Spar Girona worker, GEiEG Uni player. Basketball is the great pastime of Carla Jou, a 26-year-old from Llagostera who works at Spar Girona coordinating the first team and carrying out administrative tasks, playing with GEiEG Uni, and a germ that stands out in the ACB.
Basketball for breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner. Basketball at work, and basketball when he does sports. At home (she shares a flat with GEiEG Uni captain Vane González, “my best friend”), with her family (her brother Guillem is the captain of Baxi Manresa, and her cousins, Eric and Edu Jiménez have played there in clubs LEB, Eric now in Bisbal), and with friends. Basketball at all hours, in the life of Carla Jou from Llagostera, team manager (delegate) of the Spar Girona, club worker also on administration issues and player (wing-pivot) of the GEiEG Uni of the Women’s League 2. Basketball tie, but joy to be able to taste it. It is his “passion”, around which he develops his day to day, although from time to time he also misses a day of disconnection or a vacation to make a getaway, although now you can not go anywhere … ».
There is no doubt about it. Basketball is “my life.” Formed at the base of the Uni, they went to look for her in Llagostera in pre-childhood age to start with Santa Eugènia. He did not move until, before leaving Erasmus in Brussels (he studied Economics), he was already playing with the GEiEG in the Copa Catalunya. She also spent a year and a half in Scotland perfecting her English as an au pair, and basketball continued to accompany her. First, acting as a coach and playing with boys, for lack of a women’s team. Later competing in the Scottish Women’s First Division with a Glasgow club. “Sometimes it’s like a love-hate relationship, because of course I’m passionate, but also if I go to my parents’ house and find my father watching basketball at all hours, I tell them if we can put something else,” he confesses. . Jou, 17, came to to make debut in the Feminine League of the hand of Anna Caula (2010/11) in a match against Perfumerías Aveninda. At that time she was a first-year junior, in a team led by Alfred Julbe, now coach of Spar Girona, where she has a prominent organizational role as a team manager, setting up trips, taking care of the players and becoming in charge of the needs of rivals, among others.
Before you get here, though, Carla Jou has been growing in the club offices, making a career out of it. At the club they were looking for someone to take on administration issues and he submitted the resume once he had returned home from Scotland. It was March 2018. He started part-time dealing with marketing issues, but before the end of the year he was already taking administration and accounting matters taking advantage of the Economics degree. The previous season (2019/20) also took on a new challenge: the first team team manager, this shortly before having to go through surgery and correct the serious injury that had been done in May 2019 (the dreaded triad, rupture of the internal ligament, meniscus and cross of the right knee), which stopped her for a year and a half, until he was able to reappear with the GEiEG Uni in October 2020.
“I remember it as if it were now. I broke up on May 4, a Saturday, and the next day Uni won the second League in Fontajau against Perfumerías Avenida. I went to the match with crutches, and I had been working all day with my knee dusted, ”said Jou. It was in a match against Viladecans, and the seriousness of the problem obviously left her out of the promotion phase that the GEiEG Uni ended up taking away, to be promoted to Women’s League 2. In the summer she would end up having the diagnosis he did not want to hear (having to go through the operating room), and at first it was put in his head that he would not be operated on, even if that meant having to leave basketball. But time clarifies the ideas and he ended up seeing that “at 25 I couldn’t go around the world with a broken knee.” So once she was ready, they intervened. The confinement from March 2020 “went very well” because, all closed, connected to online sessions with a physiotherapist and that was when he progressed the most. This course has been able to enjoy playing again (although now she is injured again, due to a stroke, and she does not hide that everything has been made “harder than I expected”), and even sometimes Julbe he has asked her to dress short in first team workouts, to lend a hand.
And where she sits, next to those players she takes care of almost 24 hours a day, seven days a week, always with her phone open, doing “an unseen job.” “I manage everything that the players or the staff need, be it flats, cars, visa issues, travel arrangements …”, underlines Carla Jou. As she says, “they’re 10 players and ten lives, and you don’t have a schedule. If anyone has a problem with the washing machine at night, they will call me, because they trust me and also because of the language, those who only speak English. This work continues to be combined with the office and accounts and the GEiEG Uni. It’s basketball at all hours. It is the life of Carla Jou.
His brother Guillem is the captain of the Manresa of the ACB at the age of 23
Carla Jou’s brother, Guillem, is the captain of Baxi Manresa, the club where he arrived in the summer of 2013 at just 16 years old. He made his debut in the ACB before relegation to LEB Or, in 2017, and although in the second division he had rather little, with the return of Manresa to the elite began to explode, especially the last two years in the orders of Pedro Martinez. At first he stood out mainly for defense, but now he can score and is an extraordinary attacking rebounder. He is recovering from an ankle injury (he has three weeks left). Jordi Agut (Manresa)
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