2014 Aurora Summer Open Report

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.

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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