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Go Bikes Team in Luzon feed children and mentor young adults

With the restrictions on sports facilities and sports activities in the Philippines during the Covid-19 pandemic, biking/cycling has increased in popularity. It has led Goducate volunteers to set up GoBikes programs, one of which operates in the Province of Negros (see blog of 2021_08-28).

Another Go Bikes program was set up in May in Luzon. During the first three rides, volunteers distributed facemasks to street vendors. Subsequently, the Luzon Go Bikes team started to distribute food to children on Saturdays.

On one of the weekdays, individual team members cycle to meet members of the community whom they are mentoring on life skills. Our team is still small. We have eight active members, and 4 members of community are being mentored.  

Biking is not only an effective way of reaching out to young professionals, but it has also helped members of our team to bond with each other.

A problem is that many of the young people do not possess bicycles, so members of our team lend them their bicycles to enable them to join the Saturday bike rides.

*Our guest writer, Stephen Luceno, is a Goducate staff in-charge of Sports.
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Goducate sports programs progress online

When the Philippines government closed sports facilities as part of its effort to control the Covid-19 pandemic, Goducate’s basketball program adapted to the situation by offering training online to basketball coaches, referees, and leaders (see blog of June 12, 2020, on GoBasket webinars). After these virtual training sessions had been conducted for trainees from all over the Philippines and even for some from Malaysia, we introduced backyard coaching.

In backyard coaching, those who had been trained as coaches online would gather players in their own villages for virtual training.

The idea of online training has since been extended to other sports in a nationwide program called Go Asia Sports. The other sports covered in this Camp Goducate program include volleyball, football, taekwondo, fitness training. Coaches have been sending in their videos on training, which include moral values. The online training is conducted on Facebook.

On March 1, a virtual backyard Basketball Forum was conducted mainly for Western Visayas. The participants (30 from Western Visayas, 4 from Laguna, and 10 from Mindanao) shared ideas on backyard training and how to do so in accordance with government guidelines on control of Covid-19.

Poster about GoBasket’s training sessions 
*Our guest writer is Andrian F. Pagsuiguiron, National Coordinator for GoBasket Philippines.