2017 Aurora Cup Tournament Report

2017 Aurora Cup took place over 3 days – January 13 – 15, 2017 at the Vaughan Athletic Center in Aurora. Out of 300 players registered only 277 showed up for the tournament mainly due to poor weather conditions in the Midwest but also some injuries and late withdrawals for variety of reasons. After subtracting players who only entered doubles we sent results for 264 players.

opendoublesfinals

This was the first year that the tournament went through professional redesign of its blank entry form, podium banner, trophies, show table decorations and email marketing campaign. Flip Design Studio – a local design firm – was responsible for creating the logo and a brand. I am very pleased with results and I hope we are now on par with other better financed sports in terms of marketing and venue decorations.

Venue Setup and Take Down

This year was the smoothest yet as far as this chore. I never look forward to this part of the tournament. I think I am getting too old for this hard physical work but fortunately our club is blessed with several dedicated individuals who help every year and they didn’t let me down this year either. These individuals are: John and Jim Brandt, Zita and Robert Bayr, Michael Curry, Adam Koziel, Tom McCormak, Jacek Wisniewski, Narayan Nagarathnam, Irtiza Abbazi and Josh Szot. We even got some help from players who arrived earlier on Friday for the tournament – Chris Taylor, Erik Olsen and Adam Whaley. Here is the photo of them all. Thank you.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The schedule was as follows:

Saturday

Mark the 38 courts with tape – 3 people 3 hours

Sunday

Hang the plastic which blocks the sunlight from streaming through windows just below the ceiling – 3 people 5 hours.

Thursday

Unload the truck with equipment – 2 people 1 hour. Start assembly of 220 barriers – 4 people 3 hours. To my horror we only received half the barriers due to a miscommunication at the JOOLA warehouse in Maryland. Since we advertised ‘really fully barriered courts’ in my marketing emails I was really terrified. Fortunately JOOLA stepped up to the plate and shipped the other 240 barriers which arrived on Friday at 2:30.

Friday

Preposition all tables and barriers around the Field House in order to be able to move onto the floor very quickly and setup everything in 3 hours. We managed to finish it around 6 pm except for show court decorations which took another hour or so. Thank you Tom M. The play ended before 10 pm but I stayed a few minutes later to print updated draw sheets and score sheets for morning events.

Saturday

We started at 9 on time and ended before 10 pm.

Sunday

Move all equipment out of the Field House into the service garage. 5 people 4 hours. We managed to do it all before 10 pm, which was critical to avoid overcharges for venue rental.

Monday

Disassemble all 440 barriers and load all equipment unto a truck. 5 people 6 hours. Remove the plastic sunscreen – 2 people 2 hours.

Tuesday

Transport 100 chairs and podium background back to where they belong.

What went well

Besides venue preparation going smoothly (save the missing barriers) the strategy to start 2 events back to back paid off. We had 1 hour to play single elimination round matches and plenty of empty tables available for warmup.

Prize money increase to $10,000 did attract more high level players. At one point we had 6 2600+ players and 5 2500+ players. The extra money was raised by increasing the price of entries for most of events by $2, instituting $3 online payment fees and increasing tournament registration fee from $5 to $8 per player. It’s always a delicate balancing act when raising price of entry. On one hand you want to raise more money but on the other not so much that players won’t sign up.

Doubles events moved to Saturday and Sunday also proved to be successful. After 2016 fiasco of holding these events on Friday we got 18 teams in Open Doubles and 14 in U3800 Doubles.

Starting Friday events at 6:30 instead of 6:00 pm allowed these events to fill up. We got all but 2 show court tables filled up. This worked out in the end since it allowed us to decorate these show court tables with nice panels like in a ‘real’ tournament.

What didn’t go well

The payments. This is the biggest point of pain for me which tests my resolve to organize tournaments every year. This year at one point I had 200 players on the list and 80 of them didn’t pay for their entry. It was so bad that no amount of analysis and comparison to previous year signup velocity was able to comfort me. I was waking up with a chest pain, because I had about $9000 in uncollected entry fees and the tournament was not even close to breaking even. The only thing holding me back from cancelling the tournament was the prospect of all players who already bought air plane tickets and made other travel arrangements descending on me for refunds and the damage to my reputation as a tournament organizer. I had a nice cancellation letter typed up and ready to go on January 2nd. I expressed my feeling to several participants that this was the last Aurora Cup tournament that I organize and finance.

The whole U3800 Doubles controversy, caused by my (and only mine) decision to allow 2 instead of 1 team to advance from the round robin phase was the biggest failure. Typically if an event has few entries – such as Under 18 Youth which only received 7 entries – I would advance 2 players to give players more value for the money. I tried to do the same with U3800 doubles event, but one team became very upset about this change because they were already guaranteed $100 prize money before this change. They left but the other 5 teams did not and continued to compete. One member of this team went on Facebook and let others know what he thinks about me and my referee. I have yet to read what he wrote, but my real world friends tell me it was nothing pleasant. After the tournament I looked at the single elimination draw for this event and realized that I could have appeased this team by giving them a Bye, since two other teams got a Bye. They would still have to play to get 3rd place but one match fewer than in original draw with 1 team advancing. In retrospect, a better course of action would have been to ask all 3 teams if they would agree to this change before making it. Lesson learned.

Comments

If you are interested in what others thought could be improved in any aspect of the tournament read this page.

Tournament Staff

I have the privilege of working with experienced control desk staff and officials who share my vision for providing players with the most pleasant tournament experience. I would like to express special thanks to Linda Leaf our tournament referee. After Lindenwood University team of 22 players cancelled their trip due to dangerous weather conditions, Linda had only a couple of hours on Friday to remove all these players from the tournament list and redo draws in all 18 events which these players entered. She did it and we still started on time at 6:30 pm.

Our umpires: Jorge Vanegas, Leo Cai, Andrew Moy and Tony Miller provided professional polish to our most important matches. Thank you for a job well done.

And last but not least our control desk staff who entered all the scores and sent out matches on time – Zach Moy and Cecilia Navata. You are the best in the business.

Results

Event – Click for full results	First Place	Second Place	Third Place	Fourth Place
U-800	Saketh Boyapally	Sangita Naresh	Laith Manzoor	Kaifu Wang
U-1750	Anqing Xiongzou	Vidhan Chandra	Adolpho Pinto	Teddy Abesamis
U-1500	Eric Feng	Lawer Dixon Jr.	Debabrata Ghosh	Jack Willson
Open Singles	Zirui Zhao	Tong Zhang	Cheng Li	Yi Chi Zhang
U-1200	Austin Ford	Chris Taylor	Brian Ngeunjuntr	Avinash Banala
U-14 Youth	Sid Naresh	Nandan Naresh	Soham Kotnis	Manikandan Nagarathnam
50 and Over	Bin Hai Chu	Aaron Avery	Ladislav Sranko	Kairong Liu
U-1900	Yat To Yeung	Tat Wai Chu	Varun Senthilkumar	Alex Pham
U-1600	Zhigang Yan	Kevin Li	Eric Feng	Arsen Gaysin
U-2000	Ibrahim Mugren	Samuel Liu	Karol Baran	Tarun Chawla
U-2300	Sid Naresh	Swarna Jayakumar	Michael Wolski	Fred Cantarelli
Open Doubles	Zirui Zhao / Bochao Li	Kai Zhang / Bo Wen Chen	Yi Chi Zhang / Cheng Li	Tong Zhang / Qing Wei Sun
U-1800	Chad Dammar	Vadim Korneev	Aryan Mahajan	Rimvydas Rakauskas
U-2600	Yi Chi Zhang	Bo Wen Chen	Bochao Li	Tong Zhang
U-1700	Brett Stewart	Vidhan Chandra	Roman Zilberman	Anqing Xiongzou
U-18 Youth	Tianming Xie	Matthew Needle	Sid Naresh	David Cui
U-2100	Jason Miller	Sachin Kulkarni	Benjamin Hartwiger	Ejaz Shah
U-1400	Sriram Swami	Shreedhar Ranabhat	Patryk Zyworonek	Jincheng Wu
40 and Over	Richard Ciz	Van Ly	Bin Hai Chu	Mohd Rahman
U-2400	Tianming Xie	Michael Wolski	Felipe Morita	Wesley Fan
Women Singles	Shuang Wang	Swarna Jayakumar	Tia Hsieh	Pamela Song
U-3800 Doubles	Felipe Morita / Veer Panchal	Ihor Falchuk / Rimvydas Rakauskas	Wenjie Nie / Alexander Cai	Zachary Moy / Stanley Harn
U-2200	Edina Haracic	Van Ly	Oluwole Ayangade	Arjun Shankaren
U-1000	Alex Li	Maxime Haslett-Brousse	Jason Xu	Kenai A Rios

Pictures

Below are the pictures of winners on the podium. I took several more pictures and uploaded them to this Google Photos album. There are also several match videos uploaded to YouTube – just google ‘2017 Aurora Cup’ and you’ll find them.