2019 Aurora Fall Open Report

The tournament took place on September 28th, 2019 at the Eola Community Center in Aurora, IL.  The tournament was filled to capacity again with 5 players not showing up.  There were close to 150 players who expressed interest in our tournament but we could only accommodate 96. Many of them ended up on the waiting list, the rest withdrew when they noticed that the tournament was full.  The tournament filled up 6 weeks before the tournament date which is a new record.  The previous record was 3 weeks for 2019 Aurora Summer Open.

For this tournament the park district purchased 6 new net sets with blue nets. Our tables were bought in October of 2010 and the nets were really worn out despite many attempts to patch them.  The threads on the clamp simply wore out and posts were bending inwards.  We will upgrade the remaining 6 when the next park district budget is approved.

We want to thank the new Eola Community Center management team for supporting table tennis activities at Eola Community Center and especially Recreation Supervisor Carter Patton who oversees table tennis among other activities at the center.  He was instrumental in getting us a 3rd day of open play on Sundays from 8:30 to 11:00 am and he reserved 3 dates in 2020 for our tournaments.

Sponsors

We would like to thank our sponsor – Paddle Palace – for providing us with 4 dozen 3 star white Nittaku balls.  You may be of different opinion, but I consider them the best plastic balls in the world.  They are very durable and have very uniform bounce.  We distributed most of the Paddle Palace catalogs to you so please support them through your purchases.

Tournament Team

Thanks to the experienced tournament team we accomplished all preparation tasks in 2 hours on Friday.    We started taking tables and barriers out of storage at about 6:30 pm and since there were no activities in the other half of the gym we completed setup around 8:30 pm.   The setup team consisted of Jim Brandt, John Brandt, Michael Curry and Swavek Lorenc.

Andrew Moy entered the scores and Swavek Lorenc made announcements of winners and and took their pictures while Jim Brandt handled trophy awards.  We were done with the last awards ceremony at 7:30.  Unfortunately one group of winners left before we realized that so we have 3 trophies to deliver.

Take down of the tournament equipment started around 6:30 pm and was completed fast John Brandt, Jim Brandt, Glenn Cackovic with a little help from Swavek Lorenc.  We were totally done at 7:48.

Results

Results were published for review on OmniPong website on Monday because I got sick during tournament – it was too cold in the venue.  After some match score corrections on Monday they were sent from OmniPong to USATT.  However, all results published via OmniPong go through the verification process by OmniPong developer Craig Krum.  So they were sent to USATT for processing only on Tuesday afternoon and processed within minutes of my call to USATT.  Here is the table presenting the results with links to full results.

Group	First Place	Second Place	Third Place	Fourth Place
1 (A)	Viktor Bedriichuk	Gediminas Mickus	Zack Pan	Arcot Naresh
2 (B)	Mohamad Alzein	Keigo Yamagami	Justin Wu	Weimin He
3 (C)	Aliraza Ashiqali	Grzegorz Kasperski	Vadim Korneev	Justin Heslinga
4 (D)	John Brandt	Freddie (zheyua Fan	Kaibai Liu	Pranav Shahal
5 (E)	Pranam Acharya	Shaun Tan	Joseph Freedman	Lefan Zhang
6 (F)	Rick Schenker	Frank Kang	Claudia Leow	Justin To
7 (G)	Joon Lee	Arun Govindhan	Ed Molenda	Eva Harrison
8 (H)	Pavana Dave	Mohammed S. Zaman	Ron Chin	Nilan Patel
9 (I)	Shukan Dave	Austin Hohenadel	Nitin Fuldeore	Dheepak Sridhar
10 (J)	Nathan To	Ashish Varshney	Borton Szeto	Tanmay Varshney
11 (K)	Max Ward	Jason Fong	Jeevith Veera	Sophie Sharon
12 (L)	Matthew Vanderjack	Alex Musselman	Quinton Smith	Ekansh Mohapatra

Pictures

This time around I remembered to take as many pictures of players as I could with my camera phone.  I created Google Photos album containing them here.

Here are the winners on the podium