This International Women’s Month, The GAME celebrates the women who are breaking barriers in Philippine sports.
The Philippines’ sports scene in recent years has been dominated by the stories of female athletes.
Many moments have made it near impossible to reflect on the rise of Philippine sports without considering the women whose stories helped make it happen — the Filipinas blazing a trail at the FIFA Women’s World Cup, the cult-like growth of the Premier Volleyball League, and Hidilyn Diaz’s historic Olympic triumph are just a few.
Yet, a certain disparity persists, a gap that still needs to be bridged to allow more women to succeed in this industry. And we’re not just talking about athletes. Many more women behind the scenes pour their hearts and souls into the world of sports.
Women like Coach Mau Belen, the first and only woman to hold a coaching position in the PBA. Erika Dy, the first and only woman to hold the role of Executive Director of the Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas (SBP). Janine Nicandro, who became the first, and is now the only remaining female referee in the PBA. In media, there’s Patricia Bermudez-Hizon, the first female play-by-play anchor for the PBA; and Jasmine Payo, the first female sports editor for a major publication in the Philippines
These women have become pioneers as women in the Philippine sports industry.
The GAME had the unique opportunity to sit down with these five women to discover the truth behind the curtain. What is it like being a woman in this male-dominated industry?
Meet the glass-ceiling breakers
“I think I’d be lying if I ever said that I aspired to be the Executive Director of SBP,” Erika Dy admits to The GAME.
“It was really not in my plans at all…I’m a lawyer by profession, but somehow, I started volunteering to help out with the women’s team in Ateneo as manager.”
Dy later became the head coach of Ateneo de Manila University’s women’s basketball team, a position she held for two years. This reignited her love for basketball and motivated her to get a Master’s degree in Sports Management from Columbia University in New York.
“By the time I graduated, they were looking for someone to run the World Cup,” she recalls, referring to her role as the deputy event director of the 2023 FIBA World Cup hosted in the Philippines. “And then, after the World Cup, during the semis or finals, they offered me the executive director job already.”
No woman had ever held this position before Dy, not even in the Basketball Association of the Philippines, which succeeded the SBP.
Dy’s story resonates with the other women sitting around her at the time of this interview. They never planned on becoming “trailblazers” in the industry. They didn’t even have their current roles on their bucket lists.
Patricia Bermudez-Hizon, for instance, started as a news anchor after college graduation, and the opportunity to take on sportscasting came seemingly out of nowhere. “Perhaps it’s because they saw some sort of potential in me, [they] asked if I wanted to try to do sports commentary, which I did,” she recalls.
Her first assignment was a big one: the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Having no prior experience in sports commentary, Patricia decided that immersing herself in a sport would help her gain more confidence before going live at the Olympic Games. Thus began a short journey to becoming a blue belt in Taekwondo.
A few years later, PTV, the broadcast company she worked for then, won the rights to the country’s top sports league, the PBA. As one of the network’s in-house sportscasters, she was asked to do courtside reporting. Again, with no prior experience in this area, she soaked up knowledge “like a sponge.”
“Eventually, the same person who saw the potential in me as a sportscaster said, ‘Why don’t you try being an anchor?’”
Again, Bermudez-Hizon studied, trained, and as she puts it, “earned my seat” to become the first female voice to provide play-by-play commentary for the PBA.
Jasmine Payo did not aspire to get into sports media, either. When she applied for a writing position on The GUIDON, Ateneo’s campus newspaper, she originally wanted a news or feature beat, the most coveted among applicants. But at the time, Ateneo’s sports teams weren’t winning all that much, so the sports section was wide open.
“I just thought, ‘Oh, this might be my entry point to The GUIDON. I’ll try the sports section, then eventually move to another section,” she recalls.
But she never did.
After graduation, Payo saw an opening in the sports section of The Philippine Daily Inquirer and jumped on it. She not only became one of the familiar faces in every sports newsroom, but she was also hired as the publication’s first-ever full-time female sportswriter. And after over a decade in the industry, she earned her place as the sports editor for Rappler, becoming the first female sports editor for a major news publication in the Philippines.
Coach Mau Belen spent the early years of her career as a coach, training Filipinos abroad and locally, but she never imagined she would coach in the PBA. She simply saw herself as “one of the lucky ones” when Coach Chot Reyes gave her the opportunity to become one of his assistant coaches for the TNT Tropang Giga team.
“Having known Coach Chot during the pandemic through his leadership and mentorship program, [which focused on] basketball coaching at that time…We were in that program for three months. And little did I know, when he came back to coaching in the PBA in 2021, I was one of the calls that he made.”
Belen made waves when she became the first female assistant coach in the PBA. From there, she even went on to become the head coach for the TNT 3×3 team, a squad she led to six PBA 3×3 championships. With a CV like hers, she was also appointed the head coach of the national team in the 2024 FIBA 3×3 Asia Cup.
Belen is not alone in making waves in the PBA as a woman. Janine Nicandro had a corporate job when she heard that the PBA was looking for female referees.
“Gusto kong ding lumawak pa yung mundo ko sa basketball, and looking for a greener pasture or yung mas okay na source of income…” she says. “Kaya sinubukan ko po.”
After a few months of training alongside an original pool of five women referees, Nicandro eventually became the first woman ever to officiate a PBA game and remains the only female to continue to do so.
Nicandro, as well as these other four pioneers, can count how many female colleagues they have. In Bermudez-Hizon’s case, no woman followed in her footsteps after her stint as a PBA commentator ended. In the same vein, Belen remains the only female to have held a coaching position in the PBA.
Inevitably, the journey of every glass-ceiling breaker comes with its scars.
The uphill climb
When asked about the challenges that she had to face as a female coach in the PBA, Belen looks at her watch and jokingly says, “I’m going to time myself,” eliciting laughter from the other women in the room.
They can all relate. Being a woman in a male-dominated industry comes with countless struggles. Belen admits to waking up in the morning and sometimes wondering to herself, ‘Why me?’ PBA referee Nicandro battles online threats and people who question her authority. Dy, as executive director of SBP, continues the challenge of pushing women’s basketball programs in the country.
Even as trailblazers and pioneers, one particular theme resonates with most women in male-dominated industries: fighting for acceptance.
Bermudez-Hizon is thankful that at the time she started her career, social media did not yet exist, as it would have exacerbated what she was already combating on a daily basis. “[The challenge was] just acceptance of the audience…I don’t think we were really that used to hearing female voices in male sports,” she says, reflecting on her time as an anchor for the PBA and the Philippine Basketball League in the early 2000s.
“But I think it was a self-inflicted challenge also on my part. I didn’t want to just be good enough as a girl. I wanted to be good, period. I wanted to be considered good amongst my peers. So that was always my measure.”
To live up to the high standard she set for herself, Bermudez-Hizon worked hard to create her own style without simply copying what her male counterparts were doing. It took years of practice, accepting feedback from the community, and fully immersing herself in the sport. Of course, it also helped to have her husband, former PBA basketball star Vince Hizon, who supported her with valuable insight.
Belen also began her career in the PBA looking for an “in.” When she was first appointed as the assistant coach of TNT, one of the first tasks she took upon herself was to find a way to reach her players.
“I literally researched to know if there were players I would really have an easy time to get along with,” she shares. In particular, she was looking to find any player who had been coached by a woman in the past — but to no avail. “Maybe the influence of their mothers’ hard work to raise them, that’s the closest I could get.”
However, she did gain the acceptance that she craved among her players. Belen feels blessed that Chot Reyes instilled a culture of mutual respect within their organization. With this, she felt a level of approval from her teams from the get-go, which only continued to grow as she proved herself in her field, becoming a six-time PBA 3×3 Champion, and even winning the first-ever 3×3 Grand Slam in the league’s history.
It also took Janine some time, but since becoming a referee for the PBA in 2016, she eventually gained the respect of the players — though it was a challenging journey, to say the least.
“At first, na-feel ko yung they are very doubtful sa akin bilang isang babae. Hindi sila sure bakit may babae sa court. At first talaga, i-intimidate ka, susubukan ka, and inaasahan ko na po yun,” Janine reveals.
“Yung adjustment period mahirap, pero it takes time talaga to gain their respect din and paano nila makita kung paano ako magtrabaho. I think dun nila yung tinitingnan kung paano kami magtrabaho para maging talaga namin yung respect nila.”
Nicandro says her persistence and determination to succeed gave her the courage to continue officiating PBA games for nine years (and counting). She even continues to encourage more female referees to break into the league as well, as she currently remains the only one.
Others, however, weren’t as lucky.
Several years after Bermudez-Hizon was first asked to become a PBA commentator, and after the immeasurable time and effort she poured into her role to prove that women can have a voice in male sports, the decision to continue, unfortunately, fell out of her control.
“I had a great run. But the challenge was years and years after doing this for the PBA, I was actually told, ‘You know what, we decided na we don’t want female voices anymore,” she reveals. “It was definitely a heartbreaking season of my life.”
After she had to give up the spot she worked so hard to earn, no other woman followed after her as a play-by-play commentator in the PBA.
Belen, similarly, left a gap that remains to be filled. Though she proved her ability to lead a team, she is still the only woman to have ever held a coaching position in the league. Like Bermudez-Hizon, no one followed after her.
These women have left large shoes to fill — but their mere presence in the sports industry during their time is perhaps enough to set an example for others, showing that they can indeed be filled.
Putting the wheels in motion
Although Dy and Payo don’t tie the challenges of their jobs to their gender, they still recognize that in this industry, women still exist within a sea of men.
In Dy’s case, she acknowledges she is only the fourth executive director in the history of the SBP, founded in 2006.
“It’s the sheer amount of people who are available to do the job. There might be a pool of 100 males applying for the job and maybe only 10 females, so hindi talaga siya proportional,” she says.
“So it’s a matter of really pushing females to be in the space because right now just a few are.
If you’re female you’d tend to go somewhere else, you wouldn’t pursue [this line of work],” she says. “Even I never pursued this job anyway. Ako, I think it’s just right timing yung napunta ako dito.”
Payo says even in the early stages of her career, when female sportswriters were still a rare breed, she hardly noticed that she stood out in most press rooms.
Thus, when she was appointed as the first female sportswriter for the Inquirer, she says she wasn’t really conscious of it.
“It wasn’t a big deal for me. It was just mentioned, but it wasn’t really something that I consciously thought about, because I just love the work.”
“It was really later on in my career when there were young girls, there were students who were approaching me, and said they were reading me growing up. And they were glad to see a female sports writer among the men,” she says. “And what really touches me sometimes is like when they say they got clippings of my stories. They’d keep my stories.”
Only then, Payo admits, did she realize that a woman’s byline on a sports story meant something much deeper to other aspiring writers, and could have the potential to inspire more female voices.
Bermudez-Hizon sees this as imperative for the women in Philippine sports. “I think we just need to be able to prepare more women, give opportunities to more women because globally, women’s sports are really growing, and you need to be able to match the voice with the sport,” she asserts.
Indeed, women’s sports have been taking center stage. Payo says In recent years, it’s really the female athletes, particularly those in the Philippines, who have been doing well.
“The spotlight is really on them,” she says.
And who better to share their stories than fellow women?
With her experience as a sports anchor, Bermudez-Hizon is now pushing more women to take on similar roles around the world. Currently, she is a trainer for women in news and sports for ABC Australia, and she trains aspiring anchors in the Asia-Pacific region on sports commentary and journalism.
“For women now, especially in this era where there are a lot more women who are capable and who have the courage to step up, there’s just not enough seats that are reserved for women in sports broadcasts…So, we’re trying to not just prepare them and give them the soft skills, but provide them with a safe space and also support, the kind of support that they need,” she explains.
Her mission here is to help women feel empowered to become “glass ceiling breakers,” just as she once was.
“Nakakatakot eh. You will eat fear when the opportunity comes because it’s a lot of pressure. Sure, you’re breaking that glass ceiling but at the same time, you’re either going to make it or break it for other women,” Bermudez-Hizon says. “But what we believe is that we actually will be able to really educate the next generation of men, the next generation of people out there to be more accepting of women.
“And it actually affects it on all different levels in life and not just the corporate. You’re not just going to be able to see more women in the CEO positions or leadership positions and everything.”
As someone also entrenched in the sports media industry, Payo adds, “When you go into a male-dominated industry, it’s natural that you’ll get scared and intimidated. But I think you just have to trust your talent, believe in yourself. It sounds cliche, but if you really think you’re good at it, just go for it, right?”
It may be true that the gap between men and women still exists in the sports industry, even off the court. However, these pioneers have paved the way for more women to come onto the scene.
Belen believes her stint in the PBA was some sort of “miracle.” She had never realized it could even be a remote possibility.
“I never thought I’d be a professional basketball coach. I mean, I love coaching, but who are the people who were there for me to aspire to be?” she shares.
Times are different now. These women have disrupted tradition, and have become examples of what is possible. They’ve set an important precedent that should not go unnoticed.
If these women have done it, so can you.
Text ANNIKA CANIZA
Photography EXCEL PANLAQUE
Creative Direction CAS ASEOCHE
Styling BRYAN LAROZA
Sittings Editor SID VENTURA and ANNIKA CANIZA
Production Coordination ANTHONY MENDOZA