Institute of Sports has been created

(Editor’s note: Former PSC chair Philip Ella Juico will write a column, Sports For All, for The STAR every Tuesday. The ex-secretary of the Department of Agrarian Reform and currently Dean of La Salle Professional Schools, Inc. Graduate School of Business used to write for The STAR from 1989 until he was appointed PSC chair in 1995.)

After an 11-year absence, I am back writing a sports column for The Star. From late 1989 to March 1995, I wrote a Saturday column. I had to stop the column, called "Personal Best," when I was appointed chairman of the Philippine Sports Commission (PSC) on March 23, 1995. Then PSC chairman Mel Lopez resigned to run again for mayor of Manila in the May 1995 local elections. I stayed on until June 30, 1998, when there was a change in administration.

I resume writing when we are still shocked and shaken by that tragic stampede at the Philippine National Institute of Sports (Philsports) Complex (formerly the Ultra) last Saturday. I condole with the families of the many who perished.

The mention of PHILSPORTS reminds me of strange news articles in several newspapers. The reports state that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has ordered the creation of the Philippine Institute of Sports and that the PSC leadership has invited her to launch the said institute sometime in the second week of February at, and this is what really takes the cake, Philsports or the Philippine National Institute of Sports!

As should be obvious by now, there is nothing to establish and launch because the Philsports already exists!

We now have this weird spectacle of the present PSC announcing the "creation" of an agency that was created as early as May 18, 1996 through a memorandum order issued by President Fidel V. Ramos. That order directed the PSC, "in coordination with the Department of Interior and Local Government, to establish a Philippine National Institute of Sports within the Philippine Sports Commission."

One asks, wasn’t the collective curiosity of the PSC leadership aroused especially when they see, after all these years, either the huge sign right at the façade of the former Ultra which says "Philippine National Institute of Sports" or the word Philsports in giant letters on the basketball hard court? In fact, news accounts of the stampede refer to the place as Philsports.

Ramos inaugurated Philsports at the University of Life Complex in Pasig City on Nov. 12, 1996. The creation of Philsports was the first resolution among the 38 that the Baguio Sports Summit in 1992 produced. Ramos instructed the PSC during the Philippine Sportswriters’ Association (PSA) Awards Night in December 1995 at the Holiday Inn Manila to create Philsports.

In his speech, covered by tri-media, Ramos declared "today is a proud moment for Philippine sports. Our inauguration…of Philsports makes headway in our efforts to implement physical fitness and sports development programs that are consistent with our socio-economic policies.

The first project of Philsports was Project 1616. It called for the training in 16 sports of representatives from the poorest areas in the 16 regions under the government’s Social Reform Agenda (SRA). Trainers came from the Philippines and Australia and conducted seminars for a week at the new Philsports in, among others, sports conditioning, prevention and treatment of injury, talent identification and management.

All practicing athletes know that training is the most essential part of any physical fitness and sports development program. There is a need to train the trainers and teachers of sports; coaches of athletic teams; sports scientists, leaders and managers who will devise policy, draw up plans and carry out sports programs. The intent was for Philsports to be the sports flagship project with a pro-poor and rural bias.

The backbone of any sports development plan is a viable network and program for coaching and training athletes. The key to any realistic sports program is a coaching base that will be the hub of further nationwide development of coaching. This radiation effect will be created through, among other programs, the training of trainers. In fact, a cardinal rule in carrying out change and empowering program planners and implementers is to provide for constant and systematic human resource development and capability building.

Philsports would have been at the forefront of the country’s sporting life. It could have realized the aspirations of the Philippine sports community to have a national training center for athletes, coaches, physical educators, sports scientists, sports and recreation leaders and all the essential specialists needed to carry out a mass-based program.

Philsports would offer programs such as athletes’ training and seminars on sports officiating, formulation of sports programs and community organization. It was to be the mechanism for developing athletically gifted and sports-oriented Filipinos, especially at the grassroots, into full-fledged, high-caliber elite athletes who could serve as role models, sports leaders and productive members of the sports community and society.

Its head office was in Pasig City, the same place where the "launching" of Philsports is supposed to take place in a few days. It was to be the "main artery" and its "tributaries" in the provinces were to be in such places like Cebu City and General Santos City in Mindanao. The Cebu satellite was established on Nov. 5, 1997 in the Abellana stadium, where a marker stands as the concrete evidence of its existence.

With all these historical facts then, what "launching of the first Philippine Institute of Sports" are they talking about? Either somebody’s hallucinating or is misleading us and the President of the Republic of the Philippines or is simply oblivious to the history of sports administration in this country. In any case, if indeed the "first PHILSPORTS" is to be "launched," this act is not consistent with good governance. If that is the case, this does not, in the final analysis, augur well for Philippine sports at all.