By MARIO AGUIRRE | STAFF WRITER
SAN ISIDRO — Given the circumstances, it’s no surprise San Isidro has enjoyed the level of success it has the past two decades.
Its basketball coach, Rolando Garza, has led the team while living on campus the past 23 years. His neighbor, Marcos Garcia, is also the team’s star player. Garcia’s mother serves as the district’s principal and his father was once its superintendent.
To say Garcia grew up on campus would be an understatement.
“He was a little brat,” Garza said, laughing. “But he’s grown up a lot.”
Only 74 students attend the high school, which also has an elementary and middle school on campus. Garza believes it’s a big reason why his team is “like a family.”
“They’re like brothers, bottom line,” the coach said. “You start here in pre-K and you graduate here.”
At San Isidro, Garza is a lifer. He attended the school before playing at Laredo Junior College (back when it had a team), later graduating from UTPA. He returned in 1992 to lead the basketball program.
A year prior, the school shut down the football program.
Garza remembers the backlash at the time. But a lack of enrollment and escalating insurance costs (after so many players sustained injuries) forced the school’s hand. That’s when basketball captured the attention of its student body and surrounding community.
So much time has passed since then that Garza jokes about how little interest there is now in football.
“If you asked (the players here) the rules,” he said, “they probably wouldn’t know it.”
“I never cared for it,” Garcia said, smiling. “Even if we did have football, I’d probably still like basketball (as much). It’s something I’ve become part of. We pretty much play it year-round, so it never ends for us.”
He added: “We don’t really have anything here. Pretty much one restaurant and one grocery store, that’s it. So all we have to look forward to is basketball. We spend most of our time here in the gym during the summers. We like it.”
Garza has known most of his players since kindergarten. The average graduating class has 14 students. Half are boys, all of whom play on the basketball team. Of those, four are seniors.
And so the cycle goes, producing one of the top programs in the Valley. This year, they’ve held a top-10 ranking by RGVSports.com, and they stand as one of only four public schools in the Valley still competing in the playoffs.
Tonight, they’ll take on Schulenburg in the regional semifinals, their fourth such appearance in the past 23 years.
“It’s been amazing,” said Sammy Sanchez, a team co-captain and one of the Tigers’ leading scorers. “Just growing up here, playing basketball, you have that tradition. It puts a lot of pressure on us, where we’re supposed to be good at basketball because that’s all we do. But it’s fun.”
Like most of his teammates, Sanchez has deep roots in the school. His mother also attended San Isidro. And before she died last year, he promised her he would graduate from her alma mater. Everyday, he drives 40 miles from his home in San Juan to fulfill that promise.
“It’s kind of tiring,” he said, “but you get used to it.”
Sanchez’s situation isn’t entirely unique. Co-captain Luis Garcia also commutes a half-hour daily, waking up at 5:30 every morning.
“It’s a big commitment,” he said.
Part of that is eased by the school’s perks, such as an open gym. Marcos Garcia knows that if he wants to practice, which he does almost daily on his own, his coach will leave an extra set of keys underneath his welcome mat, “just 100 steps,” he said, from the school’s gymnasium.
“That’s a big advantage,” Luis Garcia said. “Most schools don’t get that. But I like the fact that the faculty has the trust in us to use the gym for a couple hours. It just helps us out a lot.”
Years ago, Garza wondered what it would be like to have a larger student body to pick from. Talking for a few moments with a McAllen-area coach, he said, quickly doused his curiosity.
“I told the coach, ‘You have over 1,000 boys. You think you could find a boy with height that can play?’ He said, ‘Yeah, but a lot of them don’t want to. There’s too much stuff going on in the city. They want to go to the mall, go to the movies,’” Garza said. “I thought I wanted a bigger pool of kids (to choose from) but in a sense, it has its pluses and minuses. I’d rather have a good few than a lot.”