ALWAYS AN HONOR COACHING A NATIONAL TEAM – BALDWIN
A joint SBP-PBA committee has been tasked to select the coach and players of the PHL team to elite international competitions.
First on the agenda is the selection of the chief bench tactician, the head coach who can hopefully sit the country back on the Asian throne.
A number of names have been mentioned for the post but the most talked about prospect so far is Gilas’ team consultant Tab Baldwin.
An American-New Zealander who led the Tall Blacks to a fourth place finish in the 2002 FIBA World Championships, Baldwin possesses the gaudiest resume of all the names that have surfaced.
He formerly coached the national teams of New Zealand, Malaysia, Lebanon, and Jordan, and currently serves as a team consultant of the Talk ‘N Text Tropang Texters here in the PBA.
But Baldwin doesn’t want to delve on the situation, especially since no formal offer has been given to him yet.
“I really don’t have thoughts about that because there aren’t any formal approach to me,” he said. “I work for Chot and Chot is still involved as far as I know. I owe a lot to him. I’m not really involved at this process at this time and we’ll just see what happens.”
Plucked by Reyes’ coaching staff when they had their New Zealand training camp last year for the FIBA Asia Championships, Baldwin has been a significant voice in the Gilas coaching staff, being exposed to the international basketball scene for a long time.
And since then, he believes that the Gilas program has exceeded everyone’s expectations.
“I think that’s obvious for everybody to see. Our placing in FIBA Asia 2013 was a good one. It would’ve been great to win the gold. We accomplished the goal that year of qualifying for the World Championships and the performance at the World Cup was remarkable. I was part of the Gilas team but I never expected to see the guys play as well as they did. It was a great privilege to be a part of all of that,” he said.
Baldwin added, “The Asian Games was a letdown, everybody knows that. There were a lot of factors involved, the unavailability of Andray (Blatche) and the injury of Jayson (Castro) were, I think, the two biggest factors. Having said that, I would like to have seen us overcome those issues and perform better, but we didn’t. But all-in-all, I think the Gilas program is now respected around the world and a lot has been accomplished.”
The Philippines is not the only head coaching option that might be knocking on Baldwin’s door as of the moment, as the New Zealand men’s national basketball team is also considering to tap him again in the wake of coach Nenad Vucinic’s resignation from the post.
Baldwin is also open to this possibility.
“Their coach of the last eight years have just resigned and he was my assistant coach. There has been discussions over there but they won’t be making any decisions anytime soon. We’ll see,” he said. “I really don’t know what the future holds. I just want to do my job here in Talk ‘N Text and see how we’ll go.”
Though there aren’t any talks yet on what the next step might be for our national team, Baldwin said that he’s always open to coaching national squads, saying, “I’ve coached four national teams and it’s always an honor.”
“I feel very privileged to be in that position, and if it happens again, whether it was the Philippines or New Zealand or any other country, it would be a great honor to think that the basketball people of that country would ask me to head their national team. But I’m not gonna speculate on whether that’s gonna happen here in the Philippines and what would need to be in place for it to happen,” he said. (RL)
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