Lanete, Pascual Join Sinag-Pilipinas, Will Participate In 26th SEAGAMES

After their heated battle for the NCAA crown, Garvo Lanete and Jake Pascual of champion San Beda, and Ian Sangalang and Ronald Pascual of runner-up San Sebastian will join hands along with other collegiate stars in defending PHL’s basketball title in the 26th Southeast Asian Games.

The Red Lions and Golden Stags stalwarts will rejoin the Sinag-Pilipinas team for full-time practices beginning today as PHL 5 fine-tunes its plays and works on cohesion two weeks before the battle in Indonesia.

“We’ll have everybody beginning tomorrow (Monday),” said coach Norman Black after Sinag bowed to San Miguel Beer’s ASEAN Basketball League team, 73-66, in a tune-up game where they missed the NCAA finals protagonists and Far Eastern’s RR Garcia, who's down with a bad stomach.

Black has assembled a crew of mostly varsity standouts like Ateneo’s Greg Slaughter, Kiefer Ravena and Nico Salva, and NU’s Bobby Ray Parks, Jr. with reinforcements Chris Tiu of Smart Gilas, and PBA D-League players Chris Hodge and Chris Ellis.

The team has had limited sessions during the UAAP and NCAA seasons and only went full throttle at the end of the collegiate wars.

“We’ll be okay; I don’t see any problem because we’ve been going through the plays the entire year. It’s just a matter of them getting used to playing with one another,” he said.

For this purpose, Black has set three tune-up matches against PBA D-League teams and SMB next week.

Sinag will leave for Indonesia on Nov. 12, two days before actual basketball competitions.

“We still have two more weeks and I intend to utilize these to the hilt,” said Black, back in multi-sport competitions after calling the shots for an all-pro quintet in the 1994 Hiroshima Asian Games.

source: Olmin Leyba