There has always been a price to belonging in organized sports.
Athletes learn early that being part of a team demands sacrifice. You put up with difficult teammates, punishing training sessions, and coaches whose methods sometimes cross the line from discipline into abuse. You face opponents who hurl racist remarks or go after your family over something that should never leave the boundaries of competition.
You accept pain, give up your time, and put the team above yourself.
Some of this is what makes sport meaningful. Sacrifice builds character. Shared hardship creates trust. Training teaches athletes that they’re capable of more than they imagined. But competition can also bring out the worst in people, especially once winning starts to matter more than the sport itself.
I experienced some of this as a young basketball player. My left hand doesn’t have an index finger, and I was bullied by teammates for something I had no control over. Fortunately, my love for basketball survived it. I eventually found friends who stood up for me, and the belonging they gave me made the rest worth enduring.
I also trained under coaches whose methods felt excessive, especially for kids our age. Like a lot of young athletes, I accepted it as part of getting better. Some of those experiences taught me persistence, and the value of pushing through discomfort for something I loved.
But there has to be a line.
The problem is that athletes are rarely told where it is. They’re taught to push past exhaustion, obey authority, and prove their commitment by enduring whatever is put in front of them. Pain becomes evidence of effort. Silence becomes evidence of loyalty.
It’s especially hard for athletes to admit discomfort when they’re fighting for a spot on the team. Speaking up can get you labeled as weak, selfish, undisciplined, unwilling to “take one for the team.” When playing time, scholarships, and future opportunities all hinge on a coach’s approval, silence starts to feel safer than honesty.
Younger players, reserves, recruits, kids chasing a scholarship: they have the most to lose and the least power to protect themselves. They know opportunities are limited, and that someone else is always waiting for their roster spot.
So they endure.
This dynamic isn’t unique to sport. We see it in workplaces and other institutions where loyalty to the group is valued over accountability, where speaking against your own team is treated as betrayal while the behavior that caused the complaint gets ignored.
The person who raises the problem becomes the problem.
Sport makes this dynamic especially dangerous because obedience is celebrated as a virtue. Athletes are trained to trust their coaches and put the team before themselves, qualities that can build great teams, but that can also make young people afraid to refuse, to question authority, or to admit they feel unsafe.
Violence is rarely presented to athletes as violence. It’s called discipline. Conditioning. Initiation. Sacrifice. Tradition. Team-building.
Which is why the recent deaths of Ateneo men’s basketball players Rene Baterbonia and Divine Adili demand more than grief. The two young athletes died during a team-building activity in Dipaculao, Aurora. Their deaths have prompted investigations into possible violations of the Anti-Hazing Act, and the possibility of homicide charges.
Those investigations need to determine individual responsibility. Speculation should never replace evidence, and grief should never become entertainment for a public looking for someone to condemn.
But there’s a larger, cultural question that belongs to all of us.
How does an activity meant to build a team end with two young athletes losing their lives? What safeguards were supposed to be in place? Whose job was it to recognize the danger? Did anyone feel like they could object? And most importantly, what has to change so that no athlete is ever put in that position again?
Remembering these two young men can’t end with sensational coverage, public outrage, and hollow promises of reform. Their deaths cannot become just another national tragedy that holds our attention for a few weeks before fading from public memory.
If sporting institutions are serious about protecting athletes, that protection has to exist before something goes wrong, not after.
Team-building activities need clear safety procedures, qualified supervision, and someone accountable for every athlete in their care. Schools and sporting organizations need confidential reporting channels that sit outside the coaching staff. And athletes need to be able to refuse a dangerous activity without losing playing time, a scholarship, or their spot on the team.
Coaches should be judged not just by wins and the athletes they develop, but by the environments they create. A winning record cannot excuse a culture of fear. Competitive success cannot make up for athletes who leave a program injured, humiliated, traumatized, or too afraid to speak.
Teammates and supporters have a role to play too. We need sporting cultures where empathy isn’t mistaken for softness, and where speaking up isn’t treated as disloyalty. Admitting fear or discomfort doesn’t make someone a bad teammate. Sometimes speaking up is the most loyal thing an athlete can do.
I was fortunate. I had teammates who looked out for me in the hard moments. But I still wonder how many young athletes walked away because their teams failed to protect them. How many potentially great athletes did we lose this way? How many kids gave up the sport they loved because the very institutions meant to develop them became the source of their pain?
We’ll never know their names. They disappeared before the world got the chance to see what they could have become.
Athletes already put their bodies on the line for the sports they love, often chasing greatness for their families, their schools, their communities, their country. They shouldn’t also have to surrender their dignity, their safety, or their voice just to prove they belong.
The real lesson of sport was never supposed to be how much suffering a person can silently endure.
Winning doesn’t only ask athletes to sacrifice. Sometimes it asks coaches to look away, teammates to stay silent, institutions to protect their reputations, and supporters to forgive cruelty as long as the wins keep coming.
The question was never whether winning has a price.
The question is why we keep asking young athletes to be the ones who pay it.
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