by Henry Liao
I have been a living witness to the steady growth of the Pace Academy high school basketball program for more than a decade.
The ups and the downs of the youthful Pacers I have gone through are a lot. That the Pacers do not get too high on successes and not too low on failures is a testament to their adaptability to the survival games.
Indeed, for in the end, what does not kill you makes you stronger.
Pace Academy is a young Chinese-Filipino community with no more than two decades of existence. But its hoops program did not exactly mature until the early 2000s.
Cultivating a winning culture took some time. It was not easy. Then again, climbing a mountain has never been easy either.
The learning curve was torturous. There were the early years when wins were few and far between.
Slowly, though, Pacers basketball has evolved into a competitive program, enough to scare the opposition and give its foes a run for their money.
This year, the climb to the mountaintop was closer than ever for Pace Academy, which finally made it to the final of the Philippine Ching Yuen Athletic Association for the first time in the program’s history. It has become a household name in the Chinoy basketball community.
To boot, it made school history with the selection of one of its homegrown talents in the past as the first overall pick in the professional Philippine Basketball Association draft in 2025 by way of mammoth Geo Chiu, who’s now a rookie with Terrafirma in the PBA.
A central figure in the transformation of the Pacers basketball program was Michael Oliver, the school’s top bench strategist, who earned his spurs as a former assistant coach with a PBA team recently and once handled the Gilas Youth program in the early 2000s following his modest playing career at Far Eastern University.
The soft-spoken but hard-driving Oliver took over the Pace Academy coaching reins in 2019–2020, just months before the pandemic set in.
“It was a daunting task to turn the fortunes of Pace Academy basketball around back then,” noted Oliver. “Mahirap na mahirap. Sobra. Ayun, tinamaan pa tayo at ang buong mundo ng pandemic.”
COVID-19 put a rude, abrupt halt to most activities in the world.
Sports activities were placed on the backburner.
Oliver had a first-hand experience. “Biglang nahinto yung PCYAA games in January 2020 sa kalagitnaan ng torneo. Nagkataon pa eh ang host ng torneo ay Pace,” Oliver recalled.
The pandemic immensely hurt the actual physical training of the players. “Yung online training wala naman masyadong naidulot sa mga bata,” said Oliver. “Parang nagvi-video games ka lang.”
As days, months, and a year and a half passed by, the world had started to wonder if there was still light at the other end of the tunnel. It was not until late 2021 that a vaccine to combat COVID-19 was created.
That opened up everything in the world, from the daily work grind to the buzzing physical social life to sports activities for athletes.
At Pace Academy, Oliver went to work immediately. Training was back in full bloom, and so was his passion for the game.
To prepare his wards for the bigger wars ahead, Oliver accepted the invitation for his 18-U Juniors team to take part in the school-based Chachago Invitation Basketball League in the summers of 2022 and 2023 as the likes of Kleivz Fong, who later tried out for the University of the East varsity, and Axell Cue and Wayne Barandino strutted their wares.
The Pacers Juniors earned several championships along the way. When the PCYAA returned in 2022–23, the team was back in competitive mode. By 2024, the Pacers had broken through with a medal finish for the first time ever in the Juniors ranks, romping away with a bronze medal.
And this year, the Pacers are assured of winning at least a silver.
With Oliver around, the progression of Pace basketball is headed to greater heights.
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