Blueprint for Olympic gold: from good health to great sports

If we aspire for Olympic gold in 2020, then we need to begin laying a strong foundation for grassroots sports TODAY. And the key to grassroots sports is the Department of Education, the single national organization that can organize and operate a nationwide sports program from the local to the national level.

Developing Olympic-level talent must be a national initiative connected from start to finish. If Olympic gold is to be a national goal, then it must start with good health for young children. The logic is as follows:

To develop Olympic-class athletes, there must be a large pool of nationally competitive athletes competing for slots on the Philippine team.

To have a large pool of nationally competitive athletes, we need to have tens of thousands of competitive athletes at the university and high school levels.

To have tens of thousands of competitive athletes at the university and high school levels, we should have millions of physically fit children.

And to have physically fit children, they must ALL be healthy and meet body-mass indices.

I call this cycle “From Good Health to Great Sports,” and it should be the blueprint for Olympic gold.

Data from the National Nutrition Council show that slightly more than 30 percent of all schoolchildren aged 6 to 12 years are either underweight and/or underheight (e.g., stunted) due to some level of undernutrition in early childhood. Within this age group, 65 percent suffer from iodine deficiency and 38.4 percent of boys and 36.5 percent of girls have iron deficient anemia.

The key to improving health and nutrition is school feeding in Grades 1 to 3. DepEd needs to develop cost-effective school feeding that will last at least 150 days (out of a 205-day school year).  Parent involvement and school gardens will greatly stretch school feeding budgets.

Physical education should return as a major subject in all public schools, with physical fitness the underlying objective. Twice a year, all schools should hold physical fitness tests for all boys and girls in five fitness tests as measured against international standards:

Curl-ups or sit-ups (to measure strength and endurance)

Shuttle run (to measure speed and agility)

Endurance run or walk combination (to measure heart/lung endurance)

Pull-ups or right angle push-ups (to measure upper body strength and endurance)

V-sit reach or sit-and-reach (to measure the flexibility of the lower back and hamstrings).

Children should be scored per fitness station (by gender and age), and the total score can fall into one of four categories (gold, silver, bronze or no award). Bronze should be the definition of average fitness for the gender and age group. No award will indicate below fitness.

The first test given after the first quarter of the school year serves as a diagnostic test to help children determine their levels of fitness. After a full school year of physical education and sports, a second fitness test toward the end of the year will be the determinant of what badge each child will get.

The goal: Every child earns a badge of whatever color.

By Grades 5 and 6 through high school, every school should aspire to organize intramural sports, such as basketball, football in grade school and volleyball, baseball or softball in high school. Critical to intramural sports is the development of teamwork among children to help prepare them for competition and the real world.

Individual sports that make sense for Filipinos (given our body size and build) can also be promoted at the elementary level (e.g., cross-country running, chess, badminton) and high school (track and field and athletics).

Boxing is not recommended for elementary or high school but may be applied at the university level. Other sports where Filipinos can do well: martial arts (judo, taekwondo). Swimming is a possibility but requires a facility.

As the pool of athletes expands at the grassroots level, the Palarong Pambansa of DepEd will become a true sports competition and a real sifting process as athletes compete in provincial and regional meets leading up to the national event.

At the Palaro, national sports associations and corporate sponsors should be able to spot real athletic talent from among the millions of kids in the school system and begin a serious program of training for this talent pool.

What DepEd can do for Philippine sports is provide a sustainable base of healthy, physically fit children able to compete in sports at different levels. Without this grassroots base, we are fooling ourselves if we think we can attain Olympic gold.

With a population of over 100 million, it is no stretch of the imagination to say we are an underperforming country in the field of sports. Let’s target Olympic gold in 2020 by starting today with a President’s Physical Fitness Award program for schoolchildren in our public schools.

Juan Miguel Luz (juanmiguel.luz@gmail.com) is dean at the Center for Development Management, Asian Institute of Management, and former education undersecretary.