WITH NO team from the Cebu Schools Athletic Foundation Inc. (Cesafi) participating in the annual summer basketball competition known as the FilOil Flying V Premier Cup in Manila, the possibility of the Partner’s Cup making a return has been broached.
The official roster of teams that will be competing in the Filoil tournament was released yesterday and conspicuously absent were the teams from the Cesafi.
In recent years, defending Cesafi champions University of San Carlos, the University of the Visayas, Southwestern University and the University of San Jose-Recoletos have at one point, joined the tournament to gauge their skills against some of the best collegiate teams in the country.
However, that won’t be the case this summer.
According to a source within the Cobras camp, their squad will not be participating since they currently lack players to field a respectable team. USJ-R officials, on the other hand, said that they did not receive an invite.
This development has opened the possibility of the Cesafi Partner’s Cup returning this summer.
“We’ll be having a meeting tomorrow (today) to discuss that,” said the Cesafi’s longtime commissioner Felix Tiukinhoy.
The tournament, which pairs a Cesafi squad with a corporate sponsor, started back in 2007 with the goal of helping the players remain active in between seasons. However, it was shelved in 2014 with the lack of participating teams.