Gone are the days when the University of Fighting Maroons are labeled as perennial whipping boys of the UAAP.
“Nowhere to go but up. As the community proclaims, nowhere to go but UP. They’ve clearly leveled up. If there are dark ages in basketball history, this team has moved to the age of enlightenment. A period of Renaissance,” said JJ Atencio, a businessman and start-up advocate and chairman of Januarius Holdings.
“I don’t think it’s possible to go back to those times again. It’s a different outlook now. The team and the community is now looking to be a perennial contender from now on,” added Atencio,
Atencio’s apparel start-up – STATS – has been a partner of the Fighting Maroons for the third straight season.
An athleisure brand that has started to make its presence felt strongly in the sports apparel business in the country, STATS is starting to grow just like the Fighting Maroons in the UAAP. Together, their partnership has become a fruitful one – from second to last place to fifth place two seasons ago, and from fifth to runner-up last season.
Now, they’re setting their sights on a much bigger prize with no less than a championship as their target.
“STATS is very proud of this team and is very grateful to be a part of their journey to success. This is the third year of STATS. We’re an apparel brand – a branded athleisure brand. It’s also a new brand made in the Philippines. It made a logical sense that an apparel athletic brand to partner with a team that is newly-born. The brand fits well with this team. Because the brand of UP as a contender to UAAP basketball is just starting in the same way that STATS has become a go-to brand for apparel on its development stage,” said Atencio.
Joining the Fighting Maroons, who will be handled by Bo Perasol, in this season’s UAAP wars are highly-touted second generation player Kobe Paras and promising Ricci Rivero, two former members of Gilas Pilipinas national pool, who will combine forces with holdovers Bright Akhuetie and the De Liaño Brothers – Juan Gerardo and Javier Joaquin, giving the team a brighter future in its coming campaign.
Atencio believes that this year’s Fighting Maroons can make it all the way to the championship. Last year’s team is basically intact and therefore more experienced and mature, and then there’s the entry of Ricci and Kobe that increased the team’s fire power too.
“When they approached me, to help out in sponsoring the UP Fighting Maroons, I realized that I wanted to focus on a specific activity for the team which can have significant impact and create the best value. And so, with coach Bo and the team managers, we decided on foreign training sponsorship as the most relevant contribution I could make.”
“I liked the idea because it impacts not only on the team itself, but in the personal lives of the players as well. In our first year, STATS had UP go to IMPACT Basketball Academy in Las Vegas. I’d like to think that this training was a big part of their campaign as they ended up fifth. Then last year, we sent them to Serbia, then they became second. This year, they went to Las Vegas, again, for more skills training,” he said.
In the past two years, Atencio was always asked by his classmates and friends why he decided to sponsor the UP Fighting Maroons when he is an alumnus of Ateneo and never studied in UP.
“Helping the UP Team achieve its potential is actually a very Jesuit thing. In Ateneo, we are taught to be “Men for Others” and that would happily apply to a basketball team that has no academic or fraternal links. And it helped that I knew UP President Danny Concepcion who I credit for the reemergence of UP.”
