Before a single ball was tipped, a group of kids from the neighborhood walked through the doors of a college.

For some of them, it will be the first time. Before they’re sized up for summer teams, before they find out which jersey they’ll wear for the next seven weeks, they’ll stand in the halls of Esperanza College of Eastern University and with any luck, feel something quietly settle into place: the sense that a place like this could be for them, too.

That is exactly where La Liga del Barrio wants its summer to begin.

«We’d like to expose our kids to the college — the idea of going to college, and what the atmosphere looks like,» said founder Raymond Alvarez. For more than 26 years, that has been the league’s open secret. Basketball is the hook. It was never the whole mission.

The venue is intentional. La Liga is holding its summer orientation at Esperanza, a branch campus of Eastern University in Hunting Park and the only Hispanic-serving college in Pennsylvania, because the two organizations have history. When COVID shut the city down, Esperanza opened its doors to La Liga and helped keep the league running. Now that partnership is back and it’s pulling double duty.

While coaches run player evaluations and build the summer rosters, parents will head upstairs to meet with the college’s administration, tour the campus, and hear what Esperanza has to offer. And the message isn’t only meant for the high schoolers.

«Even for middle school kids, the parents might not even know there’s a school right around the corner from the neighborhood,» Alvarez said.

Orientation does something else, too, something quieter but just as important: it brings new families into the fold and onto the same page about what La Liga is really about. And this summer, there are a lot of new families to welcome.

«This year, we literally got, I’d say, like 90% new kids,» Alvarez said — a wave of newcomers that surprised even him. His best guess is that summer, with its vacations and looser calendars, is when a lot of families finally discover a league their neighbors have known for years.

What they find is one of the best deals in the city. La Liga’s registration fee is the lowest around, and it covers jerseys, trophies, medals, and an end-of-season awards ceremony. The summer run is about seven weeks, shorter than the winter and spring seasons, which stretch nearly twice as long — but the price stays the same low number. Factor in the extras the league quietly folds in, like sneakers donated through Good Sports, and the value only grows.

This year, the league also has a new name in its corner: Jefferson Health has signed on as a sponsor for the summer season, its first time backing the program. And according to Alvarez, the health system has already made clear it wants to do more. For a league built on keeping kids healthy, supported, and connected, having a hospital on board feels like exactly the right fit.

There are ways for the wider community to chip in, too. On July 8, La Liga is hosting a fundraiser at Red Robin: dine in, and 20% of the check comes back to the league.

All of it, the low fee, the donated gear, the new sponsor, the college tour, traces back to the same idea Alvarez and a small group of community organizers started with more than 26 years ago.

The league began with roughly 200 kids and a simple conviction: that a basketball season could keep young people supported, connected, and pointed toward something bigger. Education was built in from the start: players turned in progress reports, and a kid who was struggling got help rather than a lecture.

More than two decades later, La Liga has served over 20,000 student-athletes across Philadelphia, and a remarkable number of them have come back as coaches, mentors, and parents of the next generation of players.

The summer season will end the way it always does, seven weeks from now, with an awards ceremony. But the first lesson of the year gets delivered Friday — not on a court, but in the hallways of a college, before anyone has laced up a single sneaker.

It’s the same message La Liga has been making for 26 years: you belong here.