Kuala Lumpur hosts ITF White Badge Officiating School
Lawn Tennis Association of Malaysia (LTAM) Tournament & Officiating chairman Dato Patrick Liew Chin Joon would like to see more Malaysian become ITF white badge officials and chiefs of umpires.
Liew, who is LTAM vice president and Sarawak Law Tennis Association (SLTA) president said towards this aim, he managed to lobby and convince the International Tennis Federation (ITF) to hold the ITF white badge officiating school for referee and chief of umpire in Kuala Lumpur, which took place on April 24-28.
“The main goal for the organising this officiating school is to produce more quality white badge officials to handle many major national and international tournaments in Malaysia or else we need to import them from other countries which is very costly.
“Secondly, this is to create a new career path for Malaysians to be professional officials and it is also to uplift the quality of tournaments organised in Malaysia,” he told The Borneo Post via WhatsApp from Kuala Lumpur yesterday.
“As part of the system, we start to introduce live scoring for the events to be more efficient and accurate.
“We do hope that many of the ex-state or national players can continue to have their tennis enthusiasm and keep tennis alive in our country.
“There are eight participants including two Malaysians for the chief umpire course and one of them is Gregory Tan, a white badge official from Sarawak.
“As for the referees course, there are 16 of them and three are Malaysians. Both courses have attracted participants from Australia, India, Ireland, Thailand, Japan, Bangladesh, Iraq, Lebanon, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and China,” added Liew.
Currently, Sarawak has a bronze badge referee Razmee Rawi who is currently officiating in the ongoing 40th Premier Sarawak Cup (J1) ITF World Tennis Tour Juniors (J300) at the SLTA Tennis Centre in Kuching.
The tutors are ITF gold badge referee Nitin Kannamwar from India and Wayne Mckewen of Australia who had officiated as referee for more than 130 Grand Slam tournaments.