Until the past school year, Travis Santiago's life with basketball was limited. New Bedford, born and raised, the 15-year-old was good with a ball, knew how to catch it, how to make a bounce pass, how to bank it off glass. What he didn't know was how to be a good teammate, how to learn accountability through sports, how to lead.

"I didn't think it would actually be that much of a challenge really. I thought it would be easy," said Santiago.

All of that began changing when Rick Baptista, a teacher at West Side Junior-Senior High School, an alternative, special education school focusing on a variety of disabilities, challenged Santiago and some other aspiring basketball players.

"They wanted to get a team," said Baptista, a self-described "West Side kind of kid."

As an assistant coach on the New Bedford High School football staff, he's seen many young athletes conquer and stumble at challenges. His first challenge at putting together a basketball team at West Side was identifying enough viable candidates from among the 60-plus enrolled there. The school, which will be known in the coming school year as Trinity Day Academy, is geared toward students in grades 7-11 with individual learning plans.

In a high-maintenance atmosphere, Baptista needed to know a lot more about the depths of the students' desire for a team before making calls to other schools looking for a game.

"My idea was to kind of see if it could work. We're going to play one game," said Baptista, who came away encouraged and decided to make every day a new day. "Every game, I had to redo my criteria."

In order to reinforce dedication and support fairness, players would dress for games and see the floor in accordance to the extent that they persevered with the requirements of membership.

"Showing up every day is the hardest," said Baptista. "No. 1, who's going to show up to practice? No. 2, who's going to want to play us? It was extremely hard to get these teams."

A priority on the classroom was No. 1, and attending practice was right behind it. Baptista even wanted his players thinking respectfully of themselves in public, so the students raised money for own basketball uniforms and Baptista made shirts and ties mandatory for away games, many of those supplied by the coach.

"'AP' (Anthony Acosta) had the clip-on tie, he cheated," laughed Santiago. "My team was a little nutty, but it was uncontrollable."

The majority of the 12-man roster were ninth graders, and friendship developed through the laughs and the serious times for the group.

"There's two kids I didn't know at first. We got to be friends, we would argue at times. It was like it was a big family," said Santiago. "We all talked to each other, twice a day, hang out, play ball together. Three of my teammates, Cory Rezendes, Josh and Maggie (Gelliga). She was good."

Santiago tested his friendships on the team when he suggested they double their intensity.

"What they used to call Virginia sprints, ladder sprints (a line-touching drill), Travis came up with this idea to double the workload, and the kids weren't too happy about that," said Baptista, whose team scrimmaged against New Bedford High freshmen and ended up playing three or four opponents, going 5-1.

More importantly, players used basketball as a motivational tool in the classroom.

"I had kids bringing me test scores and hung them up in the room," said Baptista.

It was especially rewarding for him that all five starters made it through the entire schedule without missing a game.

The one game West Side lost provided a lesson bigger than basketball.

"(Losing) made my team a lot better," said Santiago. "We got a lot closer than we were. That's when we started looking at each other like a family.

"My experience was a good one, a very good one, I loved it. For the first time, I actually, I felt like I moved on in life."