Amazing_Warrior
Feb 8, 2009, 07:44 PM
http://www.ue.edu.ph/manila/uetoday/news/2009/01/images/coach_chongson_header.jpg
At a merienda-reception last January 12 at the Briefing Room, a group of key officials of the UE community along with the UE Red Warriors men’s basketball team players and staff welcomed Mr. Lawrence Chongson, who has been appointed as the team’s new Head Coach. (The officials were led by Vice Chairman of the Board Jaime J. Bautista, President and Chief Academic Officer Ester Albano Garcia and Marketing Department Executive Director Jesus T. Tanchanco Sr., who has also been appointed by the Board as Team Manager of the Red Warriors.)
As it turns out, we should have said “Welcome back” as well, given that Coach Lawrence had actually handled the Warriors before—as Assistant Coach back in school year 2000-2001, when Angelito “Itoy” Esguerra was the team’s Head Coach. “I was part of the team responsible for bringing in James Yap,” Coach Lawrence recalls, referring to the former Red Warrior turned basketball icon of, as the coach puts it, “Generation X” and who has since become an invaluable player in the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA).
The Natural
While it may seem that the 44-year-old coach’s links with UE are as recent as now or even nine years ago, he actually has a far earlier connection: his parents, Michael Chong Yula and Ana Tan, are UE Commerce graduates—the former in 1959, the latter sometime in the ’60s. The Chongsons are of Chinese descent but Coach Lawrence and his parents are Filipinos: he was born in Manila as was his father, while the coach’s mother hails from Samar. “They met in UE,” Coach Lawrence notes.
However, both Coach Lawrence’s enthusiasm for basketball and affiliation with UE were less influenced by his parents—a semi-retired footwear entrepreneur and a housewife, respectively—than by what has been one of his lifelong compasses: destiny. With b-ball, aside from obvious influences such as street players or the pros on televised games, the sport came naturally for the young Lawrence, the eldest of three children. “When I was 5, 6 years old,” he remembers, “I would play basketball using improvised means: with a rolled pair of socks for a ball and a lampshade or even an open bedroom door as the ring.” Pretty soon, he was using real implements and, as fate would have it, grew taller than most, such that when he was still in Grade 6 at St. Jude Catholic School in Manila, he was already being recruited by his eventual secondary school, the Tondo-based Uno High School, to be one of its players. “My father was a varsity player in high school but he tried to dissuade me from becoming a player and told me to venture towards business like he did,” Coach Lawrence relates, referring in part to the Dragon brand of sandals that were their main business output and which was popular back in the 1980s. But the call of the ball was too strong to be denied, more so since, by age 16, he was a six-footer and thus can assume any playing position. (He now stands at 6’2”.)
In 1982, the Chongsons had to stay in Taiwan (the family also had a footwear plant there) and the teenage Lawrence had to spend senior high school at the Morrison Academy, an international school in Taichung.
When he returned to the Philippines, the would-be coach enrolled at the University of Santo Tomas—whose football team had been co-sponsored by the Chongson family business and where an uncle, Timmy Chong, was a football player and remains the team manager of the UST Growling Tigers. However, having been used to the no-uniform dress code of an international school, the young Lawrence later ditched UST and transferred to De La Salle University, where he resumed his communication arts studies, graduating in 1987. He did try out but somehow never got to be a DLSU Green Archer, but he still saw a lot of basketball action in other intercollegiate tournaments as well as in commercial, Filipino-Chinese league games.
http://www.ue.edu.ph/manila/uetoday/news/2009/01/images/coach_chongson_contract.jpg
Coach Lawrence shows his UE contract (term: two years) and is seen with his co-signatory, Vice Chairman of the Board Jaime J. Bautista, as President Ester Albano Garcia looks on at UE’s welcome reception for the new Red Warriors coach on January 12.
The Navigator
In the late ’90s, Coach Lawrence became the back-to-back Most Valuable Player in 1998 and ’99 of the alumni basketball league of St. Jude Catholic School, his elementary alma mater. One of his team mates there was schoolmate Lucio “Bong” Tan Jr., who egged him on to be the coach of the team following a sudden vacancy. “I never really thought of coaching before that,” Coach Lawrence says, “but I went ahead, anyway.” The following year brought two bigger coaching assignments for him from Mr. Tan: as assistant coach of the Tanduay Rhum Masters for the PBA and the UE Red Warriors mainly for UAAP Season 63. With the Warriors, then Assistant Coach Lawrence also co-steered the team through tournaments such as that of the Manila Interclub Amateur Basketball Association (Micaba) and the Fr. Martin Cup—even filling in as coach during an early 2001 match at the Adamson University gym versus the UP Maroons, which the Warriors won. While his Warriors stint concluded that school year, he remained assistant coach of Tanduay for another year before it disbanded.
In 2002 came his first foray as head coach, for the Pangasinan Waves in the Metropolitan Basketball Association. That same year, he was tapped as assistant coach of the Philippine team in the Jones Cup; he would go on to be a part of the coaching staff of the Philippine team in two other men’s basketball tournaments in 2007: the Southeast Asian Basketball Association and at the Southeast Asian Games in Thailand. As head coach, he navigated the Air Philippines Bacolod team through its National Basketball League exploits in 2003. The year 2004 marked his ongoing stint as head coach at the Philippine Basketball League (PBL), starting with the Air Philippines Flight team. From there he handled a succession of PBL teams: the Bacchus Energy Drink team in 2005, the Mail and More Comets in 2006, the Burger King Whoppers team in 2007 and Bacchus again since last year. As of this writing, the Bacchus team had evolved from being an “underdog” of the current PBL season to hardened contenders turned semi-finalists. (On the side, Coach Lawrence has, since 2004, been the head coach of the Allied Banking Corporation men’s basketball team for the Bankers Athletic Association.)
To date, Coach Lawrence still plays basketball, in interschool alumni leagues and even in the international 40 & Up league, where he had represented the country along with the likes of Bong Alvarez and Leo Austria.
One thing anyone would notice about the new Warriors head coach is his hair—comparatively long for a sportsman and which, these days, almost touches his shoulders. “I’ve tried different hairstyles through the years, such as the ‘semi-kalbo’ cut back when [celebrity] Richard Gomez still had it,” Coach Lawrence divulges. “Later on, a cousin of mine who’s also in his 40s pondered our age and we vowed that, while we still have it, we would keep our hair long ‘one last time’.”
The Warrior
Coach Lawrence does not deny that he came into coaching rather late (around age 33), and that when he joined the profession, he noticed that for the most part, he wasn’t welcomed by his elder peers. Still, he managed to transform those twin burdens into motivational tools. “I was further encouraged,” he says. “I knew in my heart that I know the game of basketball inside out and at anyone’s level.” As for the age factor, he drew inspiration from Gerald Eugene “Jerry” Sloan, the head coach of the Utah Jazz team of the National Basketball Association in the USA. “Jerry became coach of Utah Jazz when he was 47 [in 1988]! And he is still that team’s coach, for 21 seasons now—the longest record for any NBA coach of a single team.” Coach Lawrence adds that “Age is really just a number. What’s important is loving what you do and dedicating yourself to it.”
Upon being persuaded by Mr. Bong Tan and ultimately being appointed by the UE Board of Trustees to be the new Warriors head coach—replacing former Head Coach Dindo Pumaren, who steered the team in the last five school years—Coach Lawrence says that he felt a mixture of decisiveness and hesitation. “I told myself, ‘I can do this,’ but I also had some doubts, mainly because the PBL is not as hectic as the UAAP. But I figured, who could question destiny? I’m thinking, maybe UE and I are a perfect match now, and this could be the perfect scenario and the perfect time, especially for the University.”
Coach Lawrence is not exactly a stranger to the Warriors’ action and energy: he has had active or former Red Warriors such as Paolo Hubalde throughout his PBL stint. With Bacchus right now, he has a whopping seven of them: now former Warriors Mark Fampulme and Hans Thiele, and present Warriors Val Acuña, Paul Lee, Rudy Lingganay, Narciso “Pari” Llagas and James Martinez.
In a word, Coach Lawrence views his coaching style as “professional” given his PBL experience. He elaborates that “I intend to treat the Warriors professionally—not as kids but as young men. I will put in pointers, flesh out our system, will not play favorites and will not be one to berate or shout at them. I intend to exercise a balance of cooperation and discipline—to keep our focus, be goal-oriented, to be on the same page. If the players reciprocate that, then we would be victorious.” He points out, however, that taking things “one day at a time” is vital and that not being a UE alumnus is anything but vital. “I find it baseless that a school’s coach should strictly be one of its own graduates,” he says. “What’s important should be merit, the person’s qualifications. A coach is a coach is a coach. A school coach who is dedicated will always give his 110% with every game even if he is not an alumnus of that school.”
Already, Coach Lawrence has drawn up a rigorous schedule for the team for the first half of 2009, inclusive of bringing the Warriors in early April to Abunassar Impact Basketball training camp in Los Angeles, USA, which has also been a training venue of the RP team prior to international ball games. While there, the Warriors could see action in the Easter Classics tournament in Las Vegas. Moreover, Coach Lawrence has a lofty, off-court aim for the Warriors: to ensure that all of them graduate. “All these things are mainly to boost the Warriors’ confidence, to make them realize that they can stand shoulder to shoulder with their counterparts in the other universities—while keeping in mind that they represent UE and thus should be the best they can be. I intend to be a life coach to them and not just a basketball coach. The objective is to build not just good basketball players but good human beings.”
He notes that “I was still in college when the Warriors last became the UAAP champion [in 1985]” and that it’s high time that the team, and the University, reclaimed this UAAP glory. “As I see it, nothing stands in the way of this goal of winning at the UAAP. The players want this, the University wants this and I want this—especially for Chairman of the Board and CEO Lucio C. Tan and Bong Tan. If we all pool and put our energies and spirit into this then we can win,” Coach Lawrence states. “The time is now.”
http://www.ue.edu.ph/manila/uetoday/news/2009/01/images/coach_chongson_warriors.jpg
Coach Lawrence Chongson with the Red Warriors men’s basketball players: (front, from left) Narciso Llagas, Paul Lee, Rudy Lingganay, Ryan Monteclaro, Raffy Reyes, Nikko Tiongco, (back, from left) Gil Wagas, Fhadzmir Bandaying, Alex Lim, James Martinez, Kenneth Acibar, Jairold Flores, JM Noble, Paul Zamar, Erwin Duran, Val Acuña, John Ray Alabanza, Gino Etrone and Omar Malone at the foot of the Lualhati statue, Jan. 12, 2009.
credit goes to UE TODAY
At a merienda-reception last January 12 at the Briefing Room, a group of key officials of the UE community along with the UE Red Warriors men’s basketball team players and staff welcomed Mr. Lawrence Chongson, who has been appointed as the team’s new Head Coach. (The officials were led by Vice Chairman of the Board Jaime J. Bautista, President and Chief Academic Officer Ester Albano Garcia and Marketing Department Executive Director Jesus T. Tanchanco Sr., who has also been appointed by the Board as Team Manager of the Red Warriors.)
As it turns out, we should have said “Welcome back” as well, given that Coach Lawrence had actually handled the Warriors before—as Assistant Coach back in school year 2000-2001, when Angelito “Itoy” Esguerra was the team’s Head Coach. “I was part of the team responsible for bringing in James Yap,” Coach Lawrence recalls, referring to the former Red Warrior turned basketball icon of, as the coach puts it, “Generation X” and who has since become an invaluable player in the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA).
The Natural
While it may seem that the 44-year-old coach’s links with UE are as recent as now or even nine years ago, he actually has a far earlier connection: his parents, Michael Chong Yula and Ana Tan, are UE Commerce graduates—the former in 1959, the latter sometime in the ’60s. The Chongsons are of Chinese descent but Coach Lawrence and his parents are Filipinos: he was born in Manila as was his father, while the coach’s mother hails from Samar. “They met in UE,” Coach Lawrence notes.
However, both Coach Lawrence’s enthusiasm for basketball and affiliation with UE were less influenced by his parents—a semi-retired footwear entrepreneur and a housewife, respectively—than by what has been one of his lifelong compasses: destiny. With b-ball, aside from obvious influences such as street players or the pros on televised games, the sport came naturally for the young Lawrence, the eldest of three children. “When I was 5, 6 years old,” he remembers, “I would play basketball using improvised means: with a rolled pair of socks for a ball and a lampshade or even an open bedroom door as the ring.” Pretty soon, he was using real implements and, as fate would have it, grew taller than most, such that when he was still in Grade 6 at St. Jude Catholic School in Manila, he was already being recruited by his eventual secondary school, the Tondo-based Uno High School, to be one of its players. “My father was a varsity player in high school but he tried to dissuade me from becoming a player and told me to venture towards business like he did,” Coach Lawrence relates, referring in part to the Dragon brand of sandals that were their main business output and which was popular back in the 1980s. But the call of the ball was too strong to be denied, more so since, by age 16, he was a six-footer and thus can assume any playing position. (He now stands at 6’2”.)
In 1982, the Chongsons had to stay in Taiwan (the family also had a footwear plant there) and the teenage Lawrence had to spend senior high school at the Morrison Academy, an international school in Taichung.
When he returned to the Philippines, the would-be coach enrolled at the University of Santo Tomas—whose football team had been co-sponsored by the Chongson family business and where an uncle, Timmy Chong, was a football player and remains the team manager of the UST Growling Tigers. However, having been used to the no-uniform dress code of an international school, the young Lawrence later ditched UST and transferred to De La Salle University, where he resumed his communication arts studies, graduating in 1987. He did try out but somehow never got to be a DLSU Green Archer, but he still saw a lot of basketball action in other intercollegiate tournaments as well as in commercial, Filipino-Chinese league games.
http://www.ue.edu.ph/manila/uetoday/news/2009/01/images/coach_chongson_contract.jpg
Coach Lawrence shows his UE contract (term: two years) and is seen with his co-signatory, Vice Chairman of the Board Jaime J. Bautista, as President Ester Albano Garcia looks on at UE’s welcome reception for the new Red Warriors coach on January 12.
The Navigator
In the late ’90s, Coach Lawrence became the back-to-back Most Valuable Player in 1998 and ’99 of the alumni basketball league of St. Jude Catholic School, his elementary alma mater. One of his team mates there was schoolmate Lucio “Bong” Tan Jr., who egged him on to be the coach of the team following a sudden vacancy. “I never really thought of coaching before that,” Coach Lawrence says, “but I went ahead, anyway.” The following year brought two bigger coaching assignments for him from Mr. Tan: as assistant coach of the Tanduay Rhum Masters for the PBA and the UE Red Warriors mainly for UAAP Season 63. With the Warriors, then Assistant Coach Lawrence also co-steered the team through tournaments such as that of the Manila Interclub Amateur Basketball Association (Micaba) and the Fr. Martin Cup—even filling in as coach during an early 2001 match at the Adamson University gym versus the UP Maroons, which the Warriors won. While his Warriors stint concluded that school year, he remained assistant coach of Tanduay for another year before it disbanded.
In 2002 came his first foray as head coach, for the Pangasinan Waves in the Metropolitan Basketball Association. That same year, he was tapped as assistant coach of the Philippine team in the Jones Cup; he would go on to be a part of the coaching staff of the Philippine team in two other men’s basketball tournaments in 2007: the Southeast Asian Basketball Association and at the Southeast Asian Games in Thailand. As head coach, he navigated the Air Philippines Bacolod team through its National Basketball League exploits in 2003. The year 2004 marked his ongoing stint as head coach at the Philippine Basketball League (PBL), starting with the Air Philippines Flight team. From there he handled a succession of PBL teams: the Bacchus Energy Drink team in 2005, the Mail and More Comets in 2006, the Burger King Whoppers team in 2007 and Bacchus again since last year. As of this writing, the Bacchus team had evolved from being an “underdog” of the current PBL season to hardened contenders turned semi-finalists. (On the side, Coach Lawrence has, since 2004, been the head coach of the Allied Banking Corporation men’s basketball team for the Bankers Athletic Association.)
To date, Coach Lawrence still plays basketball, in interschool alumni leagues and even in the international 40 & Up league, where he had represented the country along with the likes of Bong Alvarez and Leo Austria.
One thing anyone would notice about the new Warriors head coach is his hair—comparatively long for a sportsman and which, these days, almost touches his shoulders. “I’ve tried different hairstyles through the years, such as the ‘semi-kalbo’ cut back when [celebrity] Richard Gomez still had it,” Coach Lawrence divulges. “Later on, a cousin of mine who’s also in his 40s pondered our age and we vowed that, while we still have it, we would keep our hair long ‘one last time’.”
The Warrior
Coach Lawrence does not deny that he came into coaching rather late (around age 33), and that when he joined the profession, he noticed that for the most part, he wasn’t welcomed by his elder peers. Still, he managed to transform those twin burdens into motivational tools. “I was further encouraged,” he says. “I knew in my heart that I know the game of basketball inside out and at anyone’s level.” As for the age factor, he drew inspiration from Gerald Eugene “Jerry” Sloan, the head coach of the Utah Jazz team of the National Basketball Association in the USA. “Jerry became coach of Utah Jazz when he was 47 [in 1988]! And he is still that team’s coach, for 21 seasons now—the longest record for any NBA coach of a single team.” Coach Lawrence adds that “Age is really just a number. What’s important is loving what you do and dedicating yourself to it.”
Upon being persuaded by Mr. Bong Tan and ultimately being appointed by the UE Board of Trustees to be the new Warriors head coach—replacing former Head Coach Dindo Pumaren, who steered the team in the last five school years—Coach Lawrence says that he felt a mixture of decisiveness and hesitation. “I told myself, ‘I can do this,’ but I also had some doubts, mainly because the PBL is not as hectic as the UAAP. But I figured, who could question destiny? I’m thinking, maybe UE and I are a perfect match now, and this could be the perfect scenario and the perfect time, especially for the University.”
Coach Lawrence is not exactly a stranger to the Warriors’ action and energy: he has had active or former Red Warriors such as Paolo Hubalde throughout his PBL stint. With Bacchus right now, he has a whopping seven of them: now former Warriors Mark Fampulme and Hans Thiele, and present Warriors Val Acuña, Paul Lee, Rudy Lingganay, Narciso “Pari” Llagas and James Martinez.
In a word, Coach Lawrence views his coaching style as “professional” given his PBL experience. He elaborates that “I intend to treat the Warriors professionally—not as kids but as young men. I will put in pointers, flesh out our system, will not play favorites and will not be one to berate or shout at them. I intend to exercise a balance of cooperation and discipline—to keep our focus, be goal-oriented, to be on the same page. If the players reciprocate that, then we would be victorious.” He points out, however, that taking things “one day at a time” is vital and that not being a UE alumnus is anything but vital. “I find it baseless that a school’s coach should strictly be one of its own graduates,” he says. “What’s important should be merit, the person’s qualifications. A coach is a coach is a coach. A school coach who is dedicated will always give his 110% with every game even if he is not an alumnus of that school.”
Already, Coach Lawrence has drawn up a rigorous schedule for the team for the first half of 2009, inclusive of bringing the Warriors in early April to Abunassar Impact Basketball training camp in Los Angeles, USA, which has also been a training venue of the RP team prior to international ball games. While there, the Warriors could see action in the Easter Classics tournament in Las Vegas. Moreover, Coach Lawrence has a lofty, off-court aim for the Warriors: to ensure that all of them graduate. “All these things are mainly to boost the Warriors’ confidence, to make them realize that they can stand shoulder to shoulder with their counterparts in the other universities—while keeping in mind that they represent UE and thus should be the best they can be. I intend to be a life coach to them and not just a basketball coach. The objective is to build not just good basketball players but good human beings.”
He notes that “I was still in college when the Warriors last became the UAAP champion [in 1985]” and that it’s high time that the team, and the University, reclaimed this UAAP glory. “As I see it, nothing stands in the way of this goal of winning at the UAAP. The players want this, the University wants this and I want this—especially for Chairman of the Board and CEO Lucio C. Tan and Bong Tan. If we all pool and put our energies and spirit into this then we can win,” Coach Lawrence states. “The time is now.”
http://www.ue.edu.ph/manila/uetoday/news/2009/01/images/coach_chongson_warriors.jpg
Coach Lawrence Chongson with the Red Warriors men’s basketball players: (front, from left) Narciso Llagas, Paul Lee, Rudy Lingganay, Ryan Monteclaro, Raffy Reyes, Nikko Tiongco, (back, from left) Gil Wagas, Fhadzmir Bandaying, Alex Lim, James Martinez, Kenneth Acibar, Jairold Flores, JM Noble, Paul Zamar, Erwin Duran, Val Acuña, John Ray Alabanza, Gino Etrone and Omar Malone at the foot of the Lualhati statue, Jan. 12, 2009.
credit goes to UE TODAY