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.