wood with a plank placed on top and changing rooms that have their years.”
On that pitch, throughout the season, they have beaten regional women’s teams such as Real Valladolid, Cultural Leonesa or Ponferradina, which belong to historical clubs that have an infinitely better infrastructure.
“It’s like a team from yesteryear because now it seems that everything is more professionalized” and compared to this a modest club like the Unión Deportiva Bovedana in which “everyone does everything selflessly” has achieved two consecutive promotions.
Youtube broadcasts
Proof of this, according to Sánchez Casas, is the anecdote of the club or that of putting the game on the bar’s television when the girls were playing outside and the match was broadcast live on YouTube.
Looking ahead to next season, the club will make some signings but will continue as a base with the same squad and will further enhance the women’s football of La Bóveda de Toro with a subsidiary team with which to build a youth system and further empower women within and off the field. EFE