Alas not against foreign players, only 'mercenaries'

Even if it was his school that broached the idea of implementing a ban on foreign players in the NCAA, Letran Knights basketball coach Louie Alas said he personally is not against having foreign players on his varsity squad. Letran is hosting the coming 88th season of the NCAA.

“You know, sometimes I get misinterpreted on that,” Alas told The STAR in the vernacular. “What I said was that I don’t want to get a foreign player if I’m the one who has to go to his country and offer him X amount or whatever material things just for him to play for me.”

For the last two years, the NCAA has been studying limiting eligibility of athletes to pure-blooded Filipinos to “level the playing field”. San Beda College has won five of the last six NCAA seniors basketball championships, three with Nigerian Sam Ekwe. Last season, one-time MVP Sudan Daniel injured his knee in a pre-season game and underwent surgery. The 6-7 American center recovered in time for the Final Four, but head coach Frankie Lim declined to use him even in the Finals, which the Red Lions won, anyway.

For this coming season, the Red Lions planned on fielding another foreign center in Ola Adeogun, whose fate is still uncertain after the brawl involving the Red Lions and San Sebastian College’s seniors volleyball team last December. Foreign athletes fulfilling their eligibility requirements for other NCAA member schools face the same uncertainty. But Alas, for his part, has always been known not to actively recruit players, no matter where they come from.

“I don’t go after players. If they want to be with us, it has to come from them,” says Alas, who steered the Knights to the 2005 championship. “For me, if let’s say, an exchange student comes over, he tries out and he’s capable of playing, I’ll take him. But to encourage them to play because of money, because of material things, I will not do that.”

In the US, the National Junior College Athletic Association passed a rule that limits the number of international athletes competing in intercollegiate sports. The old law restricted teams to spending twenty-five percent of their recruitment money on international players without limiting the number of players. The new rule decreasing the actual number of athletes takes effect August of this year. This was in response to the growing number of competing foreign student-athletes in the US, which had grown from less than 3,600 to nearly 11,000 in the last decade. The NJCAA explained that it could not comprehensively check the backgrounds of all foreign athletes entering the US, and some of them were older than their American peers and had played semi-professionally or professionally abroad. Schools protesting the rule say that foreign students pay the highest fees for a good education in the United States. The matter is still being contested.

In 2011, a furor was also raised over the increasing number of foreign collegiate tennis players in the US. Tens of millions of dollars -–the largest of any sport – are spent by American colleges each year recruiting foreign tennis players, some say at the expense of US-born athletes. Baylor in Texas was ranked the top amateur tennis team in the country, but did not have any American players at all. Thirty-seven percent of players from the top 25 teams in men’s and women’s tennis did not come from the US. This has supposedly stunted the growth of the professional side of the sport, as only four Americans were listed in the top 20 in the world, including Venus and Serena Williams.

In March of this year, three colleges in Scotland – Cardonald, Anniesland and Stow – failed new immigration standards, forcing their foreign students to leave the country or seek scholarships elsewhere. Cardonald College in Glasgow saw its sponsor license revoked, leaving its 41 non-European Union students facing possible forced removal from the UK unless they could find new sponsors or complete new documentation within 60 days. Anniesland and Stow, meanwhile, were downgraded by the UK Border Agency, losing their most coveted Highly Trusted status which allows them to get the most funding from foreign students, athletes or not.

“Foreign players are okay with me. It’s the ones I may call mercenaries I don’t want, the players who are guns for hire,” Alas clarifies. “And there are a lot in our country now.”

Alas may be referring to the proliferation of Kenyan runners who have been dominating the running boom in the Philippines, to the point that some Filipino runners choose not to participate if there are more than a handful of Kenyans entered in an event.

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Not only was the recently-concluded Palarong Pambansa in Pangasinan considered the safest and most well-organized, it is also being hailed as the most efficient in terms of medical care.

Some 800 patients were swiftly attended to at the medical stations at each of the 17 playing venues, and even at the billeting areas and the miniature hospital inside the Narciso Ramos Sports and Civic Center, not to mention at the Pangasinan Provincial Hospital as well as other provincial government hospitals. Most emergency cases were common minor injuries to participants in athletics, basketball, baseball and football such as cramps, body pain, sprains, abrasions and lacerations.

“As a parent, I am very impressed with the fast and immediate service of the medical team of Pangasinan,” said Jumel Miller, a sports director of Systems Plus College Foundation in Angeles City. “There is a feeling of security that the child is well taken care of.”

Emergency response teams were supported by 40 ambulances positioned in all playing venues and billeting areas. The Palaro secretariat also coordinated with private hospitals for fast-lane service for athletes in cases of emergency. All medical services rendered were free of charge, courtesy of the provincial government.