Basketball - Article 9

I came home from Costa Rica last week, just long enough to celebrate Mother’s Day, take the AP chemistry test, and of course go to the prom Friday night. The reverse culture shock I had expected was a let-down - more like a culture pinch. Friends were the same, my dog still rolled over for me to pet her, and everything in my room was exactly as I had left it. I spent the week in blind happiness, feeling like I could have just fallen asleep into my old life again, forgetting I had ever lived in Costa Rica. But a week later my eyes snapped open again as soon as I stepped off the plane in San Jose.
If there’s anything that had bothered me about my first three months here, it was the slow pace of life. About 30% of the plans I’d make would never happen, mostly due to people deciding they’d rather just relax at home. The week I got back, however, life began to get a lot more interesting.
The rainy season has started – every day at almost exactly 1:30, the skies turn from blue to dark grey, and rain pounds the tin roofs of the school so hard the teachers can’t be heard. People brace themselves against their desks, waiting for the cannon-fire of thunder. But since the weather is so predictable, the Costa Ricans merely work around it, the school year continuing in full swing.

However, what’s really made life interesting is basketball. I’ve been on the basketball team for a while here, but up until this week we’d only had practices. Of all the things in Costa Rica that I feel hopelessly outmatched in (soccer, Spanish, consumption of rice and beans), basketball isn’t one of them. Don’t get me wrong – I’m by no means a fantastic basketball player. Throughout my childhood I’d always panicked when having the ball, never quite sure what to do with it. After an unsuccessful year of freshman basketball, I got cut from the JV team as a sophomore. But on the varsity basketball team here, I feel like Michael Jordan.
Used to the disciplined competiveness of basketball in the States, the dynamic of the team continues to surprise me. We barely have enough players to make up one team, so we draw players from all ages, some as young as 14. Our coach is an energetic, clean cut man, always rushing into practice late (he’s told us he works five jobs). But as lively as he is, his enthusiasm hasn’t rubbed off on the players. During our bi-weekly practices, kids wander in at all hours, lazily joining in on the drills, running off to the sidelines to check their phones for new text messages. One time Coach huddled us together, spittle and Spanish flying from his mouth as he yelled the importance of showing up to practice. Suddenly he singled out a player and asked “Why weren’t you at practice last week?” The boy shuffled his feet and said, “I don’t know… I was really hungry.”
The team itself is like a sequel to Bad News Bears. It’s not to say we don’t have athletes – it’s just that they’re soccer players. Basketball in Costa Rica probably ranks about as important as does, say, croquet, in the States. Kids wiggle down the court, trying to dribble the ball and stay upright at the same time. Any basket made farther out than a lay-up is cause for applause and backslapping. I once achieved a semi-godlike status after hitting two 3-point shots in a row.
We had our first game last Tuesday, versus a local private school. As I stepped into the circle to take the jump ball, I looked up at the tallest Costa Rican I´d ever seen. I somehow won the jump, but unfortunately that turned out to be the highpoint of the game. The other team, made up of all seniors, sailed over our young players, practically walking to the basket as our team tried to organize our defence. At one point someone angrily yelled from the sidelines, “Use your body!”, resulting in yet another foul as one of our more aggressive players flopped himself onto the other teams´ point guard. Our coach frantically stormed up and down the sideline, waving his arms and yelling Spanish profanities. In contrast, the other coach sat with his players, laughing and smiling. I half expected him to pour himself a margarita.
Finally the buzzer sounded; I was drenched in sweat and covered in bruises from trying to play defence against three of their players at once. The scoreboard read 19-50, our loss. (I found out later that the other team had actually scored 87, but the referees were embarrassed for us so they stopped adding more points on the board.) “Don’t worry about it,” coach told us. “You’ll have another chance in two days.”
Our next game began on Thursday, and I looked around in wonder as I ran down the court. Something had changed – our players we hitting lay-ups, passing well, even hitting the occasional outside shot. It showed on the scoreboard too – we were keeping ourselves in the game, even taking the lead at some points. The best part was, (from all viewpoints other than my own) it wasn’t because of me. Last game I had scored over half of our points – this game I could barely hold onto the ball, missing shot after shot, and getting called for fouls at every turn (It probably doesn’t help that the back of my uniform reads “GRINGO”.) But even with myself virtually out of the game, our team continued to battle on, the clock ticking down towards the end of the fourth quarter.
Suddenly the whistle blew for a time-out, 13 seconds still hanging on the clock – our possession. The coach drew out the play he wanted on his whiteboard; a simple screen-play in order to get us the lay-up we needed to make the score 43-43. He looked up at me and in broken English said, “Evan – you do this basket?” All my childhood memories of sitting on the bench came flooding back, listening to coaches picking “the good kid” to hit the game-winning shot, their gaze never even passing over me. The eyes of my teammates stared at me, hopeful. “Si,” I said, feeling strangely at peace. I stepped onto the court, and as the whistle blew, I slid around another player, my defender getting tangled in his arms. Suddenly I was alone on the court, screaming for the ball with outstretched hands as I sprinted towards the basket.
That pass never made it to me. Somewhere it was tipped, knocked away, ending clutched against the purple jersey of the other team until the buzzer sounded. My teammates sank to the ground, devastated, and slowly drifted off towards the locker room.
But I heard something after that game, just a sliver of conversation from the showers – never had the school team scored more than 26 points, much less come close to winning a game. We lost a chance at making school history that day, but I’m not worried – we’ve got another game next week.