Go down the hill, Ateneo!

Gabriel Liwanag

On June 8, 2026, in the churning waters off Dipaculao, Aurora, the Ateneo de Manila University’s pursuit of athletic supremacy exacted an unforgivable price. Nineteen-year-old Rene Clert Baterbonia, a local prodigy from Agusan del Sur, and twenty-one-year-old Divine Adili, a recruit from Nigeria, drowned during a Blue Eagles “team-building” activity.

Baterbonia and Adili died after being instructed to march in waist-deep water parallel to a treacherous shoreline.

Every Atenean knows the lyrics to their alma mater, A Song for Mary: “Down from the hill, down to the world go I.”

Fifty-eight years ago, five Ateneans published the manifesto Down from the Hill, condemning a university for its indifference toward the masses. Today, that very same condemnation echoes not in the political elite, but in the machinery of the multi-million-peso corporate apparatus of the university itself.

If the Ateneo is to face the mirror of its own history, it cannot dismiss this as a mere accident of nature. It must face the gross negligence of its coaching staff and the ruthless corporatization of the university that made such a death trap possible.

To “go down from the hill” in 2026 requires the Ateneo to confront the hypocrisy of how it operates its modern athletic intake. The university projects an image of cura personalis, or care for the entire person, yet the reality of the UAAP arms race tells a different story.

Look at the victims. Baterbonia was a 6-foot-4 gentle giant, the 2025 Palarong Pambansa MVP who carried the Davao Region to a championship. Adili was a 6-foot-10 foreign student-athlete brought in to anchor the paint. These were not the children of the Katipunan elite. They were young men of extraordinary physical gifts, plucked from the provinces and from abroad, brought to the “hill” to bleed and sweat for the entertainment of alumni and the prestige of a wealthy institution.

Consider the mothers they left behind. When a mother in Agusan del Sur packs her teenage son’s bags, or a mother in Nigeria puts her boy on a plane across the world, they believe they are entrusting their children to a Jesuit Catholic institution promising world-class education and pastoral care. They do not expect to be offering their sons as sacrifices to a sports franchise. They do not expect them to return in an urn.

Today, collegiate sports seem to be luring working-class and foreign athletes with the promise of a world-class education, but the unwritten contract demands absolute physical subservience.

The Ateneo has allowed its basketball training to morph into a test of endurance in open, treacherous waters and has betrayed cura personalis itself. It has reduced human beings to raw capital, forged in the crucible of extreme training just to hang another championship banner in the Blue Eagle Gym.

And of course, the basketball coach is a mentor, not a military drill sergeant, and the Philippine Sea is not a gymnasium. The decision by the Ateneo coaching staff, especially by Tab Baldwin, to march young men parallel to a shoreline known for violent currents under the guise of “team-building” and “training” is an act of catastrophic hubris.

The 1968 manifesto was explicit: “Love of neighbor does not exist in paternalistic donations, which are mere palliatives for our society’s ills. Rather, it is a rendering of justice, a commitment to cure society’s ills at its roots.”

In the wake of this tragedy, the university has deployed standard crisis management: statements of profound grief, memorial masses, psychological debriefings for the surviving players, and assistance in repatriating Adili’s body. These are necessary gestures, but they are exactly what Emman Lacaba and his fellow Ateneans warned against — palliatives.

Ateneo, you must go down the hill! Remember that this is what you sing in every Song for Mary. You must serve the nation based on Philippine realities. 

The reality today is that Rene Baterbonia and Divine Adili did not have to die. Their deaths are not a mere accident; they are the collateral damage of a system that demands too much of young bodies to satisfy the vanity of the elite.

Until the Ateneo takes absolute, unmitigated responsibility for the athletic culture that led these young men into deadly waters — until it values the lives of its recruits infinitely more than its athletic legacy — it remains standing on its hill. Isolated. Arrogant. And deeply complicit.