The festivities in honor of San Roque in the municipality of Tinajo began this year with the reading of the proclamation, a very special proclamation in recognition of the CD Tinajo Women's Handball Team Season 1977-1978.
The Plaza de San Roque was the place chosen and at 8:30 p.m. Jesús Machín, mayor of the municipality, welcomed many of the players who belonged to said club and the public who came to listen to the anecdotes lived. The parish priest of Tinajo, Francisco José García, also spoke to congratulate the neighbors on the festivities and then Pura Morales, representing the sports group, was in charge of reading the proclamation.
After the protocol photos, each of the players present was given a bouquet of flowers. Subsequently, the musical show "Timplefonias" began, formed in the musical part by Alexis Lemes, Adrián Niz and José Vicente Pérez, timple, guitar and bass, acting as solo voices Fabiola Fernández and Elieser Betancort who performed an animated and varied repertoire based on music with Canarian and Latin American roots, an performance that was very reciprocated with applause from the public.
Full text of the proclamation
"First of all, we would like to thank our corporation for having chosen us as announcers of the San Roque festivities.
We are a group of women who in their day, back in the years 77-78 and later years, being teenagers and young women, decided to form a Handball Team.
The beginnings were very hard because due to the conservative society of the time, it was not well seen that girls of 12, 13 and 14 years old practiced sports, and even less such a hard sport, so the response from most families was the same; that is not for girls.
We had to fight hard to be allowed to go to training during the week and play matches on weekends.
In the meetings held recently, we have remembered the young people who helped us in the beginnings of the team, such as Eduardo Toribio and Lito Fernández, as creators of the team, Juan Morales Cáceres, as President of the Club, Luis Álvarez as Delegate and Lelo Toribio as Coach, who also accompanied us to play the 24-hour Tournament in Arrecife, and even spoke with our families to ask for permission because we had to spend the night away from our homes.
Our first official uniform was a blue shirt and shorts that the City Council paid for in exchange for us distributing the festival program. Accepting the request, we toured the municipality distributing the programs.
We began to organize tournaments for the San Roque festivities where they observed that we stood out in the game, so they later looked for coaches from Arrecife, who were Jesús Casanova and Toto, we trained and played on the school court that was made of piche and a few years later they built one of cement in which we were almost always with scraped knees.
The trainings were very hard but we did it with great enthusiasm, we financed ourselves by doing raffles, celebrating parties at the club with the help of several friends like Toño who lent us the record player, and little by little we began our journey.
The first years we were runners-up and in the third year our triumph came "Island Champions", our first trip arrived, some girls from Tinajo had to represent Lanzarote in the Provincial Championship of Gran Canaria, specifically in Gáldar and to save money they took out the tickets in the name of a large family from the town, but at the airport they realized and had to take out new tickets again and to return to Lanzarote as we did not have enough money we had to return by boat.
We arrived in Gáldar and found a parquet court, it was a fatal match, we didn't even know how to run, Mari Pino was even injured, of course we lost, and two weeks later they arrived in Tinajo, what a surprise, a cement court; now, those who didn't know how to run were them and we beat them badly on our cement court. And from there to Preferente where we were playing for two years, every fifteen days we traveled to Gran Canaria to play.
We were getting older, some got married, others studied abroad, others worked and we could no longer go to training so we gave the category to Tahíche and those girls and teenagers left the sport, although we had opened a path to those who continued coming later.
It is a time that we remember with great affection and that helped us to lead a healthy life and to promote our social relations, there were no cell phones then.
This is the list of some of the members of the teams from the different seasons, where some continued until the end, others were incorporated covering the losses from their beginnings in the year 1977 to 1985.
Pura Morales, Pino Toribio, Alicia Morales, Aurora Morales, Delfina Martín, Beatriz Martín Mimi Ferrer, Caroní Perdomo, Loly Pérez, Maribel Tejera, Eva Sánchez, Carmen Delia Bernal, Yeya Viñas etc.
We do not want to say goodbye without first thanking the colleagues, both those present here and those who have not been able to accompany us tonight, for participating in the creation of a team in a post-Franco era, in which we claim and fight for the practice of women's sports, which was so limited.
Thank you also for the meetings of these days whose purpose was to share memories that have become laughter and good times.
Thank you to all the people of the Tinajo Club for fighting and supporting us in a time when women's sports were not well seen, without it we would not have come so far.
Thank you to the Tinajo City Council for counting on us so that the citizens of this town know some of the anecdotes that this team experienced.
Finally, thank you to those present for attending this event, and so that we can continue generating beautiful moments, we invite all the people of Tinajo to participate in the San Roque festivities this year, and those to come.
Happy San Roque festivities, 2023"
