Landing in the Leyte sports academy

TACLOBAN CITY—In the din of the clamor for grassroots sports development, there’s actually a two-year-old program here in Leyte that is pinpointing and harnessing young talent in the province that we could learn from.

Abap executive director Ed Picson told me that Roel Batan of Leyte had read one of our columns on the need for dynamic action to reinvigorate Philippine sports after our SEA Games debacles. Batan wanted to share what they had started in Tacloban and being implemented to this day: training young athletes while dealing with the politics that can rip good projects apart and the financial needs of running a training center and a school.

After e-mails and texts, I finally meet Batan in Leyte. The youthful Batan is actually a father of three daughters, a gentleman farmer and a former provincial board member. He is the executive director of the Leyte Sports Academy, established in August 2010 after Gov. Carlos Jericho Petilla talked with former PSC executive Dr. Lucrecio Calo on what the province could do for sports after hosting the 2009 Palarong Pambansa.

Calo, an academy consultant, conceived a center that would concentrate on three medal-rich sports: athletics, boxing and swimming. “The Governor asked me why not basketball,” the agile 76-year old Calo related, “I said that we would have to have twelve players vying for only one medal. By prioritizing, we can develop more athletes for more events.”

Potential athletes are identified in school and provincial meets and then offered academy slots. When they join, students are not displaced from their grade or year levels but proceed with their education at the academy as Department of Education mentors teach them all the subjects that lead to an elementary or high school diploma from their original schools.

“We look for three things when we get athletes,” Batan explains at a boxing workout supervised by Dionesio Jabagat, “Potential, capacity to be disciplined and academic ability.” It’s understandable that the academy first wants to find medalists for the province but the long term goal is to train athletes who will be good enough to be accepted in universities on both athletic skill and academic acceptance requirements.

Today, the academy is housed at the Tacloban sports complex and has dormitories, classrooms, a gym and a boxing workout area. Sixty-four youngsters from ages 8 to 16 train in the morning, attend classes and then train some more in the afternoon.

Since its opening, the academy has contributed Leyte athletes for the Eastern Visayas regional meet or EVRAA and the Palarong Pambansa. Although there hasn’t been a major golden haul yet given the keen competition in big events, the academy has already had medal winners in the Batang Pinoy revived by the PSC. Among their medalists are swimmers Christal Bullo, Justin Estremos and Saturnino Ageto; tracksters Angelica Publico and Francis Acedillo and boxer John Smith Gonzales. All of them are high school youngsters being honed for bigger challenges in regional and national meets.

But being a farmer, Batan knows that patience is necessary before one can harvest more and the Leyte Sports Academy is one fertile ground that could produce the Filipino champions of the future. It’s definitely a move in the right direction of making grassroots sports development happen and not just talking about it.