Two foreign guest teams will participate in the round robin semifinals.
The preliminaries of the PVL Invitational Conference is already tough, with eleven squads participating in the tournament. It's going to get tougher in the semifinals, with two foreign guest squads in the mix.
PVL president Ricky Palou confirmed to Noli Eala on Saturday that a squad from Japan confirmed participation for the mid-season competition.
"Right now, we’ve got confirmation from Japan, still waiting from confirmation from one of the other teams," Palou said during Power & Play on Radyo5.
He explained that they invited squads from Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and Hong Kong to the Invitational Conference.
"We said the first two that confirms are the first two that we will formally invite," he added.
Last year, there were supposed to be two foreign guest squads participating in the Invitational Conference. But Japan's Kobe Shinwa Women's University pulled out last minute due to COVID-19 concerns.
Taiwan's Kingwhale Taipei made it to the finals, but the team was defeated by the Creamline Cool Smashers.
Palou though noted that they have invited pros this time around.
"They’re club teams, more or less on the professional side," he said. "For Hong Kong, we asked them if they could send their national team, so we’ll see what happens."
"These clubs are not collegiate teams, they’re not pick-up teams. Competition-wise it should be better."
The aim for Palou is to increase the level of competition, given the country's fourth straight fourth place finish in the Southeast Asian Games.
"We'd like our local players to get experience playing foreign teams. Hopefully, our teams will learn from them. It's more of our learning from them rather than learning from us."
The PVL Invitational Conference will kick off on June 27, with eleven local squads divided into two groups. The top two performers in each group will move on to the semifinals, where there will be another round robin along with the two foreign guest teams.