Early Exposure to sports; consistent training; and lots of competition against different and better opponents are the three main factors to produce world class athlete according to Alejandro W. Clemente former undersecretary of Department of Education Culture and Sports. Early exposure to sports said Usec. Cemente. He started playing tennis when he was 6 years old. By the time he was 15, he was already champion in UP.World champion like Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer started playing tennis at very young age. Same with their counterpart women tennis champions Steffi Graf, Martina Hingis and Williams Sister. So it is proven that early exposure is really big factor in future world champion.
Proper and consistent training; It is costly to the part of student or pupil-athlete and school to hire a trainer. In Tennis the lowest fee for the trainer is 250.00 pesos per hour, if they trained five times a week it will cost 1,250.00 pesos so it is very hard to an average Filipino to pay for that amount. The Department of Education sent teacher-coach and teacher-trainer of different sport event to lessen expenses for the training of student / pupil-athletes. But the problem is training teacher coaches/trainer is very minimal. And if they are ready to train those athletes, they don’t have enough time to train them because these teachers are loaded with their teaching loads. Teacher coaches must lessen at least 80 minutes of teaching loads and use 80 minutes plus P.E. time to hold training that would be enough to have a proper and consistent training.
Lots of competition against different and better opponents; I still remember the time I talked to Daniel son of the former Usec. Clemente after we played tennis he said, he could not even remember the name and face of his opponent as he was preparing for the next match. An interview with Roger Federer after he won the 2009 French Open for the first time in his career, he thank his dad for driving him every weekend around Switzerland and across boarder just to compete at very young age. Imagine how many games he played to become a world champion. If an average Filipino can’t afford to join a lot of tournaments because of financial constraint, home and away games in the division and outside the province is the best solution to play with different and better opponents.
By: Jose C. Guanzon | Teacher-III | Lamao Elementary School | Limay, Bataan
