The 2014 Aurora Summer Open took place on June 14th, 2014 at the Eola Community Center in Aurora, IL. 84 players from 6 states signed up and we had only 3 no shows. There were 1 players each from Iowa, Minnesota, Tennessee and Missouri, 2 from Wisconsin, 4 from Indiana and the rest (71) from Illinois. While there were challenges with filling up the all 200 available spots in the end only 8 spots went unclaimed. However the Open Doubles event was cancelled since it didn’t receive any entries.
First, I would like to thank our sponsors Newgy, Inc. and Paddle Palace for their continuing support of our tournaments. Newgy donated 15 barriers which allowed us to provide almost fully barriered courts. We only need 5 more barriers to make this a fully barriered tournament or a 100 total.
Paddle Palace provided 50 white 3 star Nittaku balls. I would like to ask our players to support these companies with equipment purchases.

Cecilia Navata (tournament operations), Swavek Lorenc (tournament director)
and Andrew Moy (umpire)
I would like to thank the following individuals for helping with setup, operations and take down of the tournament. Without their help the tournament would not be as nicely prepared and would not run in a timely fashion.
Setup of the venue, required assembly of 74 barriers, table washing, repair of broken wheels on tables & of course table setup. It started at 8:30 pm and ended shortly before 11 on Friday night.
- Assembly of barriers: Cecilia Navata, Justin Korte, Matthew Lorenc
- Barriers positioning Adam Koziel and Meinhard Korte
- Setup of table tennis tables & officials/vendor/charity area: Meinhard Korte
- Jim & John Brandt attaching table numbers, positioning podium cubes, barriers positioning.
- Paul Shellor placing sun blocking cardboards in the running track windows to improve playing conditions.
Tournament operations were running smoothly thanks to Cecilia Navata who quickly mastered OmniPong control desk software and pretty much ran the tournament on her own with very little help from the tournament director. Additional assistance during tournament was provided by:
- Andrew Moy – umpiring matches
- Jacek Wisniewski – tournament referee & net set calibration
- Fox Valley Park District personnel – printing altered score sheets and venue rental
Tournament take down was accomplished very swiftly thanks to:
- Meinhard Korte, Adam Koziel, Joanna Korylczuk, Jacek Wisniewski, Rachel Wisniewski, Manikandan & Narayanan Nagarathnam
The tournament’s matches started pretty much on time with only 1 event starting 15 minutes late.
Results
The results and tournament report were sent electronically to USATT via OmniPong on Sunday evening, so the ratings should be updated on Thursday evening. The top finishers in each event can be seen below.
Event – Click for full results | First Place | Second Place | Third Place | Fourth Place |
---|---|---|---|---|
Open Singles RR | Artur Kurek | Yijun Lin | Spenser Minh Lam | Engelbert Solis |
Under 2400 RR | Artur Kurek | Thor J. Truelson | Spenser Minh Lam | Akash Pardeshi |
Under 2200 RR | Janusz Franeczek | Akash Pardeshi | Keith Offord | Krzysztof Szostak |
Under 2000 RR | Sonny M. Henderson | Mariusz Merchut | David Sun | Veselin Vasilev |
Under 1900 RR | Simon Liang | Kevin Swan | Robert Douglass | Kian Beyranvand |
Under 1800 RR | Kashif Memon | Paul Shelor | Sarah Zhou | Myagmarsuren Erdenebileg |
Under 1700 RR | Tomasz Szacilowski | Don Dyer | Tadeusz Alberski | James Madrid |
Under 1600 RR | Sid Naresh | Kian Beyranvand | Lawer Dixon Jr. | Paul Shelor |
Under 1400 RR | William Goodfellow | Manikandan Nagarathnam | Zexin Jiang | Ron Chin |
Under 1200 RR | Manikandan Nagarathnam | Thomas P. McCormack | Mauricio Reyes Higuera | David Marrone |
Under 1000 RR | Raj Kagathi | Zohayr Khoja | Bud Wilson |
Pictures
As usual here are the pictures of the winners of each event.











If you like to know what participants think of the tournament operation please visit the Comments page.
I hope you enjoyed playing at this venue and will come back for another tournament.
Sincerely
Swavek Lorenc
Tournament Director