A coordinated and unified effort to develop sports at the tertiary level is in the works.
Commission on Higher Education chairman Prospero de Vera said this following a virtual meeting last week with officials of various school sports associations throughout the country.
De Vera said the CHED is now working on having the different leagues linked up with a common policy that promotes physical education and encourages athletic programs, league competitions, amateur and professional sports.
This will now be possible with the implementation of Republic Act 11180, which seeks to regulate and oversee the programs of school athletic associations in the future.
“The assistance of the national government is very limited, because there is no mechanism by which all these sports associations will regularly talk to each other,” said De Vera as he described the current situation that collegiate sports programs are in.
De Vera believes that most school sports programs belonging to different associations are disconnected from each other.
With RA 11180, the different educational institutions with sports programs will be able to participate by providing information on their programs.
“One immediate change is that our decision making will be more data-driven. One problem of higher education sports is that we don’t have data when we make decisions because we don’t know what the schools are doing, and what programs they have,” added De Vera.
Officials of the Private Schools Athletic Association, the University Athletic Association of the Philippines and the National College Athletic Association of the Philippines were among those who attended the virtual gathering.
Also providing inputs were representative of the Women’s National Collegiate Athletic Association, the State Colleges and Universities Athletic Association, the Cebu School’s Athletic Foundation, Inc., the National Capital Regional Athletic Association, the Association of Local Colleges and Universities Athletic Association and the National Athletic Association of Schools, Colleges and Universities.
UAAP executive director Rene Saguiag Jr. and NCAA management committee member Hercules Callanta of the Lyceum Philippines University shared their inputs on how their respective leagues ran their sports programs.