KARACHI: A team of under-16 boys will be sent to participate in international tennis events in February or March next year, while a ladies’ team will be sent for Fed Cup.
President Pakistan Tennis Federation (PTF) Kaleem Imam disclosed this to ‘The News’ on Monday.
He said that PTF had started creating opportunities for junior players in a bid to prepare replacements of the country’s best players, Aisam and Aqeel, with preference given to players of 12 to 16.
He said that Aisam and Aqeel still had two to three years to play for the country. “We will do what we can for Aisam and Aqeel,” he added.
“We are working on a concept paper according to which we will hire prominent tennis players to coach junior players in their respective cities. For example, Aqeel will train around five best junior players in Karachi and Muhammad Khalid, who is the coach of the national team for Davis Cup, will train five juniors in Lahore,” he added.
PTF management committee had decided to pay them on monthly basis, he added. “We would like to give international exposure to our good junior players like Mohammad Abib, Adil Kohari, Muddasir,” said the president PTF.
“But we could send them only once or twice in a year due to our limited resources. We get around Rs2 million from Pakistan Sports Board (PSB) and around Rs4 million from ITF for playing two ties of Davis Cup in a year.
This translates into Rs6 million a year, out of which we give 12,000 dollars to ITF as their fees,” he said.
“This is the reason why we have been asking for support from multinationals and private sector for our players even in terms of employment, but due to recession nobody is investing in sports,” he added.
He also said that they were considering hiring a foreign coach for players “but they are very expensive, so we can’t keep them for more than two months. We had hired two foreign coaches sometime back for a short period,” said Kaleem.
He further said that PTF had been trying to arrange wild cards for Ushna Sohail to play international matches. “We have some very talented players like Maheen Dada, Iman, Saba,” said PTF president.
