SSBU 2005 Age Group Tournament: Round up
The first SSBU event of the new season took place at Tollcross Leisure Centre on Saturday 15 October. This was a new venue for SSBU due to availability and it proved to be a great day all round.
16 boys and 6 girls competed in the 2005 Age Group event – for future events, such as the 2008 and 2011 in the coming weeks, we’d like to reach out to our young female players and ask that they come along to challenge themselves and get involved in these fun, competitive and social tournaments.
The boys singles started with four pools of four where games were one-to-one with the top two in each pool going to the knock out stage A and the others to knock out stage B. Both the A and B knockouts were played as best of three to 21. The A final was very close with Lingyun Xiao just defeating his Edinburgh colleague Blair Tait in 3 sets 21-14, 14-21, 21-18.
The girl’s singles were played as a pool of six with all matches best of three to 21 points. On this occasion Glasgow came out on top with Pranavi Singh winning all of her matches.
Unfortunately, there was only one pair of girls wishing to play doubles, so they played in the boy’s pools. There were two pools played as one game to 21 before going to A and B knockout where games were best of three.
Pranavi, fresh from her singles win paired up with Abigail Barrie from Inverness and the girls won 2 of their 3 pool games.
The two singles finalists paired up for the boy’s doubles but suffered a defeat in their pool losing 21-15 to Finn Callister and Abhinav Vinjam. However, with the top two in each pool going through to the A knock-out, Lingyun and Blair duly made their way through to the final where they came up across Finn and Abhinav again.
Lingyun and Blair were now on form and took revenge for their earlier defeat with a 21-9, 21-15 victory.
We’d like to extend a huge thank you to all players and volunteers involved at the first SSBU event of the season. Everyone enjoyed themselves and it is now on to Wishaw for the 2008 and 2011 events over the next 2 weekends.