Editorial : A toast to Thomasian sports excellence

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BEYOND doubt, the country’s powerhouse collegiate athletes play for the University of Santo Tomas.
This early, the Royal and Pontifical University is looking to bag the UAAP overall trophy for the ninth straight year in sweeping fashion with a big 36-point lead at the end of the first semester. UST won eight of the 12 titles at stake last semester for 260 points.
Unknown to many, UST has won 33 UAAP General Championships in the league’s last 34 years. UST also holds the most number of championships in swimming (30 for men’s and 33 for women’s), basketball (19 for men’s and 11 for women’s), volleyball (seven for men’s and one for women’s), taekwondo (seven for women’s and eight for women’s), men’s judo (eight), and men’s tennis (seven). All of those are a testament to Thomasian sports excellence in every sense of the word.
Aside from heightened excitement over bagging the UAAP general championship on Season 69, the Thomasian community is still in a state of euphoria because the UST Growling Tigers scored an improbable yet sterling comeback to win the UAAP Season 69 Men’s Basketball title against the heavily favored Ateneo de Manila University Blue Eagles.
What is good with the UST Basketball championship is that UST’s victories in other sports are now more written and talked about. Countless news and feature stories on other top-ranked Thomasian sports personalities are published or broadcast everyday, which had been missing before.
When the media reported about the Tigers’ Cinderella finish last Oct. 3, they also included a sidebar about the UST men’s judo team capturing the UAAP title the day before. Since then, articles about UST securing the title in other UAAP sports such as women’s table tennis and women’s swimming, and updates on off-season tilts such as Ang Liga Filipina (women’s football), Women’s Basketball League (WBL), University Games (athletics and volleyball), and Fil-oil/Flying-V HomegrownCup (men’s basketball) have been amptly covered by the dailies.
UST currently tops Ang Liga Filipina and earned a WBL finals seat with 4-0 and 4-1 win-loss cards, respectively, while the UST Male Tracksters won the University Games championships last Oct. 23-25. The Tigers, though bannered mostly by Team-B players, are sporting a fair 2-3 win-loss card in the Homegrown Cup.
Feature stories on UAAP Finals MVP Jojo Duncil, two-time SEA Games medalist Rubelin Amit, and World Bowling Champion Biboy Rivera have been also published, trumpeting UST athletes as sportsmen and women of high-caliber.
Thomasian excellence does not stop there as 12 UST players will don the national colors in the 15th Asian Games in Doha, Qatar this month. Aside from Rivera, these are Olympians Tshomlee Go and Donald Geisler, Southeast Asian Games medalist Alex Briones, and Juan Mendoza (taekwondo), Amit (billiards), Janice Hung (wushu), Gretchen Malalad (karate), Grand Master Ronald Dableo, and UAAP aces Gian Carlo Nocum (fencing) and Wilfredo Hidalgo Jr. (baseball).
Perhaps sadly, we should be reminded that UST had to win the UAAP basketball’s top honors first before its titles and stalwarts in other sporting events started to receive recognition. In contrast, elitist UAAP universities enjoy much publicity and coverage for unprestigious golf tournaments, repetitive dream games that only result in brawls, off-season tilts played by the school’s developmental pool, and even UAAP juniors basketball showdown (instead of the Seniors women’s hoops). This elitism that the media reinforce and engender is the bane of true sports. It’s the stumbling block to correct public appreciation of sports and athletics.
Excellence in sports or in any other field should be celebrated without the artificial parameters of social segregation and elitism. Men and women of sports, basketball or otherwise, must be recognized by the media. A timely reorientation of media values would result in a proper recognition of sports.




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