I keep coming back to one small, unbearable fact.
Before Rene Clert Baterbonia was a name on a national headline, before he was a “Blue Eagles recruit” and then, God help us, a body pulled from the surf in Dipaculao, he was a boy from Talacogon, Agusan del Sur, who wore the same blue we wear here in Davao. He was an Ateneo de Davao product. He led our region to a Palarong Pambansa gold and took home the MVP. He was, in the truest and most literal sense, one of ours.
So no, I can’t write about this the way a columnist writes about a distant tragedy in Manila. This one landed at home. And that’s exactly why I need to write it honestly, even when honesty means aiming criticism at the mothership of the school system I love.
The values they taught us, and the values they showed
Every Atenean — Davao, Manila, Cagayan de Oro, Zamboanga, wherever — gets the same two ideas drilled into us until they stop being slogans and start being conscience.
The first is Cura Personalis: care for the whole person. Not the athlete. Not the scholarship line-item. Not the “asset.” The person — body, soul, dignity, and the family waiting for him back home.
The second is the one they put on our diplomas in spirit if not in ink: to leave as men and women for others. Competent, yes. But conscientious and compassionate first. A person for others is supposed to run toward the vulnerable, not lawyer up against them.
Here’s my problem. When you line up those two sacred ideas against how Ateneo de Manila actually behaved in the hours and days after June 8, they don’t match. They don’t even rhyme. What I watched was not Cura Personalis. It was crisis PR. It was an institution that, in its hour of testing, reached for a legal reflex instead of a moral one.
I’ve written about this exact failure before
Some of you will remember the piece I wrote analyzing the Resorts World Manila attack as a crisis-management case study. The whole reason I held it up was that it let me lay out, cleanly, what a serious disaster response is supposed to look like — leadership fronting the crisis personally instead of hiding behind a spokesman, ownership instead of deflection, and the victims placed at the dead center of the story rather than the brand.
That was the template. Own it early. Tell the truth faster than the rumor mill can lie. Treat the people you failed as human beings, not as liabilities to be managed down.
Ateneo de Manila did close to the opposite. And that inversion is the whole tragedy after the tragedy.
The drowning was a catastrophe. Catastrophes happen; the sea is merciless and rip currents don’t care whose recruit you are. But the response was a series of choices. And nearly every early choice pointed the same direction: protect the institution first, comfort the grieving second.
The legal reality is uglier than an “accident”
For a while, the convenient word was accident. A freak wave. A cruel current. A twist of nature nobody could have foreseen.
Except the people who were there keep describing something that sounds less like fate and more like negligence dressed up as “mental toughness.” Phones confiscated at the start of camp. Rookies days into the program sent into open water. A conditioning drill pushed through in surf that investigators say carried the two of them hundreds of meters out. No flotation devices staged, no lifeguard cordon adequate to the risk. And then the detail that turns the stomach: former players saying there had already been a near-fatal drowning scare at that same stretch of Dipaculao years earlier — a warning the program apparently swallowed rather than acted on.
That is why the police did not stop at “accident.” The CIDG has now recommended that former head coach Tab Baldwin and several staff face charges under the Anti-Hazing Act of 2018, and separately recommended homicide and reckless imprudence resulting in homicide, all referred to the Department of Justice for evaluation. Nothing is proven in court yet — Baldwin is accused, not convicted, and due process is his right as much as anyone’s. But let’s be precise about what the Anti-Hazing Act actually says: inflicting physical suffering or risk as a condition of belonging to a team is not a gray area. When “building mental toughness” means isolating teenagers, taking their only line to the outside world, and marching them into water that had nearly killed someone before, we have left the vocabulary of sport and entered the vocabulary of law.
Here’s what stings as an Atenean: the school did not lead the reckoning. It got dragged into it. The subpoenas came from the state. The recommendations came from the police. The pressure came from lawmakers. Where was the institution that raised us to be the first in the room to say, this was wrong, and we did it?
A state within a state
How does a lethal little subculture flower unnoticed inside a Jesuit university? The honest answer is that elite UAAP basketball stopped being an extracurricular a long time ago.
These programs are effectively multimillion-peso enterprises, floated by wealthy alumni boosters, built around star coaches who get treated like untouchable demigods. They operate in a silo. Nobody with real authority audits the training camp, because the training camp wins, and winning buys silence. The administration, in practice, handed over its duty of in loco parentis — to stand in the place of a parent — to a program that had every incentive to guard its own methods.
That’s the “state within a state.” A university is supposed to enforce its values on its teams. Somewhere along the way, the trophy started enforcing its values on the university. And CHED has now formally accused Ateneo of exactly this failure of reasonable supervision.
Silence is not a strategy. It’s a confession.
Which brings me to the part that, as a communications guy, I find almost professionally offensive.
When the Commission on Higher Education asked Ateneo for its incident reports and off-campus compliance documents, the university reportedly sat on the request for about a week — long enough that CHED had to issue a public Show Cause Order demanding, under threat of sanctions, that the school explain itself.
Think about the message that sends. In a crisis, every hour of silence gets read by the public as an hour of hiding. A ten-day-long shrug at your own regulator is not “measured.” It is not “protecting the process.” It reads as an institution that assumed its prestige placed it above scrutiny. It did not. All the stonewalling accomplished was to convert a heartbreaking sports tragedy into a national story about a cover-up — a strictly worse story, and an entirely self-inflicted one.
Compare that, again, to the standard I laid out in the Resorts World piece: get in front of it, hand over everything, let the regulator find you cooperative to a fault. Ateneo did the reverse and paid the reverse price.
I’ll say this too, and I’ll own it as opinion rather than fact: when Fr. Yap’s statements finally came, they read to me less like a shepherd grieving with his flock and more like language that had passed through a legal filter — precise, careful, protective. Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe there was genuine anguish under the phrasing. But Cura Personalis isn’t supposed to sound like it was cleared by counsel first.
The kids who couldn’t say no
Now the part we’re all too polite to name: class.
Divine Adili was a Nigerian student-athlete, in this country on the strength of a game he could play. Rene was a scholarship recruit from a modest family in Agusan del Sur, days into the biggest opportunity of his young life. Boys like that do not have the luxury of pushing back against a four-time champion coach. You cannot “opt out” of the drill when the drill is the price of the future your whole family is counting on. You cannot demand a lifeguard when demanding anything might mark you as soft.
That is the quiet exploitation at the heart of elite recruitment. We import talent and scholarship kids into these programs and then place them in a power structure where refusing an unsafe order is functionally unthinkable. Ateneo’s deepest failure here isn’t that a drill went wrong. It’s that it built a system with no safe, independent way for its most vulnerable students to say, this is dangerous and I’m scared, and be heard by someone who wasn’t chasing a title.
That is the opposite of Cura Personalis. It is care for the roster, not the person.
The question I can’t shake
Baldwin has resigned. He apologized — “I’m sorry. To the depth of my being, I’m sorry,” he said — and I don’t doubt the man is haunted. Coaches will come and go. The indictments, if they come, will run their course through a justice system that owes even the accused a fair hearing.
But a coaching change doesn’t touch the thing that actually failed. What failed was an order of priorities. Somewhere in the machinery of a great Catholic university, a championship came to matter more than the two boys it takes to win one. That is not Tab Baldwin’s sin alone. That is institutional.
So here’s what I’m left sitting with, as a proud Atenean who suddenly isn’t sure what he’s proud of:
We built these schools to form persons for others. We turned some of them into programs that use others. If a UAAP trophy can quietly outrank a boy’s life inside a Jesuit university — and it took the police, the regulators, and two grieving families to force the question — then I have to ask the thing I’ve been avoiding this whole essay:
Has big-time collegiate sports finally drowned the very soul of the Ateneo education we say we hold sacred? And if it has — do we have the courage to admit we let it?
Rene was one of ours. So was Divine, the moment he put on the jersey. The least we owe them is to stop lying to ourselves about what we’ve become.
Requiescat in pace.
