Every week, over 80 people gather on fields in Metro Manila for Enpower Open Play. Before a single flying disc is thrown, they come together in a huddle. Nina Javier welcomes the newcomers by name. She reminds everyone what the community is about – a safe space where you can learn, grow, and have fun, regardless of whether you’ve never touched a disc or you’re a national team player. Then they play.
When your heart is in the right place, people will feel it.
That weekly ritual didn’t happen by accident. It is the result of seventeen years in Ultimate, a career built on the conviction that sport should be for everyone – and a realisation, not so long ago, that empowerment is more complicated than she had thought.
From Runner to Nation-Builder
Nina grew up in the Philippines as an athlete almost before anything else. Badminton, volleyball, athletics – sport was simply part of who she was. She spent twelve years on the track and field varsity team, and it was through that world that she found Ultimate, when a former teammate reached out looking for women to join their team. She had tried it once before, briefly, during off-season training. She remembered laughing the whole time. She had no idea what was coming.
Ultimate took hold quickly and completely. Nina became a national team athlete, a coach, and eventually the founder and head coach of Enpower Ultimate Academy. Along the way, she helped form the first Philippine Women’s Ultimate National Team, the Binibinis, a move born not from ambition alone but from frustration.
When she first started playing, girls were peripheral. In a mixed-gender sport, women were often on the field to make up the numbers rather than to play. Guys didn’t pass to girls who were wide open. Girls lost confidence. Some lost interest entirely. “People were being overlooked, looked down on, disregarded, and simply not given a chance,” she says. “It wasn’t right.”
So she did something about it. The Binibinis became a symbol of women’s empowerment in Philippine Ultimate. Clinics followed. Open sessions where women could build skills at their own pace. And eventually, an academy built on a simple vision: through Ultimate, empower Filipinos to live out their true potential, in sport and in life.
The Stronger and the Softer
Nina came to the Girls Positive and Safe Coaching Pathway nominated by her National Federation President, at a point when her academy was approaching its first anniversary and she had just finished her first year coaching an all-girls high school varsity team. She was looking, she says, to be a better coach, to understand more about the young girls she was working with and what they actually needed from her.
What she found in the course shifted something she hadn’t expected to be shifted. She had spent years championing the “stronger” side of empowerment, providing role models, setting high standards, and inspiring girls to reach for more. What the course helped her see was the “softer” side she had been less attentive to: listening, observing, and empathising. Making girls feel seen, accepted, and valued exactly as they are, not as who they might become.
I went from being a role model to being a support. I wanted girls to feel comfortable first with themselves, no matter the struggles they were currently facing.
That shift – from destination to presence, from inspiring to accompanying – changed how she coaches. She began paying closer attention to the journey, not just the result. She started thinking about safe space not as a backdrop to good coaching but as its foundation.
She shared that realisation at the TAFISA World Congress in Prague, where she spoke about her experience. The insight landed because it was honest: someone who had been doing the work for years, admitting there was a whole dimension of it she had missed.
What It Looks Like Now
The Enpower Open Play community began the month after the course ended. One evening a week, two hours, anyone welcome. Beginners line up alongside national team players. Before the game starts, everyone gathers. Nina welcomes the newcomers. She reminds the community of what they are.
The community is now 600 people strong. Friendships have formed that didn’t exist before. People who came hesitant have found their confidence and kept going. “This is all thanks to the community who supported us in creating this safe space for everyone.”
Nina’s dream is to take that community beyond Metro Manila – to reach Ultimate players across the Philippines, to share what they’ve built, and to keep learning herself along the way.
My dream is that while working towards these goals, I become a better person, a better human being, continuously learning and growing.
On a field in Manila, every week, that work continues. Over eighty people in a huddle. A welcome for the newcomers. Then they play.
SUCCEED Series: Stories of Impact
This story is featured as part of SUCCEED Stories, through the SUCCEED Framework. SUCCEED (Supporting Communities Empowerment & Development through Sport for All) is a global framework dedicated to fostering community empowerment and development through capacity building in Sport for All. Led by TAFISA in collaboration with the IOC through its Olympism365 strategy, SUCCEED aims to provide a unified and synergistic approach towards building the capacity of Sport for All stakeholders.
Girls Positive and Safe Coaching Pathway 