RULES ARE SUPPOSED to be the one thing a league doesn’t get to interpret twice. On August 7, the University Athletic Association of the Philippines (UAAP) banned Tab Baldwin from coaching for life, suspended several of his staff, and cleared the Ateneo Men’s Basketball Team to play Season 89 anyway. Two of those rulings punish people. The third protects an institution. The league has yet to explain, in any way that would survive being applied to another school, why the line fell exactly there.
Start with what shouldn’t be argued away. Rene Clert “Bobet” Baterbonia and Chukwuemeka Divine Adili went to Dipaculao, Aurora on June 8 for a team-building activity and never came home. Two families buried sons the rest of the country only ever knew as jersey numbers. That fact outranks everything this piece says next, including its own conclusion.
“The Culture We Cheer For” turned that loss inward, toward whether Mendiola’s own coaches and protocols could protect a Bedan athlete the way Ateneo’s did not protect theirs. That question still deserves an answer. But there is a second one this paper hasn’t asked, and it isn’t about San Beda at all. It’s about the body that writes the rules for every school in the league, and whether it followed its own.
The UAAP’s logic, as best as it has been explained, runs like this: Baldwin and his staff bore direct responsibility, so they were removed. The players were victims too, and wished to honor their teammates by returning to the court. Ateneo, as a program, was ordered to reassess itself. Eligibility followed.
None of that is unreasonable on its own. A coach is not an entire varsity program, and an institution is not defined solely by the eighteen-year-olds who wear its colors. Punishing student-athletes for a tragedy they didn’t design, didn’t approve, and couldn’t have stopped wouldn’t be justice; it would be grief looking for somewhere else to land. This piece isn’t asking for that, and it never will.
Rather, the question worth asking is a simple, haunting hypothetical: “If it had been a Bedan team that didn’t come home from Aurora, would we trust the league to grade its own homework the same way?”
That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the actual test of institutional integrity, and it is not born out of suspicion toward Ateneo, or its grieving athletes. It is born out of what every member school, San Beda included, is owed by the body that governs them. Every argument for leniency or nuance only survives if the logic underneath it would hold regardless of whose crest is stamped on the jersey.
Take the players out of the sentence, and the sentence gets harder to finish. If the conditions that led to Dipaculao were institutional: training culture, oversight, who had the authority to call off an itinerary and who didn’t, then accountability that stops at a coach’s whistle hasn’t found the source. It has found the nearest hand. A “comprehensive reassessment” is a promise about next season. It answers nothing about this one.
The UAAP may well have made the right call. Ateneo is a founding member with nowhere else to send athletes already mid-enrollment, and reasonable people can decide that benching a team punishes the wrong people for the right reasons. That’s defensible. What isn’t defensible, at least not yet, is a league that reaches a decision like this without showing its work: without pointing to a prior season, a prior school, a prior tragedy, and saying, here is when we ruled this way before, and here is why we’ll rule this way again.
Because that is the real question, not whether Ateneo got away with something. Nobody in this newsroom knows that, and the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) investigation remains open, so nobody should pretend otherwise. The question is whether a school without Ateneo’s board seats, its founding-member standing, its century in the league, would have been read the same way. Whether the ruling survives with a different jersey on it.
A league doesn’t need every decision to look identical. Context is real, and a rulebook blind to it isn’t fairness; it’s paperwork pretending to be principle. But every decision needs to survive being explained aloud, to every member school, using the same logic each time. That is the entire difference between an exception and a double standard.
An exception can tell you why. A double standard can only tell you who.
This isn’t a verdict. Not on Ateneo, not on the UAAP; the DOJ hasn’t finished its work, and this page won’t pretend to finish it first. It’s a standard, and the league owes it to every school watching, San Beda included.
The next time grief and prestige walk into the same room together, the rulebook needs to already know its answer. Not whose blue to forgive.
Rules are red. Exceptions are blue. Pick one.