Despite having to take my exams, I was lucky enough to represent Singapore and be able to take part in the SEABA tournament for FIBA’s basketball association. After training for 6 months with the team, it was finally time for the big tournament we had been training for. I had been waiting for my chance to represent Singapore and will never forget this experience. However, during the time I was there, I had to balance my time playing basketball and studying. I’d be away for almost a week, and when I come back, I’d only have a day or two before my next exam. This experience made me realise the importance of time management and being better organised. My day would pretty much be me training in the morning, studying after, playing a game.

In all honesty, the whole feeling of representing the national team and playing in a FIBA tournament was overwhelming. Never had I thought I’d be able to play at such a high level of basketball, it made me appreciate the hard work and time I had put into the sport. Running suicides over and over again, making sure we made our shots in practice, all these little things helped build us into the team and people we are today. Over the course of the tournament, I realised the importance of being confident. After playing horribly in certain games, I’d be demotivated and would tend to start thinking negatively. The articles talking about how bad I played weren’t exactly helpful. However, thankfully I had a good social circle around me, I had my parents behind my back giving me advice and words of motivation, and I also had the team, my coaches, teammates, all of them were there to help get me out of my shyness. And because of this I learnt to be more confident in myself as a person, and also learnt small pieces of information about social media and the differences between the international and local communities in Singapore.

One experience I had in the tournament that I will never forget is the social media aspect of it. The SEABA tournament was placed in Phillippines and had all sorts of Filipino news outlets reporting it. Being Filipino myself, brought quite a bit of attention to the news outlets. There were 3 half Filipinos in our team, and because we were in the Phillippines, certain news outlets tried to make a story out of it. There were always multiple news people walking around trying to get us to interview, however, we weren’t able to as our coach didn’t approve of it. In addition to interviews, news outlets would always either give us lots of love or try to sh*t on us. I remember how angry I was reading a few of the articles, one bad game and I had articles saying “horrific”,”horrible” and more.  And I can also remember other times when I did play well, and the exact same news outlets and commentators that would comment “He has the Filipino blood and its shown in this game”, “Filipino blood”, “he’s Filipino, did you know that?”. And this to me angered me even more. However, though this experience wasn’t the happiest of my time, I could definitely say it was one of the more eventful ones. The atmosphere, the competition and the people all contributed to making my time representing Singapore a grateful one. All I can hope for is more experiences such as this one.