Baldwin hopes loss lights fire under intact Eagles next season

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The Ateneo Blue Eagles have gotten to the part where they need to cross a bridge.

They’re leaving behind a highly successful run and hoping to reach the start of another string of championship appearances in the UAAP.

At least, that’s how Tab Baldwin sees things after a 57-46 loss to the University of the Philippines in the Final Four on Saturday meant Ateneo had to abdicate its men’s basketball throne

“A lot of people will look at this season, and they’ll say it’s a season of failure … But you know, I choose to look at the glass being half full. And I’d like to think that this season is a bridge for us,” said Baldwin after the game at Smart Araneta Coliseum.

Baldwin, who steered the Blue Eagles to four championships including last year’s sweet revenge against the Fighting Maroons, admitted it wasn’t easy to continue their dynasty, especially with a new-look roster bannered by Jared Brown, Mason Amos, Chris Koon, and Kai Ballungay.

“We’ve just come out of an amazing era of Blue Eagle basketball. It’s very difficult to continue that, you know, just uninterrupted,” Baldwin said. “There were so many disruptions in our program with the pandemic and players leaving before their eligibility was finished, and it impacted our recruiting.

“We had to contend with all of that. And I think, you know, the conspiracy of circumstances sort of caught up with us a bit this year. So we’re looking at this year now as a bridge to what we hope will be a new era of success for Blue Eagle basketball. So we’re going to be optimistic.”

Ateneo barely made it to the Final Four with a 7-7 (win-loss) finish in the elimination round, needing to beat Adamson in a playoff to reach the Final Four, where the school entered as the fourth seed for the first time ever.

Low-scoring matchThe Fighting Maroons pulled away in the fourth quarter of their low-scoring match but Baldwin said they will learn their lessons after an early exit.

“We’re going to learn our lessons, we’re going to continue to develop and grow. And I think that the team that you saw this year will be almost intact when the team takes the floor next year. So this can be a very, very valuable season for the Blue Eagles and our future,” the Ateneo coach said.

“UP was a better team today. UP was a better team, this season, they will go on and contest the finals. But for us, we really believe that we could win this game and [because of] not winning it, there’s a lot of emotion in the dugout, there’s a lot of very downcast players, they’re hurt. And they’re really feeling the pain. And you don’t feel that if you haven’t invested,” he added.

Baldwin said he was proud of his wards’ effort this year as they battled adversity until their final game of the season, where Raffy Celis and Andrew Bongo weren’t available due to sickness as well as Gab Gomez due to his injury. Chris Koon, meanwhile. played through a fracture in his foot.

“[It] certainly has been a rollercoaster season for us. The record indicates that if you were a fly on the wall [in] all of our practices you would see that firsthand. But I just got to say I’m really proud of the team, you know because this was a season of battles, not just on the court,” Baldwin said. “It was a really weird season. You know, we battled to be better all the time to grow to develop. We battled a lot of injuries.”

Baldwin hopes that their setback would light a fire under the young Blue Eagles to work themselves back to the top next year as he said that one-and-done Joseph Obasa will be the only one graduating.

“This has to be a spark for them, which lights a fire, which burns all of us until we put it out with some hardware in the future,” he said. “We will be reminding one another in the months to come about the pain that we have so that the fire doesn’t go out.” INQ