THE Philippines lost in the SEA Games.
Players are opting to play overseas.
It is a wake-up call!
Philippine basketball needs to heed this wake-up call. We are no longer the powerhouse team we once were in Southeast Asia. Our neighbors may have caught up with us, or we were merely resting on our laurels.
The stunning SEA games loss to Indonesia might be the final nail that brings us to reconsider our direction in terms of preparation for the upcoming international competitions we will participate in shortly.
In a basketball-crazy country, one cannot imagine the state of Philippine basketball several years from now. We are losing our players to international leagues. The most recent one is SJ Belangel of the Blue Eagles, who brings his talents to South Korea. First Japan and now South Korea.
It may tell a lot about our basketball programs, with players opting out of our local professional league to play elsewhere.
The two years of the pandemic also didn’t help develop and create opportunities for players.
It is not the time to point fingers and look for scapegoats. It is done. We can work on moving forward with this wake-up call.
With relaxed Covid restrictions, re-establishing grassroots tournaments can be prioritized, and sports clinics can be conducted again by established organizers.
We must consider everything in a gradual return and direction to the new normal.
What we see in basketball may also hold for other sports if we don’t take these indicators seriously. We have achieved progress, and we can still expect setbacks.
However, this setback seems odd given the initial success we were having.
SBP needs to become organized. Grassroots sports development programs need to step up in complementarity with the sport’s governing bodies.
Previous iterations of Gilas labored hard to get us back on the world basketball stage; thus, setbacks like this are hard to accept. But if this is how far we can achieve after all the preparations and planning, we might as well take that we had our time as a basketball powerhouse, and our time is up.
Notes from the sidelines:
Congratulations, Coach Butch Bencio; season two of the teachers league is now underway with 21 teams on board! May other tournaments, especially grassroots sports, slowly flourish under the new normal conditions. We need the games again.