Team Philippines - how to keep them competitive?

You were right about the teams should practice more and orient themselves with the the international rules and regulations. but i have another thought. We should also focus in sports that we are good at. Sports that do not give Filipinos a physical disadvantage. As for basketball, we have a slim chance of winning agaianst teams with tall players. Height comes genitically. We are not a tall people. OK we may have beat China because we are good at the sport. But what about the other teams who are good at basketball and who are also tall? Do we have a chance against them? Maybe yes, maybe no. The point is, there are a lot of sports we can compete in without being given a fair disadvantage. Put brazil for example. They focused in a game where they can excell, soccer. So for me, we should focus in sports we can be good at without being given a ginetic disadvantage. This is an ugly fact but a fact nontheless. But i am not saying we should put basketball in the bench. It's just that we do not give our athletes a wide variety of sports to choose from. We always put emphasis on basketball. We could also give the same emphasis on soccer, baseball, and other sports. What do you think?

First of all team Philippines must have a discipline especially when it comes to cooling their heads of. They need to have a urgency response when they are in a situation when the game becomes nasty, they need to calm their heads down. This will avoid them from getting sillt techical fouls from those hard-working referees. Their defeat with Jordan during the recently held Fiba Asia was all about maintaining composure at the end of the gaem but they fail to do it and it caused them the game and their Olympic dreams. But I do agree that our team has strong potentials and they showed it when they defeated China and US during the recent Jones Cup and FIBA. they more to work on though if they want to go to the Olympics.

Team Philippines is fast but height does matter you can really see the difference in the court, at low post its only Asi Taulava that can possibly do the damage but he cannot play full 48 minutes

What happened to team Philippines is truly extremely frustrating, especially since they've already defeated Iran during the Jones Cup, which, come to think of it, really amounted to nothing because it did not assure the team of a slot in Beijing. Your suggestions seem to be very promising. If I'm not mistaken, team Philippines only practiced for months, which were apparently inadequate to fully prepare them for the FIBA-Asia tourney, given their poor showing there. Their opponents, on the other hand, could have had more time to practice together and gel as a team, which could perhaps account for their more respectable finishes in the FIBA-Asia cup. As to your suggestion for the current members of SMC-Pilipinas not to return to their mother teams, I feel that it definitely seems to be an excitingly promising suggestion. If the current members wouldopt to remain in the current national team and start their preparation for the world championships in 2009 as early as now by joining different international competitions, I feel that their chances of landing an elusive spot in the World Championships of basketball could likely be higher. However, I certainly feel that it would not materialize, unless their mother teams would agree to commit their star players to the national team, since they have existing contracts; the current national team members themselves decide to stick it out with the national team, even if such a decision has its acccompanying sacrifices; and the SBP and BAP would be in unison to fully support such a move. With regard to your main question, rouwel23, I really feel that our national team is already highly competitive. What it lacks, though, is perhaps the ability to effectively and efficiently work as a team and adjust to the international level and style of play. In making the team gel more, I feel that the time they would spend playing together and their constant training together would do the trick, since they would familiarize themselves better with each other's style of play and necessary adjustments could perhaps be made. In coping with the international style of play, on the other hand, I feel that the suggestion to adopt FIBA rules in the PBA could be a good first step exactly because such a move would perhaps most certainly make our players knowledgeable of the international style of basketball, which they seem to have some trouble adjusting to, especially in regard officiating. Whatever the changes that the basketball leaders in our country would decide to undertake, though, I could only truly hope that it would inevitably make the Philippine team strong enough to finally have the rare chance of competing, and even winning, in the Olympics again after a very long time.