WITH Ateneo out to its worst start in the Tab Baldwin era, is the seat getting hotter and hotter for those in place?
The decorated mentor would rather take it all in stride, especially after the Blue Eagles fell to their third straight loss in the UAAP Season 87 men’s basketball tournament on Sunday.
READ: La Salle runs away from Ateneo in second half to remain perfect
“It is what it is. I don’t know what more you could say about it,” said Baldwin after Ateneo fell to archrival La Salle, 74-61. “We played the games, we competed, we’re learning, we’re getting better.”
Team manager Epok Quimpo also thinks that the seat really hasn't cooled down even if the Blue Eagles were in the midst of a dynasty just two seasons ago.
“Even if we were winning, we were in the hot seat. It doesn’t change anything. We just have to get better fast,” he said.
As Ateneo anticipated
It’s not like the Katipunan side didn’t anticipate this.
Right from the preseason, the Blue Eagles braced for a tough year, especially after losing key veterans in Kai Ballungay and Geo Chiu, among others. It didn’t help that Mason Amos’ departure threw the team for a loop, resulting in an atrocious showing in the preseason.
Fielding a young core, Baldwin projected that this will be a long season of learning for his wards.
“I told them in the preseason that this will be a team that will have great patches and bad patches, and the third quarters in all three games have been bad patches. We just have to keep on identifying them and keep working at them,” he said, while also lauding the efforts of the likes of Josh Lazaro, Jared Bahay, Kristian Porter, and Shawn Tuano, among others.
The good news is that the young players are “a willing group of workers.”
The downside? “With young players that have so many habits that they bring into the program from their past, it takes time to break this down and rebuild it to good habits and build a culture. And that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Blue Eagles' breakthrough, when?
Baldwin is no psychic to know when Ateneo will break through, but to him, it all boils down to how fast his team can be consistent.
“I don’t feel like we’re waiting for a break through. We just need to be consistent. The reasons for that can be collective discipline, can be culture, can be having to play players more minutes than what they’re ready for. So you get that sort of Richter scale of effect that you go down and up, down and up,” he said.
“It’s all cliches, but they’re cliches for a reason. It is a process, but the process doesn’t exist if you don’t have the ingredients for it. You’ve got to get the details correct and then the systems will work. It’s the fundamentals, the discipline, the attitude, the culture.”
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