Young Mexican team takes hoop dreams to US

Members of the Triqui kids basketball team, made up of children from the mountainous region of the Mexican state of Oaxaca sit on the Los Angeles Lakers bench before an NBA basketball game against the Minnesota Timberwolves in Los Angeles, Friday, Dec. 20, 2013. AP

LOS ANGELES — Their Southern California itinerary is a 10-year-old boy’s dream: Disneyland, a Lakers game and a visit to the Santa Monica beach. But most of the players from a basketball academy in the mountains of southern Mexico haven’t heard of Mickey Mouse. They grew up in isolated villages, and for them, basketball is a ticket to a better life.

At home in Oaxaca, the youngsters are so poor that they play without shoes. But they were all wearing sneakers on Friday as they got to slap hands with Lakers players. And after winning an international tournament in Argentina, they’ve been dubbed the “barefoot giants of the mountains.”

“Despite having everything against them, these children have shown their strength on the basketball court and won,” said Gerardo Vasquez, president of a federation of Oaxacan immigrant groups in Southern California. “They’ve shown the world that despite their circumstances, they are a light of hope for Oaxacans and Mexicans.”

While many Mexicans are soccer fans, in the rugged hills of Oaxaca there are more ball courts than soccer fields. Some say that the modern game echoes the traditional ceremonial game of “ulama,” which was played to the death in stone courts that now stand in ruins.

At home in southern Mexico, the 7- to 11-year-old team members live at a boarding school, study Spanish and their native language of Triqui and attend daily three-hour practices.

The 17 players come from some of the poorest areas, where “it looks like they’re stuck in the 18th century,” said Sergio Zuniga, chief coach and founder of the Mexican Academy of Indigenous Basketball in the city of Oaxaca.

“To see children who only have one meal a day, sharing a plate of beans and one tortilla between three people, isn’t rare,” Zuniga said.

Zuniga said his program uses basketball to teach discipline and pride, to help the children graduate high school and perhaps even attend a university.

On their first U.S. tour, the youngsters are playing teams from Los Angeles-area Catholic schools, recreation leagues and even an ad-hoc team of reporters from Spanish-language news media. They arrived Tuesday and will leave after Christmas

The children are usually shorter than their opponents. Zuniga and his team of coaches, teachers and social workers can’t do anything about their genes, and even the 11-year-olds look years away from a teenage growth spurt.

On Wednesday night, while Zuniga shouted from the sidelines in Spanish and Triqui, the boys played a scrappy game and kept the score tight against their taller rivals in the Woodland Hills area of Los Angeles. They won.

Tobias de Jesus Bautista, 11, said he was undaunted by his opponents’ size.

“We have to give double, triple the effort,” Bautista said. “But I think we can compensate for our height by concentrating on our free throws, by being in better physical condition and by being more sure of what we’re doing. We can reach our dreams.”