← rjgalvez

Basketball

“I fell in love with you. A love so deep I gave you my all.”

Kobe Bryant, Dear Basketball, 2015

Basketball came before software, and it stayed. Kobe is my favorite player, and what I keep from him is the Mamba mentality: do the work every day, whether anyone is watching or not.

Basketball was always for the love of the game. Engineering was always the plan.

Timeline

  1. 13

    From 13, I played for Club Arturo Prat in San Felipe.

  2. 2011

    I made the last 15 of the U-15 national team pre-selection. Twelve traveled. I was number 13. That was the turning point.

  3. 2012

    My school, Instituto Chacabuco, won the basketball title at the Juegos Maristas.

  4. 2014

    I played for Chile at the Albert Schweitzer Tournament in Mannheim, Germany, an under-18 world tournament. It was Chile’s first time there. El Trabajo, the San Felipe paper, ran the story.

  5. 2015

    Captain of Arturo Prat at the Campioni del Domani, the country’s top youth club tournament. We were the last unbeaten team until the quarterfinal, where I scored 22 and we lost to Universidad de Chile.

  6. 2015

    At 18, on the national team and starting engineering at UC, where my coach was Ricardo Sandoval. Vive la UC, the magazine every UC freshman gets, ran a profile of me.

  7. 2016

    In January we won the Campioni del Domani, unbeaten and 62-61 in the final. I opened it with 21 points and 10 rebounds against Universidad de Chile, the team that had knocked us out the year before, and was MVP of the final.

  8. 2016

    My first games in Chile’s first division, with UC, in the 2015-16 season.

  9. 2017

    Back with Arturo Prat in the national second division: 12.3 points a game.

  10. 2018

    28 points for Boston College in the deciding game of the LNB Chile-Centro final, which we lost.

  11. 2018

    Third place at the FISU America Games in São Paulo with Chile’s university team.

  12. 2018

    My first season with Deportivo Brisas in the national second division. I was the player with the most MVP awards in the calendar year and reached the national scoring record for a competition outside the first division, as counted by the Chilean stats account @nanoragi.

  13. 2018

    At its annual sports awards, UC gave me its Beca Elite and recognized my international play with the men’s basketball team.

  14. 2019

    Sergio Ceppi, second division: 10.6 points a game.

  15. 2019

    With UC, we won the Apertura of the Santiago university league. I hit a three at the buzzer to end the third quarter of the semifinal and scored 20 in the 76-60 final against Universidad de Chile.

  16. 2021

    Stadio Italiano, Liga Dos: 32 points in a 106-58 win over Árabe de Valparaíso that put us top of the league. 17.8 points a game that season.

  17. 2022

    I started working full time as a software engineer. I kept playing.

  18. 2024

    With Stadio Italiano, while working full time, we reached the Liga Dos final. We beat Truenos de Talca 3-2 in the semifinal, with 27 points from me in game 2 in Talca, and I scored 20 in game 1 of the final against Colo-Colo. I was the team’s leading scorer that season, and latinbasket named me Player of the Week three times, once with 29 points and 10 rebounds against Boston College.

  19. 2025

    Another season with Stadio: 13.1 points a game.

Clips

Videos