The truth about PhilSports

FORMER President Fidel V. Ramos should be given his honored place when the Philippine Sports Commission, under chair William Ramirez, launches the Philippine Sports Institute on Oct. 1. This was the timely advice from national athletics association president Philip Ella Juico, himself a former PSC chair.

Mr. Juico explains:

Allow me to volunteer on my role as resource person during the recent PSC consultations on the Master Plan for Philippine Sports and the PhilSports (which was established on instructions of then President Ramos to me as PSC Chair and to the DILG, then headed by Sec. Bobby Barbers, on May 18,  1996).

PhilSports, for the record, has been long in existence. When I explained my role in the consultations, which was to crystallize the issues and invite people’s attention to what has been done in the past, President Ramos instructed PSC and DILG on May 18, 1996, “to establish a Philippine National Institute for Sports within the PSC and to formulate and implement a nationwide training program for sports managers and administrators, in coordination with DILG and Ched.

In pursuit of this mandate, the PSC invited President Ramos to inaugurate (which he did) the PhilSports at the then Ultra sometime in November 1996 or some six months after the issuance of the memorandum. Several weeks before that formal inauguration, PhilSports—PSC had already rolled out several programs designed to strengthen the national coaching infrastructure (our first line of attack) through our mutual friend, Dr Perry Mequi, former PSC chair and Dean of the College of Physical Education of Foundation University in Dumaguete.

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A few years later, a new PSC administration took over and delivered to the “circular file” (garbage bin) both our plans and programs for PhilSports and the Master Plan that was painstakingly put together with the help of sports stakeholders in the government and private business, the academe, sport managers and administrators and the Australian Sports Commission (PSC counterpart), the Australian Institute of Sports (AIS, or the counterpart of the emerging PhilSports) and Price Waterhouse, one of the world’s largest auditing/accounting and management consulting firms. We had identified nine strategic focus areas with close to a 100 programs and sub-programs. We were not content with hackneyed yet “lofty” motherhood statements.

In short, let me reemphasize at the risk of being repetitive, PhilSports was established and had ongoing programs but it was shot down as it was soaring in the skies after the end of the Ramos administration in 1998. Several PSC chairmen just ignored PhilSports and the Master Plan except in 2005 when, Butch Ramirez, to his credit, tried to revive PhilSports. But his term was cut short and all his successors simply put the two concepts back into the circular file where it gathered dust until Chair Ramirez asked me to talk about our experience in crafting the eight-volume Master Plan and the concept of PhilSports.

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I suggest therefore that in the future, when we talk of PhilSports, it may be best to use words like Revive, Resuscitate and Re-launch rather than LAUNCH since President Ramos himself launched it in November 1996. I would like in fact to take this opportunity to suggest to Chair Ramirez that President Ramos, to honor his vision for sports and the work done, be invited on Oct. 1 when PhilSports is, to put it properly, Re-launched or dug up from the circular file.

The Master Plan for sports also exists. What needs to be done is to update it and not reinvent the wheel. To begin with, the PSC vision-mission statement, the starting point of any strategic plan of any noble enterprise, has not changed in substance and form, 21 years after we crafted it.

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The main reason why I wrote this email: to correct the facts, to learn from each other, not to get credit for anything. There is really nothing that magical about the Master Plan and PhilSports. No one owns these plans or has any proprietary or copyright interest on them but the Filipino people and it was our desire from the outset to propagate these concepts—the more PhilSports satellites you see all over the archipelago, the better. The more people who examine and update the Master Plan, the better.”

PHILIP JUICO