After spending half a practice mopping the floor, zip-lining in thunder showers and going toe-to-toe with a Brazilian aardvark, the Cal Poly men’s basketball team said it feels as if it is ready to make a run at March Madness. This is due in part to an eight-day trip the team took this summer to Costa Rica.
From Aug. 15 to 22, the team played two games against the Costa Rican national team and one against the country’s professional league champions, Brava. When the team members weren’t busy with basketball activities, they were immersing themselves in the foreign culture by touring the capital, San Jose, doing community service work and hanging out on Flamingo Beach.
Senior forward Will Taylor said everyone who went was grateful for the experience, but the main purpose of the trip was to become closer as a team.
“It helped our chemistry,” Taylor said. “We gelled together, and everyone knows their role. Expectations have been raised. We had one bar, now we need to get to the next one — we want to go to the tournament.”
Despite the team’s best conference record (10-6) since joining the Big West last year, Cal Poly never made the NCAA tournament. Taylor said since the trip to Costa Rica, the team has collectively committed to accomplishing this one goal.
“Everyone has that mindset, ‘We want to be that good to go to the tournament,’ so we have to sacrifice,” Taylor said. “I haven’t been home yet. I was here all summer, so I haven’t been to Maryland in almost a year now.”
Taylor said he was even more grateful for the opportunity to go to Costa Rica because, like many members on his team, he had never been out of the country before.
“It was an experience,” Taylor said. “I’m not used to iguanas running around or skinny raccoons that go right up to humans. It was really tropical and pretty, but it makes you appreciate what we have here in America and at Cal Poly.”
Fourteen players, four coaches, the athletics director Don Oberhelman and an athletic trainer made up the group that traveled as the Cal Poly men’s team and entourage. Head coach Joe Callero was one of the 20, and echoed many of Taylor’s thoughts about Costa Rica.
“Basketball is basketball, and athletics is athletics,” Callero said. “This trip was more than that. This trip wasn’t, ‘Let’s just play basketball.’ This trip was an once-in-a-lifetime experience for many guys on our team.”
Callero said throughout the week the teammates had to adjust their comfort levels to fit their surroundings, all while trying to focus on improving as a basketball team.
“Really it’s three things,” Callero said. “It is a basketball experience, a social experience and an educational experience.”
Although the planning for Costa Rica was done before Oberhelman officially started as Cal Poly’s athletics director, he said this trip was more beneficial to the team than trips he had made with other teams to places such as Spain, Canada and the Bahamas.
He said although the idea sounded good to him from the start, there were still issues he needed to be aware of before giving the ‘OK.’ They had to locate where the funding for such a trip would come from, and whether or not it was a responsible decision, given the university’s budget.
“We certainly do get impacted by the state budget just like everybody else, but we have the ability to sell tickets, raise money and get paid by other institutions to play games,” Oberhelman said.
Although players had to bring their own spending money, the trip was paid for entirely by athletics boosters and team fundraising, Oberhelman said.
Three separate donations of $10,000 were privately awarded to Cal Poly men’s basketball, and another large piece of the costs came from guarantee games — additional away games — played last year.
With an approximate cost of $2,000 per person, plus incidentals, Oberhelman said he could only make a guess at the final total.
“It was to the tune of $50,000,” Oberhelman said.
Some, including Oberhelman, Callero and Taylor, said they believe it was an eight-day team-bonding trip that money could not buy.
“That was our summer vacation right there, that was our spring break, that was it,” Taylor said. “Those eight days in Costa Rica tops anyone’s spring break, I don’t care what they say. You didn’t get to go to Costa Rica for free and have the time of your life with your brothers.”