Former player claims teammate nearly drowned at Kiwi coach Tab Baldwin’s boot camp a decade ago

Tuesday, 16 June 2026

Basketballers Divine Adili, 21, and Rene Baterbonia, 19, drowned during a team-building exercise on June 8, leading to Kiwi coach Tab Baldwin’s resignation and a police probe.

Former player Kristoffer Porter told Stuff a teammate nearly drowned during a similar beach drill a decade ago.

Baldwin said he “failed as a leader” after last week’s incident, but told Stuff several of Porter’s claims were “either incorrect or significantly exaggerated”.

Porter credited Baldwin’s military-style camps with giving him a professional “mental edge,” but questioned whether people would still trust the coach with young players.

A Filipino basketball player who attended one of Kiwi coach Tab Baldwin’s military-style pre-season boot camps claims he saw a player nearly drown a decade ago.

Kristoffer Porter, who was a member of the Ateneo de Manila University’s Blue Eagles team when Baldwin became head coach in 2016, said he was surprised by the drowning deaths of two players on a camp last week, following what he claimed was a similarly dangerous water incident at the earlier camp he attended.

Divine Adili, 21, and Rene Baterbonia, 19, died during a team-building exercise on Monday, June 8, leading to a police probe and mounting pressure on Baldwin, the experienced coach who led the New Zealand Tall Blacks to fourth place in the World Championships.

Have you attended one of these boot camps? Contact the reporter at chris.marriner@stuffdigital.co.nz

Baldwin, who said he “failed as a leader” in a video apology, and later resigned, told Stuff he could not comment on Porter’s allegations as he was “still waiting for official proceedings to run their course before speaking on the specifics of the incident or any other camps held in the past”.

He said several of Porter’s claims “are either incorrect or significantly exaggerated”.

‘I’m trying to break you down mentally’

Porter told Stuff Baldwin was clear about the aims of his camp, recalling him telling players: “I’m trying to break you down mentally so I can build you back up from scratch to show you how much more powerful your mind is than your body.”

He claimed players were taken where there were “no people loitering, no nothing. So it was literally just us.” He said players were woken at seemingly random times to take part in group exercises, which included drills on the beach and in the sea.

Players were told to form a chain of linked arms, he claimed, and perform lunges down the beach into shallow water and at other times go deeper and run in the water.

“He wants you to feel the difficulty of the exercise and to push past the difficulty, I think that’s his thinking,” Porter said.

But players were never instructed to go more than waist-deep into the sea, he told Stuff, “because the coaches are aware that not all players know how to swim”.

Safety protocols

It was during one of the water-running drills - in late 2016 or early 2017 - that Porter says players “found ourselves in a bad situation”.

“We got pulled by a rip current right out into the water,” he said, detailing how he grew up around the sea and knew how to swim and not the fight the rip.

But not all the players appeared to know how to react, and several were pulled out, he claimed.

Porter said Baldwin was the first into the water to help and claimed he personally saw him rescue one player, and was later told by teammates that others also needed assistance.

“He was the very first guy to get out into the water,” Porter said. “Coach Tab had a paddle board or a wakeboard or some kind of board with him, he had a buoy, so he ran into the water with those.”

Police in Aurora, where the deaths of the players occurred last week, have said that the Blue Eagles moved 300 metres down the beach from the resort they were staying at and away from an area known to be safe and calm.

Porter said he was surprised by reports surrounding last week’s tragedy because, in his view, a teammate had nearly drowned during a similar drill a decade earlier.

“I wouldn’t say there was any intent to put players in dangerous positions,” he said of his own boot camp experience. “I’m of the opinion that the only problem with the setting was the lack of better safety protocols.”

‘Mental edge’

Porter said that Baldwin accomplished building a stronger team, despite what Porter described as a near-drowning, and credits the boot camp with giving him a “mental edge” that he took into a career as a professional basketballer in the Philippines.

“In the moment, I hated it. I hated it with a passion, but throughout the season, throughout my future tenure as a basketball player… I can look back and say that experience helped me mentally more than anything.”

Asked if he still backed Baldwin as a coach, Porter said: “As a coach? Yeah, of course.”

But the former Blue Eagle said the necessary trust may no longer exist.

“As a coach, I have no doubt that he’d be able to fulfil his job. The problem right now isn’t whether he should stay on as coach, I think the biggest issue is, ‘Would people still trust him around their players, their kids?’,” Porter told Stuff.

“I think that’s the biggest issue right now.”

‘We must look inward’

It was reported on Tuesday that Baldwin had resigned from his position at Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, and that a fact-finding probe by the police Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) was under way.

The university’s president, Father Roberto Yap, thanked Baldwin for his “years of service” to the school’s Blue Eagles basketball team.

“We must look inward, examine our systems and rebuild the structures of our athletic programmes so that our fields and playing courts will be places where dreams are nurtured, not broken,” Yap said.

“We apologise unreservedly to the families and to our entire community for the agonising pain of this tragedy.”