From 5 to 8.30 pm, each day you will find the Taiyuan Jinshan Middle school's women's basketball team busy at work in training. Amongst all the exertion, three in particular train especially hard.
"It's never easy to go out of the mountain," said Yao Xiaoni, one of the three, who moved to the capital city of northwest China's Shanxi province from an impoverished mountainous area of Qinyuan county.
Her family lives in a remote village in Qinyuan with fewer than 2,000 permanent residents, a place where wheat flour was not affordable for the majority of the villagers until over a decade ago.
To make things worse, Yao's father was diagnosed with severe uremia in 2013. A diagnosis of a kidney transplant at the cost of over 300 thousand yuan dashed their hopes for surgery.
Warm-hearted villagers donated over 20 thousand yuan for her middle-aged father, and together with assistance from local government, they managed to gather enough money to pay for the surgery.
Before the surgery took place, Yao's mother, who was donating her kidney and was fortunate to have matching tissue with her husband, gave a brochure to Yao with names of the villagers and the money they donated.
"Even if we don't make it, you need to repay the debts," she told Yao.
The surgery went smoothly, but follow-up medicine still constituted a large expense.
The good news is that the once destitute small, remote and somewhat barren village, has been thriving due to astute government support during the past two years.
Now, there are not many names left on the brochure and Yao's family can begin to live more comfortably again. Following her 20-year-old brother, who joined the army in Tibet, out the village, Yao has been exploring a way out through basketball, that enables her to have a fresh take on the world.
In fact, Yao didn't take up basketball until just 2017.
Although Qinyuan, home to 160 thousand people, boasts an 80-year basketball history and an immense 306 local squads are playing out on 218 courts, "the primary school of Jingfeng county doesn't have any courts, stands or even a basketball," the headmaster Liu Yalin said.
"Students can do nothing but stay in the classroom after class," he added.
Things have changed since 2018 when a court established before two basketball teams were formed, one men's and one women's, giving an opportunity to all 37 students in the school.
The county was given the chance to compete in the provincial finals of 2018 mini-basketball national league.
"They must take part in big events. Many children have never stepped out of this town so we want to seize the opportunity to show them what the outside world is like," Liu said.
Pondering over which team to send, Liu and a PE teacher decided a match behind closed doors, in which the girls secured a shutout victory against boys from within the school. Then a mixed team was set up with a few girls being added to the boys to play the mini-basketball national league. They finished fourth in the end, despite going up against the other 14 teams of boys.
In June 2018, another eight-member team that involved several girls including Yao stormed the court at the U-12 League of Changzhi District when they finished second, losing in the final.
Yao also ended with a fourth place in the 2018 national league playing for Changzhi later in the same year.
"They're dauntless and extremely diligent, even though they can't even afford a pair of basketball shoes," praised coach Wang Gaihuan, who was fully aware of those girls' talent and determination.
Having navigated through multiple successful events, Yao Xiaoni, alongside her classmates Chang Xingyan and Yang Na showed their quality as basketball players. Their successes earned them scholarships for basketball to Jinshan Middle School - a school specializing in the sport.
Now, they have not faced their greatest challenge yet. The girls will be entering brand new territory, as the 3X3 basketball event of the upcoming second National Youth Games is set to be held in their hometown Qinyuan county.
