Building, not breaking athletes
It was at a meeting to discuss our college basketball program when I first got the news about the deaths of two of Ateneo de Manila’s varsity basketball players, Rene Baterbonia and Divine Adili, at a seaside resort.
The basketball team was accompanied by mentors, including head coach Tab Baldwin, an American-Kiwi, who has garnered many victories and championships for the teams he’s coached.
The student athletes who lost their lives were with their teammates in Aurora province for a team-building activity. The official cause of death was given as drowning.
The summer break in the Philippines is often a time for such team-building exercises, a combination of rest and recreation, as well as grueling physical conditioning. Most importantly, there are team-building exercises to promote team solidarity.
Baldwin advocated a “break the man” approach for this activity, drawing from a program popularized by American football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, who handled the Texas A&M University programs for many years. These programs are marked by similarities to military boot camp, where the teams are kept in isolated sites for activities and have grueling activities.
In 2017, a “boot camp” he organized for Ateneo drew adverse publicity because of what was seen as unnecessarily tough conditions. A news article about the 2017 camp explained that the goal was to “break the men,” specifically explaining “that it’s very difficult for young men who are at the height of their playing prowess, all of whom had egos that are fed by loving parents, adoring girlfriends, adoring fans, and victories along the way. And these egos are to be taken down to the core.”
Such programs have been criticized by psychologists in the United States, not just in relation to sports, including its widespread use in the military. I saw this in Philippine Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) programs, including their misuse, some ending up with deaths and serious injuries to the cadets, which eventually led to the ROTC programs’ removal as a compulsory subject. It still remains an elective, with sporadic attempts by the government (and support from parents) to make it compulsory again.
Less known by many Filipinos is that there are programs of this type—toughen up the man by shaming him and taking away his ego—to rehabilitate drug dependents. This is the DARE program (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), used widely in the US and the Philippines, but which has also been heavily criticized and phased out in many cases, or modified into “new DARE,” somewhat “softer” than the “old DARE.” But the old DARE remains pretty much as the official government program with dubious success. (Disclosure: A cousin died in one such program in 1972, completely broken, physically and mentally, and I often mention that tragedy as an example of misguided “get tough” programs. It is also a less discussed aspect of Duterte’s war on drugs.)
Baldwin has not talked about the impact of this “break the man” approach for his basketball training, but some of the “graduates” of these boot camps are now beginning to come out in the press with their accounts of activities that stretch the limits of human endurance. One account even refers to a player who could not swim but had to join the exercises in the sea.
Someone else, a reader reacting to the “break the man” story, points out that the programs were not supposed to be conducted in the sea, but in indoor swimming pools and with enough professional supervision.
Certainly, we need more fact-finding in relation to the Ateneo tragedy, but this early, whatever action that can be taken should be initiated. The meeting I was attending last Monday when news of the Ateneo tragedy came was about an upcoming international basketball competition where my school is participating. I have reminded our coaches that there will be no beachside activities for now and that we will intensify our water support and safety activities in our sports science program. Most importantly, though, we hope to work closely with colleagues from other schools to build sports psychology programs not just for the athletes but for coaches as well. This will include the rights of students to negotiate their participation in all activities and to voice their reservations and perceived vulnerabilities, physical and mental.
Many of these athletes will, after all, become the builders of tomorrow’s athletes, men and women.
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