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wo youth basketball teams from Broome, Australia, will travel to Surabaya, East Java, in early August for a basketball tour.

Surabaya, the second-largest city in Indonesia, is a sister-city of the West Australian town.

"This tour to Indonesia, which will be both a wonderful basketball and cultural experience, is not an easy tour to arrange," Gaye Yu, president of the Broome Basketball Association, said Wednesday in a press release.

"Our players do not play in weekly domestic or representative basketball competitions throughout the year, as they do in the south of *West Australia*, nor is it financially easy for us, especially in the present economic climate, but we will try our best to make this tour work for all involved."

The touring group of 24 players consists of one boys' team and one girls' team, and is made up of students aged mostly from 13 to 15 years old, who are attending either Broome Senior High School or St. Mary's College.

Also on the tour with the players will be seven adults in the positions of head of delegation and boys' and girls' head coaches, assistant coaches and team managers.

In addition, there may also be some parents joining the tour.

In Indonesia, the Deteksi Basketball League (DBL) will be hosting the Broome Basketball touring teams, in conjunction with the West Australian government's Department of State Development.

The Indonesian DBL, under the leadership of founder and DBL commissioner Azrul Ananda, is the biggest student basketball competition in Indonesia, and in 2009 this fast-growing league will oversee games played in 16 cities and 13 provinces, with 16,000 players involved (about the size of Broome's total population) and with more than 225,000 spectators watching the games.

The DBL, established in 2004 in Surabaya, aims to enforce the Student-Athlete concept, in which grades in school are just as important as - if not more important than - on-court playing achievements.