The weight of trust

By Herman M. Lagon

Tab Baldwin’s resignation was always going to be big news.

For nearly a decade, he was one of the most recognizable faces in Philippine collegiate basketball. Four championships, countless victories, and a reputation that stretched far beyond Katipunan. So when word came this Monday that he had stepped down following the deaths of Ateneo players Rene Clert Baterbonia and Divine Adili, the reaction was immediate. Sports analysts dissected it. Alumni debated it. Social media did what social media always does. Everybody had a theory. Everybody had a verdict.

Yet after several days of reading statements, commentaries, and posts, I kept returning to a different thought. The resignation matters. But it is not the story. At least not the most important one.

Because this stopped being a basketball story the moment two young men did not make it home.

Before Rene Baterbonia became a prized recruit, he was Bobet from Agusan del Sur. The son of fish vendors. The older brother who carried dreams not only for himself but for six younger siblings. Reading the accounts from those who knew him, one gets the sense that basketball was never simply a game for him. It was a way out. A way forward. A way of changing the story of his family.

Before Divine Adili became a student-athlete in Ateneo, he was a son in Nigeria. Imagine the faith required to allow your child to cross continents in pursuit of an education and a dream. Parents do not make those decisions lightly. They do so because they believe somebody on the other side will care for their child when they cannot.

That is why so many people have been affected by this, basketball fan or not. Filipinos understand sacrifice. We know what it means to send a child away.

We know the quiet calculations parents make before every school year. Tuition. Boarding house rent. Transportation. Allowance. Books. We know the fathers who spend years overseas. The mothers who stretch every peso. The grandparents who quietly help raise children while parents work elsewhere.

Every diploma in this country carries a family story behind it. Sometimes several.

I think that is why so many people immediately saw themselves in Bobet’s story. Not because they knew him. Because they knew someone like him. The hardworking student from a modest home. The child carrying an entire family’s hopes. The young person everybody believed would someday make it.

That is also why the public reaction has been so emotional. People are not merely reacting to an incident. They are reacting to a broken trust.

Behind every school goodbye is a simple act of trust. The goodbye is usually simple. “Mag-amping.” “Text pag-abot.” “Kaon sakto.” Ordinary words. Yet hidden inside them is something profound. Trust.

Parents are essentially saying, “I cannot watch over you right now, so I am trusting others to help me do that.”

When something goes wrong, people naturally ask questions. Those questions are not signs of hostility. They are signs of concern.

Unfortunately, concern and outrage often arrive together online.

Within hours of the tragedy, social media had already chosen sides. Some demanded accountability. Others demanded restraint. Some condemned. Others defended. In the middle of all that noise, what seemed to disappear was the uncomfortable reality that investigations take time and grief does not follow a timetable.

This is where discernment becomes important.

Discernment is not silence. It is not looking away. It is not refusing to hold people accountable. It simply means resisting the temptation to replace facts with assumptions.

The easiest thing in the world is to find someone to blame. The harder task is to search honestly for what happened and why. The families deserve that. The players deserve that. The public deserves that.

When tragedy happens, people pay less attention to slogans and more attention to actions. They watch closely. They notice who shows up. They notice who stays. They notice who reaches out.

That is partly why many conversations eventually turned to the responses of Ateneo de Manila and Ateneo de Davao.

Not because grief should ever become a contest. But because difficult moments often reveal different ways of caring for people who are hurting.

Grief is not a competition.

Neither school should be reduced to social media scorecards. Still, people paid attention.

ADMU focused on investigations, institutional review, accountability, and eventually accepted the resignations of Baldwin and team manager Epok Quimpo. Fr. Bobby Yap’s public apology mattered because it acknowledged a painful reality in simple language: two young men entrusted to the university did not return home.

Meanwhile, ADDU responded in a way that touched many Filipinos on a deeply personal level. The university offered scholarships to Bobet’s six siblings. It renamed a court in his honor. It retired his jersey. None of those actions changed what happened. Nothing can. But they communicated something that people instinctively understood.

They said: “We remember the family. We remember the dream.” And perhaps that is why the gesture resonated. Not because it solved anything. Because it felt human.

For educators, there is a lesson here that goes far beyond basketball.

Schools are often judged by rankings, board exam results, research outputs, accreditation reports, and championships. Those things matter. But they are not what people remember during a crisis.

People remember whether institutions showed up. They remember whether leaders were visible. They remember whether families felt accompanied. They remember whether compassion was treated as seriously as compliance.

Any school can celebrate excellence when things are going well. The real test comes when things are not. That is when values and traditions stop being words on a website and start becoming decisions. What many people are really discussing is not basketball.

It is care. It is whether schools can pursue excellence without losing sight of the people they serve. It is whether success can coexist with humility. It is whether institutions can seek truth while simultaneously embracing those who are hurting.

Those goals should never compete with one another. They should strengthen one another.

Years from now, most people will forget the details of press conferences and official statements—including who cried and who didn’t. Many will forget the arguments that filled social media timelines. Even the resignation itself will eventually become a footnote in a larger story.

What people will remember are two young men whose lives ended far too soon. They will remember a family in Agusan del Sur. A family in Nigeria. They will remember a dream that never had the chance to fully unfold. And they will remember how institutions, communities, and ordinary people responded when confronted by that loss.

Because when the final whistle blows, championships become history. Records get broken. Banners fade. What remains is something much simpler.

Whether the people entrusted to our care felt that they mattered. And whether our actions, especially during the hardest moments, proved that they did.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a ”student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.