Title doubles for six players at U15/19 National Junior Championships
Six players each won a brace of titles at the U15/19 National Junior Badminton Championships, held on 13 & 14 December at the Sir Craig Reedie Centre in Glasgow.
Lewis Smith and Qing Yang Zhou each won two gold medals in the U19 events with Emily Joshua, Calum Tsang and Nathan Luo achieving the same feat in the U15 age group.
Impressively, 14-year-old Jaagruti Mannem claimed a gold medal at both age groups including the U19 girls’ singles, where she came from a game down to beat Qing Yang Xiao 18-21 22-20 21-9 in the final.
Xiao made up for that disappointment with success in the girls’ doubles. Partnering Deepti Vijayakumar, the unseeded pairing beat top seeds Anshita Jaiswal and Chloe MacKenzie in the semi-finals before downing second seeds Mannem and Lanna Campbell in the final.
Lewis Smith and Blair Tait dominated the boys’ doubles, winning the title without dropping a game and beating second seeds Thomas Fragell and Arnav Saraswat in the final.
Fragell beat Saraswat 24-22 21-15 in an enthralling boys’ singles final and in the mixed Xiao and Smith beat their respective level doubles partners Tait and Vijayakumar in a tense 21-16 18-21 22-20 battle that could have gone either way.
Mannem completed her brace of titles when she partnered Nathan Luo to a dominant 21-10 21-10 win over Tsang and Zoe Tait in the final of the U15 mixed doubles.
That win also secured Luo’s brace, having won the boys’ doubles earlier in the day when he and Tsang beat Melrick Dsouza and Dylan Jia 22-20 21-10 in the final.
Tsang had beaten Luo in the final of the boys’ singles 21-16 21-13 in one of the first matches of the afternoon.
Emily Joshua upset the seedings in the girls’ singles, beating top seed Zoe Tait 19-21 21-17 21-15 to set up a final against the other 3/4 seed and namesake Emily Jobson, who had completed an equally impressive upset by beating second seed Elona Kennedy 19-21 21-18 21-13 in their semi-final.
In the final Joshua won out 21-18 21-13 before pairing up with Tait to win the girls’ doubles with a 21-15 21-10 win over Josie Colimbine and Annika Sinha.