Jakarta to host Sister City basketball

Eva C. Komandjaja, Jakarta

Three basketball clubs from Beijing, Seoul and Bangkok will participate in the Sister City Basketball Tournament to begin here on Sunday.

The six-day competition will be held to coincide with the city's 477th anniversary.

Indonesia will be represented by three teams. One will be the Jakarta city team, which is being prepared for the upcoming National Games (PON) in Palembang, South Sumatra, in September.

The other two teams are made up of national players, who will use the tournament as a warm-up ahead of the 2005 Southeast Asian Games in Manila.

The national teams comprise selected players from clubs in the Indonesia Basketball League (IBL).

"We don't have any target for this competition. It's just a set of friendly games," Ade Bella Harahap, an official of the Indonesian Basketball Association (Perbasi), said here on Tuesday.

Jakarta Youth and Sports Agency head Yudhi Suyoto said the city administration had hoped Rotterdam, Tokyo, Paris, Los Angeles and the Australian state of New South Wales would also send their teams to the tournament.

While they could not attend this time around, they had promised to send teams to next year's tournament, Yudhi said.

Aiming to strengthen the relationship between Jakarta and its sister cities, the tournament will award trophies to the winners.

The six teams will be split into two divisions, with the top two in each group advancing to the semifinals.