For Laura Nicholls (Santander, 35 years old), a woman of 1.90 meters in height, who was three times, as a pivot, European champion with the Spanish basketball team (2013, 2017 and 2019), as well as silver (2014) and bronze (2010 and 2018) in the World Cups, and also silver at the Rio 2016 Games, handball comes naturally to her. Her father was a player and coach at Colindres, on the banks of the Treto Estuary, very close to Laredo.
Her family lived in the same building as another famous Cantabrian sportswoman, Ruth Beitia, the high jumper who won the gold medal at the Rio de Janeiro Games, the two tallest girls in the neighbourhood. Both of them were interested in sport. Laura, after swimming, rhythmic gymnastics and table tennis, began to play basketball. She was told that she was not good at it and enrolled in the family speciality, handball. She was good at it. “Although it is not right for me to say it, that was how it was,” she commented in an interview with a local newspaper. When, due to her age, she could not continue in the mixed teams and her club did not have one for girls, she returned to basketball without much enthusiasm.
But after a difficult start and a number of fouls for the passing outs that were called for her due to the influence of handball, it took her just a year to start to stand out among the other young women of her age. She was in the Blume Residence from the age of 14 to 18, and after her signing for Celta de Vigo, she began a successful professional career, culminating in her national and international titles, with the national team (nine medals and 197 matches) and the Spanish and European teams in which she played.
In May 2021, she refused to attend the Spanish national team training camp, announcing her temporary retirement from the courts, and then her final one. “I have decided that, after more than 20 years dedicating my life to this wonderful sport, the time has come to stop. It does not have to be a definitive goodbye, but personal situations would not allow me to respond to the call of the national team with the concentration and energy necessary to face such demanding events as those next summer,” she noted in the statement she published on that date. The delicate state of her grandfather’s health pushed her to return home. During that break, she got into politics with the Regionalist Party of Cantabria, was elected councilor in the Santander City Council, although she resigned from the seat. Two years later she decided to return to the court at Leganés. “I knew that if I did not spend these last years with my grandfather, it would be something I would never forgive myself for,” she explained upon her return. “I needed a break because I was drowning.”
Now, he will definitely stop looking at the basket and set his sights on the opposing goal, because he returns to the handball of his childhood in the ranks of Uneatlántico Pereda, in the División de Honor Oro, the second category after the Liga Guerreras Iberdrola.
“There are thorns that stay stuck inside and you always try to get them out. That is what Nicholls felt with handball,” say the Cantabrian club about the incorporation of the now ex-basketball player, which is not the only case in Spanish basketball, since Borja Vidal (Pontigón, Asturias, 42 years old) followed the same path. He trained in the Joventut youth academy, played in Melilla, Bilbao Basket, Naples, Virtus and CAI Zaragoza, and in that city he changed the ball for a smaller one to join the CAI Aragón handball team, at the request of Valero Rivera, its technical director at the time. He played for Algeciras, Teucro, Torrevieja and Nantes before signing for a Qatari team, where he has continued his career, which has, as its most important milestone, the runner-up position in the World Cup with Spain in 2015. Legend has it that the nickname of the Hispanos that accompanies the Spanish handball team came to him, who was nicknamed “the Hispanic” in Naples, when he was still playing basketball. He later obtained nationality in Qatar and there he has won two Asian championships with the team and gold at the Asian Games in 2014.
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