Ang Kape Ni LaTtEX

No, it’s not the La Salle scandal that was sold in VCDs years ago.

I’m sure you’re all well aware of the newer UAAP edition, where two of La Salle’s UAAP men’s basketball team players were found to be ineligible to enter the university owing to questionable papers from the Department of Education.

The good news, perhaps, is that the Department of Education confirmed that only 2 Archers have false documents. So it’s only Mark Benitez and Tim Gatchalian.

The bad news is that it’s as real as it gets.

I agree with the sentiments of several people, Lasallian and non-Lasallian alike, that this was a serious case of negligence in La Salle’s part. It took three years to find the skeleton in the proverbial closet? And how many other players were able to slip through before?

And I agree that heads must roll regarding the issue. The first head that I personally would want to chop would be that of Manny Salgado. In fact, aside from that punch on Arwind Santos, some of my friends actually think that it was Salgado who facilitated the falsification of both Benitez’s and Gatchalian’s papers.

On the other hand, I expect several good things to come out of this fiasco.

I’m hoping that this will make the already strict admission policies of La Salle even more stringent. If they’d stop accepting PEPTCR documents and require students to actually finish highschool, even if it’s only from correspondence school, then cases like these would be more easily prevented.

I think it will also hopefully make the school administrators of the seven other UAAP schools examine their own ranks. Hopefully, it won’t be limited to basketball.

Finally, I also believe that this issue will encourage the universities to breed their own players and not rely on external recruitments that are sometimes conducted by unscrupulous alumni.

Right now, however, there’s apparently one good thing that already came out of this issue: Mark Benitez has vowed to return to highschool. If this vow is sincere, even if just for Benitez’s own sake, I think this scandal was worth going through with.

Animo La Salle!