The Philippines is an established sporting hub, with strong performances across games like volleyball, football, tennis, and an array of martial arts, but by far the most popular sport is basketball. According to Coach Vincent ‘Chot’ Reyes, basketball is the ultimate Filipino sport.
“It speaks to the Filipino psychology. It’s fast and exciting,” he says. “To succeed in basketball, you must be very creative, and we Filipinos are very creative. You have to work together as a team, which speaks to our Filipino Bayanihan spirit. Filipinos love a high-scoring, up-and-down kind of sport, and that’s what basketball gives us – not to mention it’s easy to do it. Pick any corner, any sandlot in the streets, if you put up a ring and you have a ball, then you’ve got a game going.”
Vincent ‘Chot’ Reyes leads his teams to victory
A renowned head basketball coach for the Philippines Basketball Association (PBA), who led the national basketball team to the 2014 World Championships, Chot is the only coach to win 3 All-Filipino titles with different teams – Purefoods in 1993, Coca-Cola in 2002, and Talk ’N Text in 2009, 2011 and 2012.
He has led many teams to victory, but what he values more is being the only coach to have won PBA ‘Coach of the Year’ 5 times. “Leading the Philippines through the 2014 World Championships was very special, and being the only coach to have won 5 ‘Coach of the Year’ awards is very special. I mean Tim Cone, Jong Uichico, Norman Black, a lot of other coaches have won more championships than I have. But to win the 5 ‘Coach of the Year’ awards speaks to a different kind of achievement, so I’m very proud of that.”
Unlike many other sports coaches, however, Chot also doubles as the current president of TV5 Network, owned by MediaQuest Holdings.
Taking the reins to TV5 Network
When Chot was approached by the network to head up its struggling sports division, he said the role came very naturally to him. “It was in a field that I knew pretty well,” he says. “We did a very good job in turning around sports from losing in my first year to turning a profit in my second year.”
While working as head of Sports5, Chot was hailed as one of the country’s top executives by the communication professionals group International Association of Business Communicators (IABC).
“In my third year, in January 2016, they handed me the reins to run Media5, which was the sales, marketing, and digital arm of TV5.” By September, the former TV5 president, Emmanuel C Lorenzana, announced his retirement and the banner was handed to Chot the next day. He was effectively plucked from the world of sports and plunged into managing all network operations and programming as well as overseeing finance, IT, team building, and even coordinating the broadcast of the 2017 Miss Universe Competition.
My style is ‘hands off, eyes on’. I allow my people to do their jobs, but I oversee them.
“It was a huge transition,” he says. “Still, being part of a corporation and running a business was no stranger to me, so it was also not a very difficult transition. While I’ve been coaching professionally in the PBA for the past 20-plus years, I’ve also always been involved in business endeavours in several forms.”
An entrepreneur at heart
An entrepreneur at heart, Chot had experience running his own executive coaching training and consultancy business, Coachcom.ph, providing mentoring, workshops and team-building activities with managers and executives in various top 500 corporations in the Philippines. He and his wife, Cherry, also run a chain of TONI&GUY hairdressing salons in Manila.
“The real transition was the scope and the breadth of the work, but at its core it was the same thing I’d always done, so I approached it the same way. When I came to TV5, my priority was to stop the bleeding, so to speak, and to get the network in a position of stability. We had to make some very difficult decisions. We had to rationalise the organisation, so that was challenging.”
Once stability was achieved, Chot and his TV5 team could stop playing defence and formulate a plan for growth in the medium term. “First, we want to make sure we continue our dominance in sports. We identified several opportunities like eSports, for example. We’ve also identified digital opportunities as a way forward.”
Partnering with Filipino art house director Brillante Mendoza
Furthermore, the network has sought to progress in more unconventional spaces, starting with a partnership with Filipino art house director Brillante Mendoza to produce new storylines outside of what you’d normally see on television. Chot says they are also encouraging all their current content creators to feel free to pitch new and innovative ideas.
“We want to be known for doing things differently. That means we’re not going to do any new traditional teleseries, telenovelas or dramas, because we cannot beat the other networks in that,” he says. “The entertainment shows that we’re going to put on TV5 have to have a different look, a different feel, and be told in a different voice.”
If all goes to plan this year, the network will have improved 67% over the environment in which Chot first arrived. “It is difficult to juggle my responsibilities of coaching and running a network, but I can depend on the strong teams I work with.”
Chot’s leadership style: hands off, eyes on
Fortunately, his experience in basketball coaching has translated a lot into the leadership of a corporate team, and Chot knows that his job is to support and direct his people, not to micromanage.
“My leadership style is ‘hands off, eyes on’. As a coach, my job is not to shoot the ball; it’s to make sure my players are in the perfect position to make shots. I have used that same philosophy in the corporate world. I allow my people to do their jobs, but I oversee them and give them the support they need,” he says.
With Gilas Pilipinas dominating the courts, and with high expectations for TV5, Chot believes 2017 will be a year of great achievements. “I’ll be the first to say it’s going to be difficult,” he says. “Being a basketball coach also means I understand what it takes to bounce back from losses. That’s not something that you’re taught in school – the ability to take a loss, learn from it, and turn things around. Growing TV5 was a challenge, but I’ve always lived for challenges my entire life. I’m not going to back down from this one.”