The grief carried by the families of Divine Adili and Rene Clert Baterbonia weighs heavier than his own — that was the acknowledgment Ateneo de Manila men’s basketball coach Tab Baldwin offered as he addressed the public for the first time since the two student-athletes drowned during a team-building activity in Dipaculao, Aurora, on June 8.
The 68-year-old mentor delivered his message through a video posted to the university’s Facebook page on the night of Friday, June 12, ending a silence that had drawn mounting criticism over the preceding days. Baldwin opened by noting he had been instructed to keep his remarks to four minutes, a constraint he said felt impossibly long for someone left without words, even as he believed he could speak for hours about the two young men.
His central admission centered on the trust placed in him by the players’ parents. “And in this, I feel I’ve failed. And I’m sorry. To the depth of my being, I’m sorry… And in that moment, I experienced the descent into the darkest place imaginable,” Baldwin said. “And yet I knew at the same time that good people, people that had done an amazing job raising these two young men, were going to be in an even darker, more horrible place. At that moment, I felt I had failed.”
That sense of failure, he said, extended across every role he held in the players’ lives. “I failed as a leader. I felt I had failed as a coach. I certainly felt like I had failed as a friend to Divine and Rene. And when later I faced the team to try to be a leader in that moment, I felt that I failed them too,” he added.
Baldwin recounted that the players had been sent out for what he described as a routine training run in waters the team believed to be shallow, only realizing later that some had been carried into dangerous depths and that not everyone had come back to shore.
Beyond the two families, the coach widened his apology to anyone shaken by the tragedy. “So deeply sorry. And I’m so deeply sorry to not just the families, but everybody that feels let down, somehow betrayed. And I pray that we all find some pathway forward to come back to hope for the future, love for one another, and forgiveness for those of us who failed and tried so desperately hard to reach a better outcome,” he continued.
He closed his message with a plea for prayer and peace. “I wish peace for everybody. I wish comfort for everybody who is hurting. And I pray that we will all find that. God bless you all. And we are trying. Thank you,” Baldwin said.
The decision to keep Baldwin from commenting earlier had come from the university itself, which later confirmed it had asked the coach — at Ateneo’s helm since 2016 — to hold off on public statements.
The deaths have triggered parallel inquiries from both chambers of Congress, while the Philippine Sports Commission convened a Sports Stakeholders’ Panel bringing together CHED, DepEd, the Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas, the UAAP, the National Youth Commission, and the Palarong Pambansa to examine what happened. Arrangements for the players have diverged in the days since: Baterbonia, the reigning Palarong Pambansa MVP, was returned to Davao for his wake, while Adili remains at the Immaculate Conception Chapel on the Ateneo campus in Quezon City ahead of his repatriation to Nigeria.
