The fifth Aurora Summer Open held on July 15, 2017 at the Eola Community Center received registrations from 96 players which is not bad for a mid summer tournament. Summer is traditionally a low season for tournaments. Out of those 96, 5 players didn’t show up and 3 retired early due to fatigue or other reasons. The Summer Open was our first USATT sanctioned tournament 5 years ago in the ‘new era’ when Swavek Lorenc took over organizing tournaments at Fox Valley Table Tennis club. Here is a report from that first Summer Open in 2012.
Sponsor
I would like to thank our sponsor – XuShaofa Sports – makers of seamless poly ball for supporting this tournament. They provided us with 4 dozen of the 3 star balls and fewer than 5 broke. Please look into purchasing their 3 star or training balls directly from their website if you like how these balls play.
The Crew
After 5 years of running tournaments I began to run out of steam and asked our club members for help. Micheal Curry, John Brandt and Jim Brandt stepped up and helped relieve the stress and carry the workload associated with organizing and running the tournament. They fulfilled their duties wonderfully and now I can breathe a sigh of relief that my work over the last 5 years to build a reputation for good quality tournaments will not go to waste and tournaments will continue into the future. Club members come and go but as long as we have dedicated members like these gentlemen we can enjoy tournaments hosted at our club.
We also had some very young people help with tournament operations. Manikandan and Uma Nagarathnam helped with data entry and ‘audit’ to find data entry mistakes before they are sent to USATT.
Andrew Moy was our sole umpire and he was called upon to umpire and resolve conflicts in several matches.
Finally, preparation and take down were accomplished very quickly thanks to Narayan Nagarathnam (who has been helping with these tasks in the last few tournaments) and two Eola Community Center gym attendants who helped with setup on Friday evening. Thank you.
Results
The results of the events were as follows:
| Event – Click for full results | First Place | Second Place | Third Place | Fourth Place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open Singles | Sid Naresh | Felipe Morita | Nachiket Joshi | Nandan Naresh |
| Under 2400 | Felipe Morita | Sid Naresh | David Lee | Ihor Falchuk |
| Under 2200 | Nandan Naresh | David Lee | Arcot Naresh | Sonny M. Henderson |
| Under 2000 | Jerry Dydynski | Arcot Naresh | Tadao (tom) Inui | Sylwester Sobota |
| Under 1900 | Arcot Naresh | Keighobad Jafarzadegan | Vadim Korneev | Yusuke Kuboki |
| Under 1800 | Vadim Korneev | Douglas Wruck | Cheryl Lim | Mark J. Hoffman |
| Under 1700 | Cheryl Lim | Alexander Cai | Nishant Sahay | Cole Ely |
| Under 1600 | Cheryl Lim | Patryk Zyworonek | Alexander Cai | Madison Chao |
| Under 1400 | Nishant Sahay | Brian Ngeunjuntr | Tom Dorman | Chang Liu |
| Under 1200 | Heidi Lim | Arun Govindhan | Veerasaravanan Chandrika | Nikhith Rao |
| Under 1000 | Malena Escalante | Maxime Haslett-Brousse | Heidi Lim | Veerasaravanan Chandrika |
| Under 600 | Michael Curry | Volodymyr Gut | Smridhi Kama | Akshar Kota |
Pictures
Here are the pictures of the winners on the podium. I also uploaded some pictures to the Google Pictures and created “2017 Aurora Summer Open” album. I apologize that I don’t have many ‘action’ photos but my camera’s lens is just to slow for fast moving table tennis action.
Comments
I asked for feedback regarding tournament and here is what players said. Thank you for providing this feedback.
Hello Swavec. Thanks a lot for the e-mail. The tournament was fantastic, and was extremely well-run. We recently moved to Woodridge, and I just started playing in tournaments again this year after a long 20+ year break from USATT events so I am extremely happy that there are local tournaments. I also read the report and it sounds like there was a team of volunteers helping out. Please keep me in mind if you are looking for volunteers for future events- I would love to help out!
Thanks a lot and see you at the next tournament!
-Osman-
Swavek – As always, a great tournament, and a remarkably quick production of the results.
Thanks.
Ron Stevens
Thanks a lot!!
I really enjoyed the tournament.
Regards,
Malena
Swavek, excellent job getting the results in to the usatt. Getting the results processed in 3 days is unbelievable. I thought the tournament staff did a great job. I really like the rubber flooring at the tournament.
Mark j. Hoffman
Hi Swavek,
Thank you for a great tournament, I myself and a lot of players (I’m sure) enjoyed the experience. Everything was great – I also would like to make a small suggestion about the photos: they are great (some are blurry) so if you could get a faster lens for your camera – you could capture the beauty of table tennis better.
Thank you again for the great experience,
Nguyen
Hi Swavek,
Thank you so much for organizing the tournament. We really missed not having the Spring Tournament, getting it back in Summer was great. As always, you have been very helpful in the tournament, communicate well and promptly publish results soon after the tournament. Overall great professionalism displayed in the tournament.
Only complaint I have is the number of tables were less in this tournament which resulted in delay for playing few events as each table was assigned for designated events. Still it wasn’t that bad as you were able to make adjustments and fix that on the spot.
I am delighted to be part of this local event and looking for more in future.
Best Regards,
Arun
fvttc.org 