Sad Reality of Philippine Sports (Part 1)
This corner primarily discusses basketball but will dabble from time to time with other sports.
This time we will talk about the sad state of Philippine sports and how, we, as a people look at sports.
The reality is that the only kind of sports event that matters in this country is basketball – and at times boxing. Other than these two, we don’t care about other sports.
Volleyball is one of the sports events neglected for quite some time to a point that we have not built a competitive team, hence, we barely can compete in the Southeast Asian level for this category. We have seen increased interest in women’s volleyball of late but due to years of neglect, politics and lack of funding—our neighbors in Southeast Asia are competing at an elite level. We are unable to beat the likes of Thailand, Indonesia or even Vietnam.
In recent years we built a team to compete in the SEA Games but not strong enough to even win medals. We also could barely compete in the Asian level.
A generational player like Jaja Santiago, a 6-foot-5 middle blocker is the centerpiece of the Philippine women’s volleyball team. She has the height to give the team a fighting chance in international volleyball.
However, she plays professionally in Japan and there is news that the Japanese team wants to naturalize her. Japan is the fifth best team in the world while the Philippines is not even in the top 100 best teams in the world.
Japan will compete in the volleyball competitions in the Tokyo Olympics and Santiago, if she joins the Japan team, may have a chance to play in the Olympics. This is a chance she will never get if she will remain with the Philippine team.
This leads us to the reality that the years of neglect resulted to the possible loss of the best Filipina volleyball player.
If only we put an effort to invest money on volleyball and build a competitive team, we might be able to save the loss of Santiago, possibly to the Japanese.
We will continue with this issue next week as we explore the malady affecting the progress of not just volleyball but Philippine sports in general.