Volleyball pro league to start maiden season
Volleyball pro league to start maiden season
Musthofid, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The hastily arranged Proliga, a "professional" volleyball league,
is set to start its inaugural season on Friday with organizers
already aiming to expand the competition beyond Indonesia in the
future.
The opening eight matches will be served up in two cities --
Jakarta and Gresik, East Java -- on Friday when four mens and
four womens teams take the court.
The eight remaining teams, four men and four women teams, play
each other on Sunday in the same cities.
"Everything is in place for the opening matches. This is a
dream come true," Rita Subowo, the chairwoman of the Indonesian
Volleyball Association (PBVSI), told a press conference here on
Tuesday.
Though the success of Proliga is yet to be determined, Rita
said she hoped a league would be proposed for a competition among
Southeast Asian nations.
"I have been making contact with my colleagues in Thailand and
Malaysia about the possibility of holding an inter-nation league.
We will discuss it further at a meeting in Jakarta next April,"
she said.
Proliga would be not only an unprecedented professional
volleyball competition in Indonesia, but also in Southeast Asia,
she said.
The league has also lent its birth to a commercial promoting
body m-lynx, and is assured of wide television coverage from
state-run TVRI and private Trans stations.
Though the league is yet to prove it can live up to its
"professional" status, the organizers are already facing the
prospect of issues over its players.
The competing 16 teams -- eight men's and eight women's --
come from ten clubs. Although they are new clubs -- seen from the
names they bear -- most of them generally comprises members of
already-existing clubs, which regularly feature in the national
amateur volleyball competition, Livoli.
The clubs have joined the league with different names.
The male and female players from Bandung Tectona are those who
regularly play for the Bandung-based Perhutani, runners-up at the
recently completed 2002 Livoli.
And Surabaya Flame, which joins the league with its men's
team, will field players from the city's Samator club team, the
Livoli champions.
As soon as the league finishes about April, the players will
change colors to compete for their Livoli teams, while the 15
overseas-recruited players will return home.
The organizers appeared undecided as to whether the league
players would still be allowed to play in the amateur competition
next season.
"We will talk on the issue further after the first league is
completed," Rita Subowo said.
"This is only the beginning. And we have had only three months
to prepare," she said.
The foreigners have come from Australia, Sweden and Canada,
and have been brought here to "reinvigorate national volleyball".
Their allegiance with their respective clubs was arranged by
PBVSI.