Not in recent memory has someone floated the idea of creating a Philippine sports university — a shining, purpose-built campus where future Filipino Olympians train on pristine tracks alongside four-walled classrooms. The proposal came from the Philippine Sports Commission’s (PSC) overachieving chairman, Patrick “Pato” Gregorio.

I was there when he actually made the pitch during his commencement address at the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Human Kinetics, where my fencer son was part of this year’s batch that received their newly conferred sports science diplomas.

The debate over whether to enact a separate law to build a Philippine sports university was settled by the PSC chief right before it even began. Clearly, we don’t need to build one from scratch because we already have it. It’s called UP, and it has been sitting there in plain sight, fully mandated, waiting for someone in government to simply read its charter.

Republic Act 9500 established UP as the country’s official national university. Buried in that mandate — right alongside research and public service — is language directing UP to undertake and support comprehensive sports programs. That is not a stretch of interpretation; it is a statutory instruction. If Congress wanted a national sports university tomorrow, it could write new legislation, establish new governance, and navigate a lengthy accreditation process. Or it could simply point at UP and say: You already have the mandate, use it.

That is the unglamorous truth about institution-building — the fastest path rarely runs through crafting a new law. Why start from scratch when you can expedite the process through an existing institution that already possesses the legal authority, administrative muscle, and academic credibility to absorb a new function without reinventing itself? UP ticks every box.

Start with what it already teaches. Human kinetics, sports science, sports medicine, biomechanics, nutrition, and sports psychology aren’t aspirational programs UP would need to build. They exist. What is missing is an organizing structure that pulls these disciplines under one roof and directs them toward specific elite athletic development and a holistic national physical framework — instead of leaving them scattered across departments that rarely talk to one another.

Then there is research capacity, the crucial component most sports-university proposals conveniently skip. A real sports university isn’t just a training camp with a diploma attached; it is a research engine studying injury prevention, coaching science, and performance analytics the same way a medical school studies disease. UP is, without much debate, the country’s premier research university. That isn’t a credential you build overnight — it is one UP already holds and maintains.

Geography further strengthens the argument. UP isn’t just a single Quezon City compound; it is a system spanning Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. A new standalone institution would likely concentrate on Metro Manila by default. UP, by contrast, could power up regional high-performance centers wherever it already operates a campus, transforming athletic development into a true national network rather than another NCR-centric project.

Multidisciplinary reach matters more than people assume, too. Elite sport today relies on law, engineering, AI-driven analytics, business and communications — not just coaching. UP doesn’t need to import any of this. It already teaches all of it; it just hasn’t directed these fields toward a focused, scientifically rigorous Olympic cycle.

There is a credibility dividend as well. Being the premier state university carries immense weight across the Philippine educational system, with foreign universities, and with the International Olympic Committee and international sports federations that demand a serious institutional counterpart. That opens doors — making partnerships with global powerhouses like Nippon Sport Science University or the German Sport University Cologne a conversation between peers rather than a courtship between unequal entities.

None of this requires reinventing UP. The practical execution is almost purely administrative: establishing a UP Sports University as a new constituent university, creating a dedicated campus for sports science, or launching a UP National Institute of Sports that grows into full constituent status once it proves its concept. Any of these options is faster and significantly cheaper than legislating an entirely new state university and hoping its governance matures before the funding runs out.

We have spent decades studying and importing snippets of governance models from foreign sports powerhouses, wondering why we can’t fully replicate their athlete pipelines. Maybe we just never noticed that we already had one — mandated by law, sitting in plain sight, waiting for someone to connect the dots.

UP doesn’t need permission to become the country’s national sports university. It simply needs an act of institutional imagination — and, perhaps, one dedicated line item in next year’s national budget.