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News > POA
Pak female tennis umpire to attend course in India Back To Main
24-Apr-2012
The News
KARACHI: A female tennis umpire from Karachi will go to India in the next four months to participate in a three-day Level-II umpiring course.
Khalid Rehmani, Secretary Sindh Tennis Association, informed ‘The News’ that Sara Ahmed has cleared a Level-I course held some six months back in Islamabad by Pakistan Tennis Federation (PTF).
“She has contacted us and showed her interest, so we have decided to send her to India for further training from the platform of STA,” said the secretary. “We are really short of Level-II umpires.”
When contacted, Sara said, “I would love to go for this opportunity, it’s quite interesting job for me. I was number one player of Sindh sometime back. It would be kind of a pleasure for me to be umpiring.”
She further said that she has not been getting enough time to fully deal with this umpiring thing because of her studies, as she is doing her master’s in business administration. “I think no other lady is in tennis umpiring, and it’s not much-explored thing yet in Pakistan,” she added.
She claimed that she would be the first one to go to India for this course.
“You have to secure over 80 percent score in the test to get the level 1 certificate of umpiring, which is quite a difficult to attain,” said Rehmani.
In Pakistan there are around 20 Level-I umpires and only three umpires have Level-II credentials. Arif Qureshi (PTF’s treasurer), Shehzad Alvi (another PTF office-bearer) and Sohail Ahmed (left the country for Kuwait) are White Badge umpires of Pakistan.
The referees in Pakistan are Khalid Rehmani (PTF’s Vice President), Arif Qureshi and Shehzad Alvi. They have in the last three years organised three ITF’s senior (over 35 years) tournaments — two in Karachi and one in Lahore.
PTF organised a course for Level-I umpiring some six months back — after a gap of five to six years — in which six persons got cleared out of 25 participants.
In Pakistan 90 percent tennis matches are supervised by coaches or ball boys.
Few ITF Level-I courses have been held in the recent years in Pakistan. This appears quite odd for a country with a population of 180 million.
During the nine-year tenure of Senator Dilawar Abbas not a single white badge umpire was produced by PTF. But this is not strange if we compare it with the tennis activities in Pakistan where only 4 to 6 national tournaments are held in a year as compared to 4000 tournaments in Spain, which has a population of 40 million