Tag: 2008

IF COACH Henberd Ortalla’s honest assessment is correct, the UST Paddlers are likely to fill up only half of the championship glass this season.

And for numerically sound reasons. The UST veteran count reads: Tiger Paddlers – 5, Lady Paddlers – 3. The rookies? Tiger Paddlers – 3, Lady Paddlers – 3.

Juggling these figures in mind, Ortalla himself openly admitted that the Tiger Paddlers, despite losing Season 70 MVP Reygea Rosales to graduation, are still heavily favored to retain the title they wrested from archrival Far Eastern University (FEU) last year when the UAAP table tennis hostilities unfurl this month.

“The Tigers’ hunger for victory did not fade after claiming last year’s championship crown,” Ortalla told the Varsitarian. “Even more, our new sets of players are rookies who want to experience how it feels to be a champion.”

ORPHANED by their chief playmaker for health reasons, the UST Tigresses bowed before a rampaging Far Eastern University (FEU) Lady Tamaraws, 47-80, to absorb their second defeat in five games, last July 27 at the Ateneo Blue Eagle gym.

The Tigresses sorely missed the backcourt presence of Season 70 Mythical Team member Marichu Bacaro, who underwent a tooth extraction a day before the game.

“The rest of the team was shocked when they knew Bacaro could not play,” coach Peque Tan told the Varsitarian. “They were not moving in their usual element.”

WITH THE groundwork already in place, it’s now just a matter of time before the new home of the perennial UAAP general champions rises at the heart of the UST campus.

The four-story UST Sports Complex, whose groundbreaking was held last July 29, is set to be finished by 2011 in time for the University’s quadricentennial anniversary, said Fr. Roberto Pinto O. P., director of the Facilities Management Office.

THE UNIVERSITY has transferred UST athletes to the GMG Active Dormitory Inc. from the Isabel Building last June 18 to prepare the erstwhile Thomasian players’ residence for renovations.

“We still do not know whether this will be permanent. All we know is that the University has plans for Isabel Building,” said Assistant to the Rector for Student Affairs Cristina Castro-Cabral.

HE WAS the Olympic “cop” who used to police the backcourt as a “cool, calculated, and heady” guard for the UST Glowing Goldies of the late 1940s. But more than leading a fearsome crew of hardcourt deadshots that has defined UST’s post-World War II onslaughts in the UAAP, Gabriel “Gabby” Fajardo lent his playmaking brilliance for a greater cause: to serve flag and country in the world’s biggest sporting arena — the Olympics.

EAGER to reclaim the title the Tigers lost last season, coach Pido Jarencio now brings in a pack of raw yet promising greenhorns at the start of Season 71. More than just backstopping their seasoned comrades, rookies Clark Bautista, Emilian Vargas, Jeric Fortuna, Carmelo Afuang, Christopher Camus, Carlos Fenequito, Jackson Wong, and Allein Gail Maliksi are raring to parade their individual arsenals against the fiercest hardcourt batallions assembled for this year’s UAAP cage wars.

OUTGROWING a failed back-to-back title test, the UST Tigresses could have just easily dispatched the harrowing lessons of Season 70 as mere footnotes in its newly devised basketball workbook.

But a lesson, good or bad, enriches experience, a weapon the Peque Tan-mentored squad gamely recognizes.

HOBBLED by the untimely exit of key player Remia Buenacosa, the UST Tigresses surrendered to pressure and crumbled before a towering Adamson University squad, 61-73, in the finals of the 2008 Nike Summer League last June 13 at the Philippine Sports Arena.

“They were just tired, I guess,” Coach Peque Tan told the Varsitarian. “That explained why they came out lifeless by the second half of the game.”

SHE HURDLED every roadblock but the last.

Season 70 Most Valuable Player Rose Anne de la Cruz may have rampaged through a crowd of lightweights en route to booking a finals ticket in the Dunlop Open women’s badminton tournament.

But dominating a seasoned member of the national team proved unlikely as she absorbed a clinical 19-21, 10-21 loss in the singles championship last June 6 at the Powerhouse courts in Makati.

START the year right to end it right.

In 2005, the UST Growling Tigers lost in the UAAP opener against the University of the Philippines Fighting Maroons, 66-69. Notching three second-round wins, the Tigers avoided being at the bottom of the standings but failed to enter the Final Four. That was Season 68.