Making the cut: Cebuanos in nat’l teams

ONE of the most difficult achievements in sports is making the national team, and it’s very true in football. Being good enough is simply not enough.

You have to be consistent; in your games to get invited to a tryout; in the tryouts to make the initial cut; and in the training pool to make the final lineup. For youth players, the process is longer. Play well enough to get selected to join the Cebu Football Association youth teams that join Festivals of Footballs organized by the Philippine Football Federation for Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao.

These festivals are essentially weekend long auditions where a youth player gets to show his skills and football IQ. The best are selected for the regional pool and they in turn, compete with the regional pools in a national festival, where national coaches pick the national training pool.

Those that excel in the national training pool, of course, get to don the country’s jersey.

So, making the national team isn’t easy. And footballers from Cebu who make the national cut have earned citations from the Sportswriters Association of Cebu during our annual SAC-SMB Sports Awards. There were only a handful when we started giving out these awards for national team members a few years ago, I remember Paolo Pascual being one of the early recepients late or in the middle of the previous decade for making it to the U19 team.

Surprisingly, as I go over this year’s (or next year’s awardees to be precise), we have a dearth of national winners and an abundance of individuals who made it to the national team--16. I think this is the greatest number of individual awardees for football that we’ve cited in my brief stint with SAC.

What does it mean for Cebu football? I really don’t know. You can’t call it a bad year because of the record number of individuals who got called up for national duty, and you can’t really call it a good year for the lack of national trophies.

Here are our awardees for football in next year’s SAC-SMB Sports Awards: Alexandrea Gumilao, Joaquin Buyco, Trevor Lood, Joaquin Suarez, Pietre Dakay, Marcel Ivan Ouano, Jesse Semblante, Leo Maquiling, Valentino Calvo, Major Dean Ebarle, Lorenzo Genco, Julian Miranda, Jordan Jarvis, Kintaro Miyagi, Vincent Erik Lovitos, Raphael Clifford de Guzman, Lorenz Giuseppe Genco, and Nicholas Christan Villacin.

Congratulations, guys, for making the cut.