IT was certainly a different kind of day for me last Tuesday.

You see, I have been involved in sportswriting for more than 40 decades now and I have interviewed people many times over. I am used to doing that.

But to be interviewed in turn by a colleague is something else and what made it even more different is to do an interview on the same occasion.

Last Tuesday, together with our Philippine Sports Commission(PSC) staff, Romma Lyn Mendoza, herself a journalism graduate, we went to IBC 13 studio in Quezon City upon the invitation of an old friend Bill Velasco in his recently-revived Hardball radio podcast on DWAN.

Actually, he wanted PSC Commissioner Fritz Gaston but unfortunately, he is still in the hospital for minor surgeries on his knee. He had a knee replacement last year , and it got infected last week.

It was good seeing Bill back in action as just a few months ago, he was in critical condition and was in the hospital with a heart case.

Bill wanted to know about the Indigenous Peoples Games, an initiative by the PSC with the objective of promoting traditional culture of IPs, native games in particular and I have been attending these events as they are under the oversight of Fritz.

In fact next week, I will be in Bago City for the Visayas regional leg of the IP Games and next month in GenSan for the final leg in Mindanao.

Of course, the actual interview with Bill went beyond the IP Games so I also shared some plans on prioritizing sports and a high performance program for elite athletes to culminate in the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, also the last year of the current PSC administration team.

This was me being interviewed but prior to that, we were inside the office of DWAN station manager Marc Logan, a long time ABS-CBN staff who was tapped to help revive IBC.

Someone entered the room. Volleyball coach Roger Gorayeb who turned out to be the other guest of Bill in his show that morning and I guess I will never outgrow being a sportswriter so I threw questions at Roger while we were waiting for the show to start.

First question I asked was on the development of women’s volleyball compared to 10 years ago, and he said the skills level of our players have really grown, but not yet at the level of Japan or Thailand. For one, he says other Asian powerhouse teams have much bigger and taller players.

Comparing it to the men’s side, he says our boys are more competitive, blessed with both height and good skills, but unfortunately, the men’s side of the game here has not developed the fan base like that of women’ s.volleyball here.

He even had his reason for this but I would rather not share that because of its sensitivity, okay?

Another big factor he says is the lack of a comprehensive program that should include U20, U18, U 16 and u 14 teams unlike what he saw in Thailand.

Too that Thai female players are now playing as imports in other countries and are only recruited back for national team assignments when there are major international tournaments like SEA Ganes, Asian Games, or Olympic qualifying competitions.

We also both recalled the Indonesian player who suited up for the women’s national squad of Indonesia but turned out to be male. Isaw “her” play in the 2019 SEA Games here in Manila but Roger says he saw this player much earlier and he was pretty sure about the player’s gender.

In fact his players then told Roger they saw the athlete with no shirt in a balcony of a room where he stays alone, this was during a competition.

From what I heard, the player eventually got out if the team, became a soldier and even married a girl after.

Roger also shared what for him was the sad story about Jaja Santiago who opted for Japanese citizenship to fulfill her dream of playing in the Olympics, only for the International Federation of volleyball to change its ruling on players exchanging their citizenships. Now, a player can only play for one country, dashing Jaja’s Olympic dreams.

Whether she can go and play anew for the Philippines in future international competitions remains in question. For one I do not know if she opted for dual citizenship or is it even allowed in Japan.

Anyway, that was the day that I fulfilled both roles of being the interviewer and the interviewee, and I will still prefer to ask the questions rather than to answer them.