The start of the 2023-2024 V-League season is less than a month away. Teams are making last-minute preparations. While it’s important to get together with your teammates and make sure you’re all on the same page, it’s the second half of the preparation process that’s most important. This is why clubs that have been sweating it out all summer to prepare for the new season continue to invite university and unemployed teams to play practice matches.
In this regard, the ‘2023 Preseason Men’s Professional Volleyball Tournament’ held in Danyang, Chungcheongbuk-do from July 17 to 21 is special. Five teams – Hyundai Capital, KEPCO, Woori Card, KB Insurance and Samsung Fire – are participating in a series of practice matches in a full league format ahead of the start of the new season on April 14. Korean Air missed out due to domestic training with the Finnish national team for the 2024 Paris Olympics World Qualifiers, and OK Financial Group missed out due to a scheduling conflict with a training camp in Japan, but it’s a rare opportunity for each team to play four games.
Unlike the Korean Volleyball Organization’s (KOVO) V-League and Cup competitions, the clubs’ own preseason tournaments are held at the Danyang National Sports Center with two games a day, and the outcome is not important. The main purpose is to check the results of summer training and to see how the team is performing at the moment.
As a result, each match is played in four sets, regardless of the set score, and foreign players can be used freely without any restrictions. Of course, the same applies to Asian quota players, which will be introduced in the new season. In addition, if there is room in the roster, different lineups or combinations can be used for each set. That’s why the matches between Woori Card and KB Insurance and Hyundai Capital and KEPCO were so exciting.
This is not the first preseason tournament. The tournament, which began as a practice match organized by Hyundai Capital and Samsung Fireworks in 2018, has become a special event in professional volleyball, traveling to Hongcheon, Gangwon-do, and Busan. The tournament skipped 2020 and 2021 due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, but resumed last year in Danyang.카지노
With its expanded scale, the tournament is likely to continue to evolve. It could be held in a different region each year, or it could be a tour with major teams traveling to Japan or Thailand during the war years. “The training conditions and schedules will be different for each team, but it’s positive in the sense that it’s an efficient way to quench the thirst for real-world experience,” said a club official.