This is the third post in Where Team USA Handball Took Me, a series about what a country actually looks like when you’re there to compete, not on vacation. The first two covered Morocco and a training camp in Paris; this one covers a string of friendlies in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in June 2026.
Puerto Rico is a shorter flight than our usual overseas trips, and a friendlies series like this tends to move fast: land, adjust, play, play again, leave.
San Juan is the capital of Puerto Rico and sits on the island’s northern coast, an Atlantic port city with a walled old town, Spanish colonial architecture, and a tropical climate that stays warm and humid for most of the year. It’s also a genuine hub for international sport in the Caribbean and Central America, which is part of why it made sense as a stop on a Team USA friendlies calendar.
Because this trip was on U.S. soil, some of the usual friction of an overseas trip wasn’t there — no long-haul jet lag, no unfamiliar currency, no language barrier for most of the team. But a friendlies trip has its own version of the same constraint as a tournament or a camp: you’re there to win games, not to explore, and the schedule is built entirely around that.
The Schedule, Honestly
A friendlies series usually means back-to-back or near-back-to-back games, which changes the rhythm compared to a training camp: less repetition of one routine, more of the up-and-down adrenaline of matchday, over and over, inside a short window.
The trade-off is recovery. Whatever it looked like, it ate into anything that resembled free time, because a body playing every day or two needs more maintenance, not less, and that maintenance doesn’t pause for sightseeing.
There’s also less flexibility built into a friendlies schedule than a camp. A camp can shift a session by an hour if something comes up; a match has a kickoff time that thousands of people and two federations have already agreed on.
The Four to Six Hours I Actually Had
Whatever it was, San Juan makes it easy to feel like you got more out of a short window than you actually did, because so much of the postcard version of the city — the colorful buildings, the ocean, the old fort walls — is visible even from a car or a short walk near the team hotel.
That’s worth naming honestly: a few hours in a place like this can feel like a real visit even when it’s a fraction of what a tourist would spend there. That gap is the whole premise of this series -what you saw was real, but it wasn’t the whole place, and pretending otherwise would do a disservice to both the sport and the destination.
What Athletes See That Tourists Don’t
A host venue for an international friendlies series is rarely on any tourist’s itinerary, but it’s the center of the entire trip for the team: the warmup routine, the locker room rituals, the specific sound of a crowd in a building most visitors will never have a reason to enter.
One Thing Worth Returning For
The Photographer’s Hour
On a short, match-dense trip like this one, that hour is even more compressed than usual, which if anything makes it more deliberate.
There’s no room on a trip like this for a wasted afternoon. Whatever this hour produced, it’s proof — the same as it was in Morocco and in Paris — that you were somewhere real, in between the parts of the trip that were only ever about winning.
More From This Series
This is the third entry in Where Team USA Handball Took Me, after Morocco and a training camp in Paris. For more on how these trips fit into my life as an athlete, see my about page. And if San Juan is calling you too, here’s where I’m building out a fuller guide to Puerto Rico.
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