2016 Aurora Spring Open held on April, 9th 2016 was another successful tournament at the Eola Community Center in Aurora, IL. 96 players signed up and 95 attended. The tournament attracted players from IL (69), WI (11), IN (5), MI (3), IA (2) and one each from AR, CT, OH, OK, OR and NE. A total of $1,300 in prize money was awarded to 3 top players in each of the top 5 groups. The lower groups were awarded trophies to the top 3 finishers.
Sponsor
I want to thank our sponsor Paddle Palace for providing this tournament with best quality balls – 3 star white Nittaku plastic balls – same as will be used at the next World Championship. They proved to be very resilient and I think we only lost a couple of them due to breakage.
To reciprocate for their continued sponsorship of our tournaments (and to enable our participants to get some stylish clothing), I asked for discounted pricing for Donic Cooper shirt and matching Donic Chilly shorts. I received 8 orders before the tournament and additional 10 at the tournament. I would like to thank all who placed these orders and thus showed support for our sponsor.
Preparation, operation and take down
Preparation went very quickly thanks to permission from the the Fox Valley Park District to setup tables and barriers on Friday evening. It took about 3 hours with the help of the following individuals:
- John Brandt
- Michael Curry
- Narayan Nagarathnam
- Mannikandan Nagarathnam
Cleanup was just as quick. The last match ended at 8:10 pm and we left the gym at 9:00 pm. This was accomplished with the help of the following individuals:
- Narayan Nagarathnam
- Clint Henderson
- Joanna Korylczuk
- Jacek Wisniewski
- Andrew Moy
The tournament was staffed with experienced officials:
- Referee – Jacek Wisniewski (RR, NU)
- Umpire – Andrew Moy (CU)
- Control Desk Manager – Zachary Moy
- Check in processing – Jim Brandt
- Swavek Lorenc – Tournament Director
We had no major problems or conflicts during the tournament. Everyone was playing nice. Only one match was umpired.
Results
Results were published to OmniPong on Sunday to enable players to review and dispute the results. Only one mistake was found and corrected. The results were submitted to USATT for processing on Monday and ratings were updated the same day. This was the fastest update of tournament results in my 4 years of running sanctioned tournaments. Kudos to Jon Taylor, the new USATT Membership and Club Development Director, for speedy processing. You can see the official ratings from the tournament here. Just enter ‘2016 Aurora Spring Open’ in the search box or click on tournament name if it appears in the list.
Here are results from each group if you are interested in which place you eventually took in your group.
| First Place | Second Place | Third Place | Fourth Place | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Group 1 | Kaixin Jiang | Viktor Bedriichuk | Sid Naresh | Scott Barone |
| Group 2 | Bogdan Plugowski | Krzysztof Szostak | Ihor Falchuk | Jasper Maniates-Selvin |
| Group 3 | Sonny M. Henderson | Manikandan Nagarathnam | Sixing Zheng | Tadao (Tom) Inui |
| Group 4 | Rachel Zhou | Xinye Ji | Nandan Naresh | James Madrid |
| Group 5 | Zexin Jiang | Nestor Jose Prato Martinez | Mathew R. Morris | Mehdi Barati |
| Group 6 | Nicholas Shilling | Matthew Kim | Robert L. Tysl | Carlos Lara |
| Group 7 | Huabo Lang | William Goodfellow | Chris Peri | Benjamin Ho |
| Group 8 | Kaibai Liu | Alexander Cai | Rick Schenker | Kyle Hess |
| Group 9 | Lijian Cai | Maithreyi Parthasarathy | Daniel Soja | Jun Yuan (David Jin |
| Group 10 | Sriram Swami | Karthikeyan Thukkaram | Arun Govindhan | Brian Coons |
| Group 11 | Tanay Vutukuru | Aarish Lakhani | Michael Curry | Carl Klein |
| Group 12 | Alex Li | Srihas Rao | Justin Wu | Wesley Wu |
Pictures
Here are the pictures of winners on the podium
I want to thank all who were involved in making this tournament a success and invite everyone to our next tournament which will probably take place around July 24th.
Swavek Lorenc
Tournament Director
fvttc.org 