Barefoot Mexican boys win international basketball tournament

Indigenous Triquis boys basketball team players pose for photographers upon their arrival to the airport in Oaxaca, Mexico, on October 17, 2013.

Who says you need a good pair of shoes to play basketball?

A group of barefoot Indian (the Mexican kind) kids from Oaxaca in Mexico dominated a basketball tournament held in Argentina. The team played six games and won all of them to be crowned champions at the International Festival of Mini-Basketball.

Nicknamed “the barefoot mice from Mexico” by the other teams due to their much smaller size compared to their opponents, the boys compensated for their lack of height with “strength, speed and resistance”, according to their coach Ernesto Merino.

The children on the team are actually given a full kit and sneakers when they join the team, but they did not wear the shoes as they were used to playing barefoot.

“For them it’s normal to not have shoes, to walk barefoot,” Merino said.

The boys are part of a program to help impoverished children in Oaxaca, one of Mexico’s poorest areas. The state government gave them $46 a month apart from a uniform and tennis shoes.

“We see a basketball as an opportunity to grow in life,” Merino said. “We want them to be prepared in life,”

Even the Mexican president was all praise for the boys on Twitter.

Translation: “The victories of the Trique Indian team from Oaxaca’s Academy of Indigenous Basketball make Mexicans proud.”