The Exchange That Happened Before the First Exchange
Before EuroKayak Experience ran anything official, a phone call to a player he’d never actually met got a short-handed team through a tournament — and turned into exactly the kind of friendship the whole project was built to create.
João found Telmo’s phone number on a club website, years before EuroKayak Experience existed. He was connected to a club in Coimbra and had once played a Spanish championship alongside Burriana, back when the team was short a player and happy to welcome an eighth. Telmo didn’t play in that tournament. The two never actually met.
The call that changed that came in 2026. Burriana’s third-division kayak polo team had a tournament in Galicia landing squarely on exam season — only four players could make it, nowhere near enough to field a team the club was counting on to fight for the league.
By then, João was already a contact of EuroKayak Experience, and Telmo called him without much hope of an easy yes — João played at a level well above third division, with nothing obvious to gain from a weekend helping out a smaller club. He said yes immediately. He wanted to play alongside Burriana again, and he wanted, finally, to meet Telmo in person.
They needed a goalkeeper too, so João brought Francisco, barely eighteen, along with him.
Burriana finished second that weekend. The result mattered less than everything around it — dinners that ran long, easy laughter, matches that felt like something more than a favor being called in. João talked about how Coimbra trained, how they read the game differently, and Telmo listened the way he always did: less interested in tactics for their own sake than in what a different club’s whole approach to the sport could teach his own.
A mini exchange, Telmo would call it later — everything EuroKayak Experience was supposed to be, happening months before the project had run a single official one.
In the tournament that followed, back home in Burriana, the team won the championship outright — and with it, the national third-division league they’d been chasing all season.
None of it needed Erasmus+ paperwork or a signed agreement to happen. It needed a phone number on a website, a favor worth calling in, and two players willing to drive across the country to help a team they’d never really played with before. That, as much as anything with a grant number attached, is what Telmo means when he talks about EuroKayak Experience.
