Carlo Lastimosa
Carlo Lastimosa comes from a family of basketball players, son to former Cebu team Mama’s Love player Danny Lastimosa and nephew to the Philippine Basketball Association’s three-time Mythical Team awardee, Jojo Lastimosa.
It was only natural then that the younger Lastimosa started playing basketball at the young age of five in their family’s residence in the city of Cagayan de Oro.
Watching his uncle Jolas play in professional basketball may have been a very big influence for Carlos to opt to make a career out of the sport later on and develop an ambition of following his uncle’s footsteps by making it good in the PBA someday.
It goes without saying that sharing the same last name with a legendary uncle, in the same field nonetheless, would almost always lead to inevitable expectations from everyone for you to live up to that said legacy. Awareness of that fact doesn’t seem to bother the 6’2 shooting guard at all, who seems to have done both a good start and a good job at keeping the pace by recently being a crowd favorite and winning the NCAA’s Rookie of the Year award this year while playing for team Benilde Blazers.
He is fully aware that being compared to his uncle is one thing, and making a name for himself is another. After all, he didn’t start as a fairly known player of national television’s NCAA.
When he was young, he joined a MILO Best Training Center courtesy of his father. He then joined the varsity team of Xavier University-Ateneo de Cagayan during his high school years, where he quickly became a subject of interest in the local basketball scene. He eventually participated in the Jesuits Athletic Meet, a basketball event between different Philippine Jesuit schools, back in 2007. It was then that Ateneo de Manila Blue Eagles’ coaching team, led by its head coach Norman Black, saw his potential and asked him to play for their school. However, things didn’t go as planned for the then 16-year-old, encountering problems of adjusting to the sudden changes while in Ateneo. He eventually decided to take up Hotel and Restaurant Management at De La Salle-College of San Benilde, which proved to be a good career move since it was where he found his way to the NCAA.
-Kristof Tiongson-
