SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA, Guatemala — The gleaming artificial-turf soccer stadium in the hills above this picturesque town, tucked along the southwest shores of volcano-ringed Lake Atitlán, may be a paean to a soccer-loving culture.
But visible almost everywhere along San Pedro’s steep serpentine pathways are signs of a seemingly unlikely affair with another sport: basketball.
Basketball hoops are as much a part of the tableau of this town of 12,000 as the pat-pat-pat sound of women slapping tortillas into shape in storefronts. They are there in schoolyards, at an indoor gym, inside a car repair garage, adjacent to a bus depot and on the edges of the lake, whose rising waters have claimed a court, but not yet its backboards and rims.