IT all began with a simple phone call.
“One afternoon earlier this month, I was eating out somewhere when Coach Chot Reyes messaged me, asking if he could call,” Maureen Kris Belen recalled as she told SPIN Life her backstory.
As Spin.ph reported yesterday, Coach Mau may make PBA history as she vies to be the first Pinay in a team coaching staff. But it all started when her notifications pinged, with Coach Chot and a simple question on the other end of the line.
“Of course I said yes. I dropped everything else to pick up the phone.”
It was the 10th of March, nine days before her scheduled flight to the Middle East. Her bags were already packed, her mind dead set on pursuing a coaching career there that she had failed to secure in the Philippines.
Coach Chot, who had led Gilas for much of last decade, asked how she was and how her basketball career going.
This was a few days after the Women’s National Basketball League (WNBL) was officially launched, and the teams were being introduced to the public.
“He was really pushing me to be part of the WNBL, I tried applying [to] one team, but they had other plans. That’s what I told him. I said I was going back abroad because there’s an opportunity there,” she said.
"And then there was a long pause."
Greener shores?
The Middle East was familiar stomping grounds for Coach Mau. From 2014 to 2017, Belen had a few coaching stints in the United Arab Emirates. She was the first female coach in the Filipino Youth Basketball program there, before she went back to the country to try her luck.
Rejection after rejection in local leagues, coupled with the worsening situation of the pandemic, made her think it would be best for her to just go back to UAE. After all, she had just received a competitive position in a sports management group there.
But in their phone conversation, Coach Chot pulled out a surprise.
“Biglang sabi niya, ‘I have an offer for you to be part of TnT.’ I was left speechless, I’m not quite sure if the things I uttered after that still made sense, I can’t really remember.”
Reyes clarified that he was offering her the position from his own volition, and that he still needed to get the green light from the management. But would she be game?
Belen grabbed the opportunity with no holds barred.
“Coach Chot was a visionary leader. He’s made to do this. He wanted to make a difference in the platform through inclusivity,” she said.
With the thumbs-up from the TnT top bosses, Belen officially joined the team management crew. She assigned to do video and stats for the team. In team manager Gabby Cui’s words, it was an “internship”, and she’s more than happy to deliver.
“I have no problem with that. In fact, I prefer to start small. I’d always prefer to take the stairs, and move forward one step at a time,” she explained.
Working from down below all the way up has always been her guiding principle since she first started in basketball.
Grassroots hoops
Born into a big extended family, Belen grew up watching her dad, uncles, brothers, and cousins play ball.
“It’s really my family. My father is a diehard fan of basketball. He named my two brothers after Robert Jaworski, and my uncles, too, named their sons after him. So all in all, there are five Roberts in my family,” she said.
She added: “It’s also how they talked about basketball in the dining table, or when sitting around in a gathering, watching basketball on the TV together.”
The family genes, it seemed, were also geared for basketball. She had brothers and cousins who hit 6’4”, while she herself only stood at 5'3".
But none showed as much love for basketball as she did.
“Sa side ng father ko, 11 silang siblings and sobrang dami kong cousins na ka-batch ko, so whenever they play sa courts dati, they invite me ‘pag kulang. Sasabihin pa, ‘O, tara na kahit taga-pasa ka lang!’ Ako naman, kahit nasa gilid lang, I was a keen observer,” she said.
She learned so much from the game from just watching.
Belen landed her first competitive experience in the sport when she moved to Manila from San Pablo, Laguna. She made it to the tryouts of the Diliman Preparatory School in Quezon City.
A few leagues later, until she capped off high school, she got an offer from the Centro Escolar University in college. She had batchmates who pursued UAAP schools, but at that time she thought she wasn’t ready for it. So she settled for WNCAA.
While playing for the Mendiola-based school, a coach from Assumption College called her up after a year and a half, offering a better deal.
In just her sophomore year, she became captain of the squad.
“During my college years, that’s when I got myself exposed to my love for coaching, for leading. So after I graduated, I really wanted to pursue that,” she said.
So near, yet so far
After she finished with a degree in Marketing, she joined the Coach-E Basketball Camp by Coach Eric Altamirano before she applied to the PBA office. She landed a job in the business side of the league, during the era of Commissioner Chito Salud.
She realized, though, that she wanted to to be in the operations side.
So near yet so far, she finally quit her job in the PBA to fly to the Middle East, and look for a job there. “Anything that is in sports, that was my mindset when I went there. Buti na lang ‘yung kapitbahay ko don, he’s one of the organizers of the Filipino Youth Basketball, so I applied,” she said.
That two-year stint there earned her connections in the local Filipino sports community. Belen got to mentor people of different ages, from kids to teens to adults, as she manned the sidelines in their company leagues.
She even got to work in a sports events company, where she had the opportunity to meet a few NBA stars like Scottie Pippen and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Moments like that just continued to fuel her love for the game. After three years, she decided to go back to the Philippines.
Trial and error
“When I got back here, I applied in Assumption as the assistant coach to my former head coach. It was my first team here. Then, I did mentorship in St. Paul Paranaque for Grade School and High School boys,” she said.
Sometime in 2019, she came to watch his cousin’s game in a PNP league, and she noticed the opposing team didn’t have a coach.
“After the game, kating-kati talaga ko. Hindi ko natiis, nilapitan ko sila and I told them that I’m a coach, in case they wanted to give it a try,” she recalled.
Things happened fast. By the next practice, Belen was already in the thick of it, instructing a pool of police officers how to win the game.
Word of mouth about her coaching ability spread. She was tapped to coach the official team in the organization’s biggest league, the AFP Cup, where the police force squad competed against their counterparts in the Navy, the Coast Guard, and the Air Force.
But then this gig was cut short by the pandemic.
“Nung nag-lockdown, I was staying at home, attending seminars, listening to talks, just trying to shape my mind about basketball. I’ve been following all the PBA coaches on social media and I saw na Coach Chot posted about a master class and free seminar for provincial coaches. I told myself I needed to be part of that program,” she said.
#GirlsCan
Out of 16 participants, she was one of the two females who got in.
They conducted classes during Fridays, and it became one of the highlights for the week. Belen finished at the top of the class... and much more, earned Coach Chot’s trust.
After Spin.ph published the article about her upcoming stint in TnT, she immediately messaged Coach Chot.
“Thank you so much, coach,” she said.
Reyes replied: “Keep working, keep grinding.”
The 29-year-old female coach was ready to do just that.
Already joining the team in practices, she’s glad to be making her mark little by little. After all, she’s all about the bigger goal of representing women in sports.
“I’m done feeling sorry because I’m a woman,” she said. “The biggest challenge will always be trying to educate people and making them understand that it’s not all about whether you’re a man or a woman, if you deserve the role, you should have it. This way, I can inspire one girl at a time and make them know, that they also can.”
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