TT league to hold coaches' draft on Monday

The inaugural Indian table tennis league will hold the draft for coaches on Monday. 

The league, earlier named” Ultimate Ping Pong” has been renamed “ Ultimate Table Tennis (UTT)” and unlike any other league in the country, will have club based franchises rather than city based ones. It has also been learnt that the players draft will take place on June 7.

The five franchises for the inaugural season are: Dabang Smashers TTC owned by Radha Kapoor Khanna of Dolt Sports; RP-SG Mavericks by Sanjiv Goenka of RP-SG Group; Maharashtra United by Kapil and Dheeraj Wadhawan of Rajesh Wadhawan Group; ASK TTC  owned by Sameer Koticha of ASK Group and Oilmax Stag Yoddhas by  Kapil Garg and Vivek Kohli. The sixth franchise will be announced soon.

The coach draft scheduled for Monday promises the participation of a vast pool of highly experienced Indian and international coaches. Arup Basak, A Muralidhara Rao, N Ravichandran, Sachin Shetty, Sandeep Gupta and Soum­yadeep Roy comprise the Indian coaches while Elena Timina (Netherlands), Ferenc Karsai (Hungary), Francisco Santos (Portugal), Ilija Lupu­lesku (USA), Peter Engel (Germany) and Vesna Ojstersek (Slovenia) complete the line-up of coaches.