International Tennis Premier League: Serena Williams and Andre Agassi to light up Singapore

Serena Williams and Andre Agassi will draw huge crowds during the ITPL

In the latest of a series of international press and media announcements culminating in tennis’ newest spectacle, the International Premier Tennis League (IPTL) and the team owners of the Singapore Slammers, the Singapore based IPTL franchise, announced its participating players, team owners and event details to the local media. Hosted at the prestigious Shangri La Hotel, the Singapore Indoor Stadium was also unveiled as the venue for the prestigious event from 2-4 December 2014.

“I congratulate the IPTL for being able to conceptualize such a unique sports format and we, from the Singapore Tennis Federation are proud to partner with the organizers to make this event a great success for all the sports fans in Singapore. After the WTA Tour finals, this will be the second major professional tennis event to grace the city in 2014 and we are proud to become a part of the word tennis calendar.

The Singapore Indoor Stadium with its over 12,000 spectator seating capacity has a tradition of hosting major sports and entertainment events and will be the ideal venue for the IPTL,” said Greg Tan, Vice President of the Singapore Tennis Association at the official launch press conference of the Singapore Slammers. “To have the best players in the world competing in this unique team tennis competition will only encourage more players to take up tennis and help develop the sport in Singapore. With our promising youth development programs, we are confident that in the future a true Singaporean tennis champion will soon emerge to compete at this level and play for the Singapore Slammers in the IPTL. I would like to thank the IPTL for bringing the event to Singapore and happily extend our full support to the team owners and the organizers of the IPTL.”

The IPTL is a new team tennis competition featuring the best current and former ATP and WTA players across 4 selected cities in Asia (Manila, Singapore, Delhi, Dubai) from 28 November until 13 December 2014. “It is time for innovation in tennis. We hope the fanfare IPL has brought to cricket, the IPTL will bring for tennis,” states Mahesh Bhupathi, founder of the IPTL. Mahesh, himself a winner of 53 ATP Tour titles including of 12 Doubles and Mixed Doubles Grand Slams continues that “the IPTL format will be very attractive to broadcasters and fans alike.

We have changed the traditional scoring format to single-set no-add scoring which will speed up the games and allow us to expose the fans to up to 24 different players in one evening while the broadcasters for the first time, will be able to schedule predictable start and finish times of each match. Each match will consist of 5 sets played by different players (men’s singles, women’s singles, men’s doubles, mixed doubles and former Champions singles) and each game won counts as one point for the team points total and the team that wins the most games overall across the five sets wins the match.” Mahesh added.

“Fans will see players calling for ‘time outs’ in the middle of a game, announcing a ‘power point’ and play a ’shoot out’ to decide the winners of each match while live entertainment, a running shot clock and many more features will ’Break the Code’ of the traditional etiquette of tennis to attract a new audience to the sport!”