2024 Aurora Summer Open Tournament Report

The second post pandemic tournament organized by the Fox Valley Table Tennis Club on July 6 & 7th can be considered a success. It received entries from 160 players, 17 of whom withdrew before the tournament started and which left 143 to attend. For a variety of reasons only 129 players showed up. There were also 12 players on the waiting list who expressed interest in 16 event slots.

Players came mostly from Illinois (133) followed by Wisconsin (11), Indiana (4), Iowa (4), Missouri (3), California (2), Michigan (2) and Minnesota (1). The three most represented Chicago area clubs were – Experior (35), Fox Valley TTC (32) and Chi-slam TTC (9). You can view and sort this data any way you like on the enhanced tournament players list.

I would like to thank our sponsors Paddle Palace for providing us with 6 dozen 3-star Premium Nittaku 40+ balls. They are a favorite ball of many of our club members and they performed superbly at this tournament with only 3 of them broken. Please support Paddle Palace through your purchases.

I would also like to thank the Eola Community Center management for allowing us to setup the gym on Friday evening, so we could offer players the best possible conditions and avoid the rush on Saturday morning. Friday setup was accomplished by the team of Swavek Lorenc, Agya Adueni, Vikas Kerni and Avinash Banala between 6:00 and 8:30 pm. We were even able to wash the tables. Thank you guys.

The whole gym looked like this:

Take down was also accomplished in record time starting at about 5 pm and ending at 7:30pm. This was accomplished by Miroslaw Lepa, Agya Adueni, Andrew Moy and Swavek Lorenc. Thank you guys.

The crew manning the control desk consisted of Miroslaw Lepa (Tournament Director), Swavek Lorenc (Tournament Referee) and Andrew Moy (Umpire).

Tournament Operations

This was the second tournament that used ttaurora.com website for tournament registration and operations. This time I was worried that it may not properly advance players from the round robin to the single elimination round. But in this regard it performed flawlessly. However, we had to deal with spotty connections to the internet which prevented some players from logging into the website – especially those with older phone models who don’t have 4G or 5G capable phones. The connectivity issue was resolved by connecting via public Wi-Fi network at the Eola Community Center. There were also some players who simply forgot their password and after multiple attempts their accounts were locked out. I had to perform an ’emergency operation’ to unlock them.

I got more ideas on how to improve the usefulness of the website and was shown several cosmetic bugs which I will fix before the next tournament. Overall, the website makes the control desk staff job very easy. Only 5 matches out of 410 that were played, had to be entered or corrected by the staff. We avoided the avalanche of paperwork when playing on 12 tables completes and everyone wanting to know who advances out of their group. The software does this for us immediately after the last match is entered and shows players the group rankings. Yey!

This was also the first time a doubles event was offered at this venue. By all accounts players who entered it had a blast. 14 teams signed up out of 16 possible spots. Since these were the last matches of the day during this event’s single elimination round we enlarged the courts to give players more room to run around. Below is a picture of a final (foreground) and 3rd/4th place matches (in the background). I will offer this event in future tournaments.