Shooting Hoops At Two Miles High

My son and daughter were breathing hard. I was breathing harder. Three-on-three pickup basketball is a good workout but if you are not used to playing at 11,000 feet, your lungs can feel like they are on fire. (more on Sunday morning pickup basketball here) The three of us were playing against three cusqueño men in their early 20’s and we led for the first 10 minutes but then the altitude started getting to us. After my son hit a 3-pointer from the top of the key and my daughter stole the ball and converted it for a layup, we were huffing and puffing and we didn’t score again, losing by a bucket.


Coach Juan talks strategy during time out

We moved off the court to make way for the next team and I plopped myself down on the grass behind the basket. A short man in a track suit came up to me and said, (in Spanish) “Good game. You should have won.” I countered with some altitude-related excuse and he said, “How old is your daughter?” “Twelve,” I replied. He was quiet for a moment and then said, “I coach a team of twelve-year old girls. We will practice in a few minutes. Does she want to join us? My daughter shyly agreed and practiced with the team. She was one of the better players, along with two twin girls. Juan the coach told her to come back for another practice. This is how my daughter joined her basketball team.

For the next few months the pattern was the same. Juan would call me a day before a practice or game and give me the name of some school where we were playing and we would rearrange our schedule to make sure she got there. Once he told us to be at a school that we’d never heard of that was around the corner from our apartment. We walked there and entered a door off San Blas square that we passed by every day and discovered there was a large school inside with a very nice outdoor basketball court in the middle of the interior courtyard.

Usually Juan would give me a time for the games and I found that I could pad those times by as much as 40 minutes. The first few times we’d show up at the time he mentioned only to wait for 45 minutes for everyone else to stroll in. (more on Tiempo Peruano here). Once the games started, it was a great experience for our daughter, who was always the only blue-eyed, blonde-haired girl on the court. Everything was communicated in Spanish so her ability to communicate colloquially improved significantly and she made some new friends. In all, she played in about a half-dozen games and just as many practices.

Within a couple months, we were due to leave Cusco. I never got Juan’s phone number (I’d always wait for his last-minute calls) and we went 2 weeks without a call from him, so we were never able to say goodbye to the team. Despite this, it was a great experience for us and particularly our daughter. She is now proficient shooting hoops at sea level as well as two miles high in the Andes.