Limpag: Will Cebu’s sleeping giant finally rise?
-A A +AThursday, August 23, 2012
I MET University of San Carlos assistant coach Joshua Fegidero last Sunday at the Cebu City Sports Center, during the opening of the Cesafi football matches.
And Joshua, who plays for Pachanga in the UFL, has something cooking that I hope will only lead to the growth of football in Cebu.
Joshua said he’s planning to put up the Carolinian Football League, a competition for USC alumni who still plays or want to play again. And there are a lot of football-playing alumni, heck, majority of the Cebu Football Association officers are USC
alumni, including former president Richard Montayre, too.
According to Joshua, each team doesn’t have to be composed of players of the same batch, they just have to be alumni or students of the school. Current varsity members are exempted.
USC, actually, has a strong football community. In fact, in the late 90s, some students put up the University Football League—a widely participated tournament at the USC-TC campus featuring mostly teams of engineering and architecture students.
By the way, how can an alumni league spur the growth of the sport?
Like I told Joshua, I hope that by supporting an alumni league, the USC admin will begin to see what a potential the USC system has for discovering talents. The school has elementary, high school and college teams, but under the current setup, they might as well be carrying different names.
Joshua had an ambitious plan back in the mid-2000s, where the development of all players, from elementary, to high school, until college, will follow the same program.
Just imagine, hundreds of first-graders in USC, joining the program—in five years, the elementary team could be a powerhouse. They, then, could progress to high school and college.
Joshua, and USC head coach Gary Panagsagan’s talents would be put to greater use if they get to be in a program like that, and won’t be just limited to coaching the college team.
I really hope the CFL will wake up the sleeping giant in USC and now, because of the current football craze, is the perfect time to set it up.
And that’s just for football. Imagine if USC adopts the same thing for basketball, tennis or swimming? And if the other universities do the same thing? We’d have a sports population explosion.
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on August 23, 2012.
Sports
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