This week’s report is on recent good news and bad news in sports.
Good news: winning in international debate. Last Tuesday in Dhaka, Ateneo de Manila University defeated Nanyang Technological University (of Singapore) to win the 2009 Asian Universities Debating Championship (AUDC), hosted by the East West University of Bangladesh.
In the final match, Ateneo’s A-team of Gica Mangahas, Steph Co and Shiveena Parmanand successfully opposed the motion: “This house believes that emigration of the best and the brightest from poor countries to the first world is beneficial for both types of countries.” They got the nod of seven of the nine judges to become the first all-woman team to win the championship. Gica Mangahas was named the second-best speaker of the tournament.
Debating is a sport. Sides of a proposition (affirmative/government versus negative/opposition) are assigned at random. Each side has 30 minutes to prepare, each main speech is limited to seven minutes, and a reply is limited to four minutes. The order of speakers is: government leader, opposition leader, government deputy, opposition deputy, government whip, opposition whip, opposition reply, government reply. Speakers are graded according to “matter” or substantive arguments, “manner” or style of delivery, and “method” or organization of the presentation.
A school may send up to three teams, seeded as team-A, team-B, and team-C. A typical AUDC involves over 100 teams, from over 50 schools, of which the great majority use English as a medium. After seven preliminary matches, the top 16 teams are said to “break,” and are seeded in quarterfinals according to their performance in the prelims.
At this year’s break, the top seven teams were, in order: National University of Singapore (NUS)-A, Nanyang-A, University of the Philippines Diliman-A, Ateneo-A, International Islamic University (of Malaysia)-A, Ateneo-B, and Ateneo-C. Other Philippine teams that broke were from UP Manila and De La Salle University. In the entire tournament, Ateneo was the only school whose teams all broke.
But third-seeded UP Diliman-A lost, unfortunately, to NUS-B in the quarters. In a close semi-finals match, Ateneo-A defeated top seed NUS-A, by getting the votes of three of the five judges.
The Ateneo Debate Society (ADS), founded in 1991, is Asia’s most awarded debate institution. It has won eight out of 10 National Debate Championships. The ADS is both a varsity team and a service-oriented student organization, that also trains debaters from other schools, public and private. It is one of the top 10 debate societies in the world.
During 1994-2004, Ateneo took part in the All-Asian Intervarsity Debating Championships. In seven of those years, the champions were Filipino: Ateneo in 1994, 2002, 2003 and 2004, the University of Santo Tomas in 1997 and 1999, and the University of the Philippines in 2001. Other winners were Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia in 1995, International Islamic University Malaysia in 1996 and 1998, and National University of Singapore in 2000.
In 2005, Ateneo joined some other schools with strong debating traditions in setting up AUDC as an alternate league. It won AUDC championships in 2005 in Singapore, in 2006 in the Philippines (in an Ateneo-A versus Ateneo-B final), and in 2007 in Indonesia, but lost to Nanyang Technological University in 2008 in Malaysia. Last Tuesday’s final was an Ateneo-Nanyang rematch.
Sending debaters to three international tournaments a year—“Asians,” “Australasians” (adding Australia and New Zealand), and “Worlds”—is expensive. I know this by having contributed two sons and a daughter to the Ateneo international debating teams, from the time when school funds were minimal, and families financed almost all the costs. (That’s what families do for children in world-level sports, right?) So I join the ADS in sincerely thanking Mr. Manny Pangilinan and the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company for sponsoring such costs since a few years ago.
Bad news: declining popularity of billiards. Last Thursday, the Social Weather Stations reported that the popularity of billiards as a participant sport and as a spectator sport has fallen since 2006.
Comparison of the last two SWS national surveys on billiards, in September 2006 and February 2009, shows that the proportion of Filipino adults who play regularly fell from 14 percent to 10 percent, and that the proportion of adults who watch it regularly on television fell dramatically from 18 percent to only 8 percent. On the other hand, the popularity in 2006 was about the same as in 2005, when the first SWS billiards survey was done.
Regular players are defined as those who have played within the past six months. Regular watchers are those who always or often watch whenever billiards is televised. The 2006-2009 declines are statistically significant.
The SWS surveys on billiards popularity were done pro bono for the Billiards and Snooker Congress of the Philippines (BSCP), of which I have been a member since 2005, and am now a board member, after new elections, approved by the Philippine Olympic Committee, were held last March.
The survey findings do not reflect well on the tenure of the previous BSCP leadership, which was more oriented on successful staging of events than on success of Filipino players. Due to great policy differences, our star players stopped cooperating with the old leadership, which retaliated by excluding the stars from several international events to which it held entry passes. It’s the Filipino champions who make the game popular, not championships held in the Philippines.
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Contact SWS: www.sws.org.ph or mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.
