Plans are underway to increase next year’s Fiji International tournament to be bigger and better at the Natadola Bay Championship Golf course.

The Fiji International is the country’s first and largest, and most lucrative sporting event to date.

The Fiji International forms part of both the PGA Tour of Australasia and OneAsia schedules and confirmed for five years is boasting a prizepurse of US$1 million with the winning professional to take home US$180,000.

PGA of Australia chief executive officer Brian Thorburn said there is a strategic plan to move the event to October.

“This year, the dates are clashing with the Hibiscus Festival. It’s got a few championships around us, so next year we will grow much bigger,” Thorburn said.

“With extra daylight, we will have a bigger field. We want to play the tournament with 156 golfers because of this time of the year and hours of day ight, we can only get 120 golfers.”

He said they had improved on a few things things before the tournament starts tomorrow.

“We started late to this tournament running. We only had six to eight months to get rolling and only four months to sign the contracts. Next year we are most likely to play it in October, so we will have a 14-month gap between this one and the next one. We have learned some lessons as well.

“Golf tournaments are not new to Fiji, but at this magnitude Fiji is new to us for organising this level of competition. With all the experience under our belts, we will be able to do it more efficiently.

“In order to make a tournament more enterprising, some golfers are paid hefty appearance fees. Those matters we keep confidential and don’t disclose that, but we do pay some appearance fees, but we won’t disclose to whom and how much,” Thorburn concluded.

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