The Meme

May 15, 2025

I was 16 and living out of a duffel bag packed with mismatched sports bras, anxiety, and pink Nike slides. I'd left high school a month early — not because I was rebellious or cool or dramatic, but because I got the chance to play for the El Salvador national U16 women’s basketball team. A sentence that still doesn’t always sound real when I say it out loud.

My Spanish was passable in theory and tragic in practice. Most of my teammates didn’t speak much English. Our coach spoke none at all — not a word, not a phrase, not even “good job.” Which would’ve been fine, except he was also yelling. Constantly. Loudly. Passionately. And sometimes... violently. Chairs were thrown. Water bottles exploded against concrete. Tears shed during drills. And then, a few hours later, we’d all be eating pupusas together, laughing about how many times I’d misunderstood the play.

Basketball in El Salvador was not like the States. We were sweating through 90-degree humidity, sprinting on cracked courts, practicing two, sometimes three times a day. Nobody coddled you. Nobody explained twice. You figured it out or you didn’t — and I had to figure it out, fast.

Still, I grew to love those girls deeply. The ones who yelled at me for missing cuts. Who corrected my grammar mid-layup. Who gave me side-eyes and eventually gave me hugs. I remember lying on hotel beds with them, translating Migo’s rap songs, braiding each other's hair, making jokes through half-English-half-Spanish sentences. They became my people. And our coach — the one I swore I feared — became one of the greatest coaches I’ve ever had. He taught me toughness without ego. Precision without overthinking. Pride without arrogance.

Then came Chile.

FIBA U16 Women’s Americas Championship, 2017. It was my first time in South America, and the air in Aysén was cold and sharp and full of anticipation. We weren’t stupid — we knew we were underdogs. We weren’t just playing basketball; we were playing survival. Our warmup shirts didn’t match. Our team bags weren’t monogrammed. Our shoes were worn out. Team USA’s girls looked like future Olympians. Because they were.

And then came that game. You know the one.

USA 114 – El Salvador 19.

You heard me.

It was humiliating. Painful. Surreal. I couldn’t even process it in real time because my brain sort of left my body around the third quarter. Every play was like being hit by a moving train — except the train was 6'3", Division I-bound, and smiling politely while doing it. And after the game, when the meme started circulating — the scoreboard, the stunned looks, the captions — I think part of me went numb. It didn’t matter how hard we fought. The internet was laughing.

To this day, six years later, I still get it sent to me. Random DMs. Group chat roasts. “Isn’t this you?” It was. It is.

But what the meme doesn’t show is what came before it. Or after.

It doesn’t show the weeks of brutal training. The morning runs in San Salvador, the full-court suicides, the tears in the locker room. It doesn’t show how we grew into something close to a family. Or how, after that game, the girls from Team USA — the ones who obliterated us — came over and hugged us. They talked to us. Some of them even became my friends. They didn’t gloat. They didn’t make us feel like a joke.

They reminded me that women’s basketball isn’t just about the scoreboard. It’s about grit. Culture. Showing up. Holding space for each other.

And we showed up.

We didn’t just show up — we played in the Americas Championship. We were one of only eight teams to qualify. We played in Patagonia. We wore our country’s name across our chest. And I played beside girls who taught me what heart really looks like — even when it’s breaking.

So yes, I was a meme. And no, I didn’t like it. And yes, it still stings. But I also got to represent a country I love. I got to play in a different language. I got to fall apart and build myself back up beside girls who will always mean something to me — even if we never speak again.

That game was a loss. That moment was a mess. But my respect for my team, for my coach, for everything we endured together — that’s never been stronger.

And that photo? The one you keep sending me?

That’s not a meme. That’s a fucking memory.