With the Cardinals coasting to an easy victory over Scotts Valley on... (Shmuel Thaler/Sentinel)
There are millions of young hoop heads in the world, and then there's Santa Cruz High senior Zen Maki.
For him, the world is a giant eight-paneled inflatable orange ball.
In 2007, at the age of 14, Maki was so driven to make the most of his basketball potential that he asked his mom if he could move 5,000 miles away from their home in Japan to the United States, where he would have more opportunities to play.
Amazingly, she said yes.
"We believed Zen had a chance," his mother Thia Tsuruta said. "He knew this is where he needed to be to get better at basketball."
Maki spoke limited English, but he understood the language thanks to his American mother speaking it to him his whole life. Tsuruta grew up in Pennsylvania and attended college at UC Santa Cruz. She moved to Japan in 1986 and runs an English school there. She maintained connections to friends and family in the Santa Cruz area, and Maki attended several summer basketball camps here.
The April before his freshman year of high school, Maki, his mom and his stepfather, Taka Tsuruta, moved to Santa Cruz. Taka, who was an architect in Japan, took a job at Tsuruta's uncle's landscaping business. Maki enrolled at Santa Cruz High.
He left behind his two older sisters, his older brother and his father, whom he now sees once each year during summer trips back to Japan.
"It was pretty hard coming over here because, of course, I didn't have that many friends over here and
all my family is over there," Maki said. "But it was like a big opportunity because my mom had lived over here, so I chose to come over here."
Basketball is on the periphery of the sports landscape in Japan, where most young athlete grow up dreaming of being a baseball or soccer star. But for some reason, Maki instantly took to basketball when Taka showed him how to shoot hoops as a kid.
Perhaps it's in his blood. His grandfather on his mom's side was a basketball coach.
Maki showed potential from a young age. He was selected to the city all-star team in his hometown of Aichi. His family realized he might have a future in the game in 2006, when he was one of 12 players out of 500 selected to a Japanese junior NBA team that traveled to New York to play all-star teams from the East Coast.
"That gave him confidence," Tsuruta said. "He felt like he could go on from there."
Maki has settled in nicely in Santa Cruz. He made the Cardinals varsity team as a freshman and began playing with the West Valley Basketball Club AAU team. His learning curve has been steeper than most, considering the language barrier and the difference between Japanese and American basketball. Yet as a senior, Maki has emerged as a game-changing player in the Santa Cruz Coast Athletic League.
"The game is way different here. It's more one-on-one, and in Japan it's more teamwork," Maki said. "It's more physical here. People are pushing, there are more hacks, and the refs are different. It's a whole other game."
He's adjusted nicely. Maki sat out several games last season with a broken thumb, and returned late in the year in time for the Cardinals' playoff run. In the SCCAL Tournament final against undefeated regular-season champion St. Francis, Maki led all scorers with 19 points to help Santa Cruz steal the tournament title and a share of the league championship.
He has started at point guard this season and the Cardinals have gone 13-5. They currently sit in second place in league at 5-1 behind Aptos [16-2, 5-1], which beat them in the first round of league play.
Maki is leading the Cardinals with 2.7 assists per game and was tied for the lowest turnover total on the team.
"Zen is probably our leader," Santa Cruz coach Bill Domhoff said before the season. "He's probably come in a stepped up and put in the most time working on his game, getting stronger."
Maki would like to stay in the United States to play in college and said he has been contacted by several NCAA Division II and III schools. He is considering playing at a junior college for a couple seasons and trying to transfer to a bigger school. After college, he said he would like to try to play professionally in Japan.
The sacrifices he and his family have made for his love of basketball are paying off.
"I'm so happy," Maki said. "I now speak Engish really well, and, in basketball, I've gotten way stronger. Whenever I go back to Japan, I feel the difference. Like my teammates used to be -- I don't know -- we used to have rivalries and stuff. But now it's like I'm way better than all of them because, I think, I came over here and my basketball skill went way up."
Ryan Moses' basketball column, Full Court Preps, appears every Saturday in the Sentinel. Send him feedback and story ideas at 706-2372 or rmoses@santacruzsentinel.com.