An appeal to DepEd: Make Palarong Pambansa more inclusive

Having read in the Inquirer about our country’s only Olympic champion, Hidilyn Diaz, and other Filipino athletes who will compete in the Paris Olympics, I felt inspired to write this.

As a former Palarong Pambansa swimmer—with the Southern Tagalog Regional Athletic Association Region 4 team in 1994, and with the champion National Capital Region team in 1996, and as a former coach of the University of Santo Tomas (UST) high school juniors team—I am quite invested in developments in the local swimming scene. I join many others in the swimming community in hoping that the Department of Education (DepEd) would reconsider its decision to set qualifying times to determine which swimmers in different regional meets all over the country would qualify for the upcoming Palarong Pambansa 2024 in July.

This qualification rule is different from the previous one that was followed for many years, where the top two swimmers from each category in the regional meets were automatically sent to the annual sporting event, regardless of the time they clocked in the pool. To begin with, the qualifying times set in the various swimming categories and levels (elementary and secondary) are quite high and could therefore deprive a lot of swimmers the chance to join the Palaro. Imagine how heartbreaking it would be for a young athlete to emerge champion at a regional meet, only to be unable to proceed to the Palaro because he or she failed to reach the qualifying time.

I would thus like to share that our sports program at the UST—the perennial University Athletic Association of the Philippines general champion—is not solely focused on winning. Our primary goal is to assist our student-athletes in developing character, building self-confidence, and fostering a strong desire to excel at higher levels of competition. As an educational institution whose student-athletes join various local (and sometimes international) tournaments, we do our best to provide and seek opportunities for as many student-athletes as possible to participate in different tourneys.

The Palaro is where grassroots level athletes can be discovered. We believe that more exposure to such a sporting event can help develop more confident athletes who will succeed at higher levels of competition in the long run. By supporting our students-athletes from different regions across the country and enabling them to compete with each other in a tournament like the Palaro, we inspire them to strive for more.

Let us encourage and make it possible for them to experience and enjoy laddered sports tournaments where they can develop the competitive zeal that they can bring with them to national and international arenas later on. There’s still time between now and the Palarong Pambansa 2024. Here’s hoping that the DepEd would consider this matter, and make the tournament more inclusive by widening the field (or pool) for more young swimmers from all corners of the country.

Jerome Angelitud Porto, LPT, D.Pd,
japorto@ust.edu.ph