We recently connected with Hilda Mateiu and have shared our conversation below.

Hilda , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Our mission is to give back to our community as much as possible by preparing youth basketball players to play on a competitive level and helping them get into middle and high school basketball teams. And the most crucial part is that we try to make our training programs as accessible as possible for everyone, especially for players from low-income families.

I dare say we are working on making our whole club free of charge, just like Oceanside has a free basketball club that is supported by the city, the community, and the player’s parents. We work towards creating such a basketball club in San Marcos, and we hope the community will step up and support us.

San Marcos Basketball is the only nonprofit organization in San Marcos, California, for competitive youth basketball. I grew up in a low-income community, and I managed to play basketball because I had a lot of support from parents and nonprofit groups. As a kid and teenager, playing basketball meant everything to me and kept me out of trouble. It gave me a place to belong and helped me feel included.

That is why San Marcos Basketball’s mission is so important to me because, through this organization, I want to offer young basketball players from the community the opportunity to grow and participate in competitive games even when their families can’t afford the club fees, the equipment, the games participation fees and so on.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am Hilda Mateiu, a team manager, volunteer coach, and founder of San Marcos Basketball, a nonprofit organization in San Marcos, CA. I grew up in Romania, where my passion for basketball started, and as I mentioned, I had lots of support from nonprofit groups.

I played basketball for eight years through middle school and high school and played for the Romanian National Team for two years. Now, I’m living in San Marcos, California, and for the last three years, I’ve been training the young basketball teams with other amazing volunteer coaches. I trained the San Marcos Flames team, which the San Marcos High School coaches later absorbed.

I’m super happy to be able to provide a medium for other passionate players to develop their fundamental skills from ball-handling, shooting, and passing to coordination, teamwork, and agility while also focusing on a healthy competitive mindset. But what I am the most proud of is that we managed to offer support through full and partial scholarships to boys and girls who want to play competitive basketball but come from low-income or single-parent families and who might struggle to keep up with the club fees.

So, we want to level out all our talented San Marcos athletes through our nonprofit program. We want everyone to be able to have a high level of training and be able to compete regardless of their backgrounds or financial status.

I also want to mention that all our coaches work as volunteers and aren’t paid by the player’s families. They are driven by the passion for basketball and the desire to give back to our community. Maybe, in a sense, we all understand a young girl’s or boy’s desire to play basketball without worrying about money and where to get equipment from. As adults, we can also relate to the parents who want the best for their children and don’t want their kids to give up on their dreams and goals due to financial reasons.

So right now, all players, regardless of their background, cover only the games they play in competitions without having to pay for training, and the ones who can’t afford that are supported through our scholarships.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

When we first started, we only had a team of five players, and now we have over 60 basketball players. But you can imagine that with only five players, nobody in the community knew who we were.

Still, we trained that five-player team really hard for two years through the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s how, little by little, people started asking who we are as an organization, and we gained visibility. It was not easy, but we continued to develop as coaches, learned from mistakes, and learned from each other, and as a team, we learned from the games and practice.

You can call us resilient because, in the beginning, we were losing all of the basketball games. You can imagine how demoralizing that was for us and the kids. For two seasons, we had no victories. And in times like these, it’s vital to maintain focus, go back, do more training, and be patient.

The kids we started with were recreational basketball players who could not get the training they needed at other facilities because they were low-income. Some players had never participated in competitive games, but we made them into a winning championship team. That took about a year to achieve, but we did not give up; more practice and effort, we just trained more and kept our morale up.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

We started our social media about eight months ago, and we focus on sharing what our teams do at the games, how they grow as players with every month of practice, and fun pictures: cute pictures of parents wearing our Thunder merchandise T-shirts and gear. We are proud of how our kids play, and we show that on social media: famous shots and things like that.

We want parents and other people who might come across our social media to see what we do, to wonder where we are going next time, when we are playing our next game, and to start following us. Sometimes, other basketball clubs follow us to see what tournaments we will play in so they can play against us.

So yeah, that’s pretty much how we try to build our social media presence. We’re obviously no experts and might not have much advice for people starting their organization or business. But this is what we do: we think of our audience, who is interested in seeing how our teams play and develop, and try to show the community how hard we play and train even when we start from zero. Hopefully, that will inspire other families with kids who wish to play competitive basketball.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.smbball.org/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/smbball/