In its third season, the Prime Volleyball League (PVL) has its third champions. Calicut Heroes finished top of the league phase. Then they finished top of the Super 5s. Then they were just superior to the Delhi Toofans in the final in Chennai on Thursday night. They have their first trophy, and they left no doubts as to who the best team was in the tournament.
However, for the PVL itself, Delhi Toofans making the final was vindication of their decision to add another team to the league this season. The PVL CEO Joy Bhattacharjya says there were more prospective buyers at the start of the third season, when they added the Toofans to the league.
To get here hasn't been easy for the PVL.
Baseline Ventures earlier ran the Pro Volleyball League for one season, contracted by the Volleyball Federation of India (VFI). That was discontinued after the VFI pulled the plug on it mid-contract. The matter went to the Madras High Court, who ruled in favour of Baseline and asked VFI to pay up to Rs. 6 Crores in damages to the promoter. When the Prime Volleyball League was announced, the VFI announced that they would have a league up and running before the PVL. Nothing ever took off on that front.
Now, the PVL have their own lines of communication even with FIVB, the sport's world governing body, which helped them host the Club World Championships in Bengaluru last year. It's clear now how that power struggle ended: The PVL clearly holds the aces (or should you say super serves?) in Indian volleyball.
Obviously, the biggest beneficiaries have been the players. They were once collateral damage in the legal tussle between the VFI and the promoters of the PVL, and were even threatened to make a choice between playing the PVL and playing for the country. Not anymore.
Indian star Ashwal Rai says the league has brought about an unmistaken professionalism to Indian volleyball, which is making the players better. "There was no analysis at all in our volleyball before the league," Rai says. "Now, we're being shown what our weaknesses are, we are being shown how we can exploit other players' weaknesses... this was completely new to us."
For a new player coming up the ranks, the exposure they get to top-notch coaching and practices will only make Indian volleyball stronger in the days to come, Rai says.
But where are the players coming from? Where's the volleyball market in India?
Dakshinamoorthy Sundaresan, the coach of the Chennai Blitz also runs the volleyball programme at SRM University in Chennai. The university's influence on Indian volleyball has been so pronounced that Bhattacharjya calls it one of the two main gharanas [schools] of the sport, along with Kurukshetra University.
One of the PVL's biggest source of players, SRM have finished on the podium of the All-India University Championships every year since 2007, when Dakshinamoorthy moved there to continue a programme in association with the Sports Development Authority of Tamil Nadu that he was already running at another university in the city. He has had more than 20 players play in the PVL, so he now recruits more young players for the programme at SRM to keep the conveyor belt running.
As for volleyball market, the viewership numbers for season three already surpassed the first two seasons before the end of the Super 5s stage, and Bhattacharjya says that is down to the sheer potential the sport itself has. "It's a worldwide sport, it's more three-dimensional than, say, Kabaddi. When you have aerial action, that is a thrill in itself."
The Pro Kabaddi League, with its success in its ten editions so far, has set a benchmark for non-cricket leagues in India. Bhattacharjya acknowledges that the PKL is aspirational, but he also says it's important for the PVL to try to live within its means.
"Mashal Sports (the promoters of PKL) put its whole machinery behind the PKL, especially in the first five years. We know we don't have that kind of bandwidth, so while the PKL has aspirational value for us, we need to continue to understand what our product is, and how we reach this to the masses," he says.
An important aspect of the PVL's initiation, Bhattacharjya says, is that its teams and investors "aren't losing boatloads of money by the season".
"I think a bigger league wouldn't be able to sell the smaller deals we do, which is our biggest plus," he says. The PVL has had Rupay as its title sponsor since its inception, but Bhattacharjya says it's the various sub-crore deals that the league has in its portfolio right now which are giving it its oxygen.
The exponentially increasing standards of Indian volleyball
This financial input into the league is what has opened Indian eyes to the standards of world volleyball. Even for someone as accomplished and coveted in Indian volleyball as Dakshinamoorthy is, exposure to foreign coaches -- like the Bengaluru Torpedoes' (and former Olympic gold medalist) David Lee -- has helped.
Lee says analysis and videos form the bedrock of his work. Dakshinamoorthy says the PVL gave him a platform to actually show his players video in the build-up to games for the first time.
"You can observe, you can tell the players. But when they are actually visually seeing exactly what you are talking about, it is a completely higher level of sharing information with them," he says. In modern sport, video analysis has become so important, but even the most accomplished of Indian volleyball coaches didn't have access to it. Such was the state of the sport's ecosystem.
It is this gap that Lee wants Indian volleyball to address. Analysis, he says, forms an integral part of defence, more than attack. "At some level, anyone can attack well, Indian players attack as well as the best players in the world," he says, "but what separates the good from the best in volleyball is your defence, and that's where these players need to be developed from a younger age."
Lee takes the example of his some of his own players, who he calls brilliant attackers and servers. But he says defensive basics weren't instilled in them early enough. Lee's Torpedoes players aren't the only such in India.
Rai says the Club World Championship, where he played for Ahmedabad Defenders, brought to light the gap which India still has to bridge in world volleyball. "We saw the best players in the world, learnt from them and are now trying to implement it, but the difference was visible," he says.
Dakshinamoorthy has seen his own players from previous years benefit from the PVL. He has coached India stars like 37-year-old Mohan Ukkarapandian, and says that for the first time in their lives, some of these players are managing to afford personal trainers for their all-round betterment.
This is part of the big-picture change the PVL wants to bring to Indian volleyball - that it is not just a league that runs for three months a year. Rai says he is in talks with his franchise, Kolkata Thunderbolts, to provide him with conditioning support throughout the year, in preparation for whatever competitions he would be required to play in.
So, when Rai, Ukkrapandian and the other Indian players head to the senior nationals or the other invitational tournaments they play in all-year round, they now go there as better players than they were before the PVL. They go there better equipped to handle the challenges of modern-day volleyball.
Delivering this legacy to a larger group of players over the next few years is the next challenge for the league. For Bhattacharjya though, the next step is to market the sport, the product they have, which he is bullishly confident about.
"When we market it to the right audience, this sport has the potential to completely take off in India, it has not done that yet," he says.
So far, they've been smart with bringing the money in to run three seasons of the league. The foreign players and coaches have already made a tangible difference to the Indians. And yet, as the Club World Championships showed, there's such a large gap to bridge to the rest of the world.
Dakshinamoorthy was there, coaching the Ahmedabad Defenders. "The world level is far away, we need to put in a lot of work to reach there," he says.
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The Prime Volleyball League, in its infancy, is showing that it has the people to put that work in to reach there, one spike at a time.