The 2017 NCC Tennis League Cup draws took place in Lagos over the weekend with a lavish opening ceremony featuring exhibitions by junior champions from the ITA Junior Circuit.
Fourteen teams registered for this year’s event with six new teams joining the fray while three new cities – Ekiti, Ibadan and Jos will host top level tennis this year.
However, the International Tennis Academy, organisers of the competition, say the League will feature 12 teams. Eleven of the 14 teams will get automatic spots based on their collective team ranking while the three weakest teams will contest for the last spot in a playoff that will take place in Lagos a week before the main League starts.
To arrive at the Team Ranking, top 10 players get three points, top 20 two points and the rest one point each.
The Prize money has also been consolidated at N23 million with all the 12 teams getting logistics support of N500, 000 each. The winning team will get N7 million, the runner-up N5 million, the third place N3 million and the fourth place N2 million.
The League will as usual feature two groups – Blue and White – with the top two finishers emerging to play semifinals and on to the finals.
The Blue Group consists of 2015 champions, Team Civil Defence (Abuja); Team Kalotari (Port Harcourt); Team Muller (Lagos), Team Optiweb (Ilorin); Team VGC Lions (Lagos) and the Qualifier team from the playoffs.
The White Group will feature defending champions, Team Offikwu (Kaduna); Team Ndoma-Egba; Team Goshen (Ilorin); Team CBN Futures (Lagos); Team Oyetade (Ekiti) and Team Tech Vibe (Jos).
The NCC Tennis League which debuted in 2015 aims to take topflight tennis to major cities of Nigeria, attract sponsorship to our elite players and prepare them for the ATP Circuit.