The court was built in 2020 on land that had been a rubbish dump for eleven years. It took the Lyari Youth Collective four months to clear, level, and pave it. The first game was played by nine girls who had never held a basketball before.
Four years later, two of those girls are national-level athletes. The court runs 14 hours a day. It has a coaching programme, a mentorship network, and a waiting list of 300 young women who want to join.
But the founders are careful not to let the sports story overshadow the deeper one. "Basketball is how we get them here," says coordinator Zara Khatri. "What keeps them here is the feeling that they belong to something, that they matter, that winning is something girls are allowed to do."