Thursday, June 28, 2007 Basketball body eyes new direction for RP By Rommel C. Manlosa Sun.Star Staff Reporter
THREE important agendas that will determine their group’s direction will be tackled during the monthly meeting of the SBP-BAP Board of Trustees this Monday at the PLDT building in Makati City.
The meeting, which was supposed to be held in Cebu today, was moved back to the nation’s business capital after Cebu’s foremost basketball patron Michel Lhuillier left the country for an annual vacation.
“I have to move it here in Manila because Michel is still out of the country.
But nevertheless we will be holding our monthly meeting with the board of trustees in Cebu when Michel is back,” SBP-BAP executive director Patrick Gregorio told Sun.Star Cebu in an interview yesterday.
This also means the trip of SBP-BAP president Manny Pangilinan, who was scheduled to arrive for the awarding of the 1st Talk ‘N Text SBP-BAP MVBA Invitational tournament, is also cancelled.
According to Gregorio, the board will ratify the proposed plan of having a Visayas (and Mindanao) Training Center in Cebu; to put into action the plan to have regional tournaments patterned after the defunct Metropolitan Basketball Association (MBA); and the naming of the regional and provincial heads for the regional structuring.
Identify
“We have to identify the athletes for both men’s and women’s national teams so players will not need to leave for Manila to play. With the Visayas training center, talents are identified early and when the time comes, they will be included in the national team. Our proposal of having a regional tournament has also received a lot of interests. We will ask the leagues to send their best players back to the regions for a tournament where regional teams will have to play home-and-away games, just like the former MBA. But this is only a short tournament,” Gregorio said.
Gregorio is also proposing to “franchise” basketball in the regions.
“We are also trying to give opportunity for the regions to manage their own offices, market, solicit sponsorships and earn from the gates so they could spend their income to the development of the grassroots. The simple logic here is just like the franchising system. We are going to make each regional office just like a business framework,” Gregorio said.
Gregorio also welcomes all the people who will try to help their program saying, “I call it revolutionizing volunteerism.
Everybody is welcome. We are just one federation there is only one interest to move forward so that basketball will grow even bigger.”
