Hoops for Hope promises top notch basketball coaching for a cause.
The Filipino Canadian Association of Cochrane Alberta (FCACA) is pairing up with Calgary's FCBA Blizzards basketball program to offer the $15 basketball clinic later this month, with proceeds providing disaster relief in the wake of Typhoon Rai (known also as Typhoon Odette) — a tropical storm that tore through the Philippines on Dec. 16, 2021.
"Right now, our secretary Mila Prout is in the Philippines for vacation," said FCACA president Mike Bautista. "She saw what's going on in the aftermath of the typhoon last December.
"The typhoon there was very, very bad, so the people there need some help."
Prout sent pictures back to Cochrane capturing some of the destruction from the Category 5-equivalent super typhoon, responsible for killing 410 people and causing more than US$1.02 billion in damages according to the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.
It is the second costliest storm in Philippine history after 2013's Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda).
An estimated 80 people are still missing and hundreds of thousands of people were left homeless after the event which ripped off roofs, shredded wooden houses and wiped out crops.
Cochrane's Filipino association was able to raise $700 through a bottle drive last December, but Bautista feels their support shouldn't end there.
"As a group, we said we need to do something again," he said.
Bautista, who moved from the Philippines to Cochrane in 2007, knows all too well the devasation tropical storm's like Rai can wreak on his home country.
Typhoon Agnes (or Typhoon Undang as Bautista knows it), a Category 3 storm, swept over Apalan, a municipality on Cebu Island where he was living in 1984 while in elementary school.
"It was really hard," said Bautista. "All the houses there were all gone and broken, all the animals were dead in the road like the cows and everything — it was really hard to see.
"You lose everything, everything's wet. I know the feelings, so that's why I'm very eager to help those people."
Bautista is determined to lend a hand in the way he knows best: through basketball.
The sport was a constant all throughout his life growing up in the Philippines, having played from elementary through to college. He later established the Cochrane Sunday Ballers, a club affiliated under the Calgary FCBA Blizzards, in 2013.
The two clubs, along with the FCACA, Bubble Tea Brewers and Dadiguz Basketball & Beyond Foundation, are teaming up Feb. 27 to host Hoops for Hope, a basketball training session, at Spray Lake Sawmills Family Sports Centre from 9:30-11:30 a.m.
The money raised from trainee fees will support boots on the ground efforts to repair and restore shelter in areas effected by Rai, said Bautista, as Prout's photos are telling that much work remains to be done 68 days after the storm first made landfall.
