Alohi Robins-Hardy will still have to go through the Draft. —ANGEL B. DUKHA III

Amid the Alohi Robins-Hardy impasse, it seems like the Filipino American is the last person bothered by all the controversy circling her eligibility to play for Farm Fresh in the PVL.

“Confused [about all the issues arising], shocked maybe a little bit, but I take it with a grain of salt,” Robins-Hardy said during a press conference hosted by Farm Fresh, the team she was supposed to join but later on denied by the league. “I am from Hawaii. I am very chill, laid back, so I am not really stressed.”

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Farm Fresh recruited the playmaker and got her under contract during the offseason before the team announced its newest setter on its social media accounts. The PVL then stepped in and declared that she must go through the Draft to enter the league.

That obviously didn’t sit well with Farm Fresh, whose owner, Frank Lao, said that he had a gentleman’s agreement with PVL president Ricky Palou.

May 2024 ruling

Speaking for Lao during the press con, CK Kanapi-Daniolco claims that Palou had agreed to allow the setter to suit up as long as she presented a Philippine passport, which Robins-Hardy was happy to show to the media.

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“We know the rules (of signing free agents), but we asked (Palou). So if we were told that it’s not possible, then we wouldn’t have pursued [Robins-Hardy],” Kanapi-Daniolco said. “But he said yes.”

Contacted by the Inquirer on late Thursday, Palou admitted over the phone that he had said yes to Lao sometime in June, but it was for an “unidentified Filipino-American [player] whom he said already played for Cignal.”

“I was the one who found out that it was Alohi, and two or three days after I had said yes, I told him that Alohi is not a free agent.”

The PVL had implemented a rule back in May that requires all league rookies to enter the Draft. This, after wanton recruitment by monied teams had threatened to tilt the balance of power in the league.

Only free agents that had played in the PVL from 2021 to the present can freely choose which team they want to play for, and in Robins-Hardy’s case, the technicality is that she never played in the PVL before even though she was a fixture in the defunct Philippine Super Liga from 2019 up until the pandemic hit.

“I feel for these guys—the management, the team, sir Frank but I am laid back, I am not really worried,” the 28-year-old Robins-Hardy said. “I am just gonna do my thing and help the team out in any way I can.”

Robins-Hardy seems willing to wait.

“I really don’t know the PVL rules by heart. I just know that there’s a Rookie Draft and the thought that I had is I am technically not a rookie,” she said. “I’ve played overseas before, in France, in Serbia, in the Czech Republic, so if they can’t consider that then, I mean, I can’t do anything about it.

“It’s not in our control.”