Volleyball is a team sport.

But being a professional, says Laura Künzler, also means “being alone a lot”.

The 24-year-old Swiss felt this particularly intensely last season.

After moving from the French premier league club ASPTT Mulhouse to competitor Pays d´Aix Venelles in the south, the 1.88-meter-tall outside attacker had to find a new team again after just one year.

"Half of Europe" separated her from her friend Leon Dervisaj, who distributed the balls at the Bundesliga club SVG Lüneburg in autumn 2020. Traveling was difficult due to the pandemic; The Lower Saxony also forbade their player to visit abroad. The couple could only see each other at Christmas. In the seven-year relationship that began while they were together at the sports school in Aarau, “we had never been apart for so long”. The woman from Aargau also missed her family.

There was no distraction. If things don't go smoothly during training or a game, “you sit alone at dinner and only think about volleyball”. At Künzler, the decision matured that she no longer wanted it that way. “I lost the fun of volleyball a bit,” she admits. "And I wonder whether it is really worth investing so much in sport over and over again."

The result was a club change, which seems like a step back in view of the up-and-coming player's previous career.

Künzler signed a one-year contract with VC Wiesbaden.

As a “grenade commitment”, the new coach Benedikt Frank announced the reinforcement in the table tenth of the previous season in the summer.

As captain together with Olympic champion Justine Wong-Orantes, the 2017 Swiss Cup winner is responsible.

In the two defeats of the currently eighth-placed Hessians in Erfurt and against the Rote Raben Vilsbiburg, where she herself spent her first two years abroad from 2017 to 2019, Künzler was the top scorer of her team with 15 and 22 points.

Together with the friend

“It's a cool project here in Wiesbaden,” with all the young, very ambitious players, says the manager. She wants to put as much energy into it as possible. The fact that she really feels like it is due to the new "good life balance" that she enjoys in the state capital. Here Künzler can live with her boyfriend for the first time. Leon Dervisaj moved from northern Germany to the Main at the beginning of 2021 and will also be on the network for the next two years at the Bundesliga-wide United Volleys.

“It was a huge relief when we both signed our contracts,” says Künzler. This was preceded by back and forth. “There was also another alternative”, but the 25-year-old wanted to stay in Frankfurt and now commutes the 40 kilometers to the big city every day. “I had to do this for my mental health,” emphasizes the partner. “But that took a lot of courage.” Because the expectations of her are different and have been high for years.

In her homeland, the US-born athlete, who used to do gymnastics but soon felt disadvantages due to size, quickly became an exceptional talent, "probably the greatest of the past decades", as her former trainer Timo Lippuner once stated. With this talent, it was clear to the 17-year-old top scorer in the first division team in Pfeffingen that the step to a professional contract across the border should also be possible. "At that time there was still no Swiss woman who played abroad," says Künzler, who was striving for a pioneering role in bringing volleyball to a new level in her own country.

One year after her own signature in Bavaria, where she took Lippuner with her, Maja Storck, who is now playing for the German champions Dresden, followed her to Germany to the Ladies in Black Aachen.

The two also lead the Swiss national team, which recently took part in the European Championships twice.

Künzler has her tenth summer in a row behind her in the national jersey.

Even with the ravens, the pressure in the club was completely different from what she was used to before.

Sometimes she had the feeling that she could barely breathe, says Künzler.

She has not yet given up the dream of participating in the Champions League, from which she already had an offer in the spring, or a commitment in volleyball-crazy Italy.

With the "reset" in Wiesbaden she wants to find out how important her volleyball is.

With the Swiss Association, to which she has been available almost without exception since her youth, she is also striving for a solution to allow her head and body to relax.

“I can imagine everything for the future,” says Künzler.

But now she wants to play volleyball first without giving up “the good things in life”.