It's unfortunate that the second most progressive region in the Philippines is struggling in sports. As of today, Central Visayas is number 7 in the medal tally of the Palarong Pambansa 2025, lagging behind relatively economically disadvantaged regions like Western Visayas, Northern Mindanao, and the Davao Region. They did also poorly in last year's Palarong Pambansa 2024 placing 5th despite of having home advantage.
Why do you think Central Visayas is falling behind in sports?
Cebu seem to lack training facilities for table tennis. Only place dedicated for table tennis seem to be JTCC which is quite difficult to access since its not very easy to find and there's no real parking spaces outside. Just park on the street if you are lucky to find a spot.
Where I live in Sweden, in a small town with 30 000 citizens (less than a third of City of Naga or Minglanilla) we have two clubs. One has 9 tables as standard set up and this is for table tennis only.
Other place has five tables.
When we have tournaments we use the arena area which is usually used for handball, basket, futsal (indor soccer) and such sports. Then we add tables, a lot of tables..
We train kids from 5 years and up. We added over 140 new members just this last year and they all participate in coached sessions. For the youngest there is of course very easy ones, bounce the ball on the racket kind of excersizes.
I'm coaching the youngest ones and it is very rewarding (I'm doing it free of charge so don't misunderstand me) to see a kid who haven't decided yet if he should hold the racket in his left hand or his right hand and then a year later being able to loop against underspin.
How would this translate to the situation in Metropolitan Cebu area?
Table tennis is a cheap sport (no you don't need anything from Butterfly, expensive Carbon blades will in 99,5% cases make you develope slower compared to a cheap 5-ply allround wood blade. Same with Tenergy 05, Dignics 09C and so on. Just use PF4 for a fraction of the price.
For the youngest you can have a bunch of pre-assembled blades they can lend from the club.
So find places that are used by others and ask / check if you can share the same space with them.
If it is a basketball club who train indoor, ask if you can store a few table tennis tables in a storage area and when then make a schedule to that you can play table tennis on a fixed schedule = now you have the basic requirements for a table tennis club.
Think outside the box and talk to schools, malls, hotels.., in Talisay they seem to have had a deal with the City Hall for some period?
It is difficult to train table tennis when the floor is a dirty concrete floor. The ball will get dirty, your rubber will get dirty and if you invest in a robot it will start to malfuction due to dust.
So a clean, flat floor is worth a lot. If it is painted conctrete, fine, just adopt your shoes accordingly. I would not recommend table tennis shoes on such a floor, rather well dampered jogging shoes.
You seem to have try outs for College teams in Cebu but with so few clubs offering real training you are likely already far behind other regions / countries.
You don't have to start training table tennis super young, Hugo Calderano started when he was 8. So you can come really far if you start at 10 or 12. But at that age you need to be able to offer qulity traning and not only quantity.
A decent facility. A coach. Organize competitions. And then compete against many different players and playing styles.
Do that and you will win Palarong Pambansa 2030, 2031, 2032, 2033, 2034 and soon have players competing at highest WTT level and with medal chance at the Olympic Games.
So hope you guys can be less obsessed with Basketball and Volleyball and realize that lenght means a lot in those sports and that Philippines has a great disadvantage there. In table tennis being very tall might instead be negative.
Talk with your Barangay captains, with the politicians in the City Hall, with business owners. Tell them you have a plan and a vision to make the Philippines worlds nr 1 in Table Tennis.
Sweden, at the time with 8-9 million citizens where most of them are interested in icehockey, skiing and soccer could do it. We won the team World Championship 3 times in a row, starting 1989 beating China with 5-0. Then again 1991 and 1993.
Yeah, I agree. Even though Cebu is considered the most progressive city in Visayas and Mindanao, it has fewer table tennis training facilities than its neighboring cities. For example, I've heard that there are 5 table tennis clubs in Bacolod, which is in Western Visayas.
Apart from JOTTC, there are training facilities in schools, but they are exclusive only to varsity players. Then there is Huaching Foundation in Mandaue but I consider it private because you can only play there if you know somebody in the inside.
Here's the table tennis training center in Huaching Foundation Mandaue. It also houses the Donic brand in the Philippines.
Yes, you arenas we can only dream of over here but seem to lack accessability to them.
Sure you can play at a mall but that is not a place for a coaching session and the ball is rolling away 20 meters if you smash.
So it is really not a question of money or resources but rather priorities.
