The first state championship organized by the Fox Valley Table Tennis Club was a resounding success. We received entries from 155 players and over 20 more expressed interest but ended up on the waiting list. In fact, only 2 spots out of available 324 spots were unfilled. We offered 3 ranked events prescribed by USATT: Men’s Singles, Women’s Singles, and Boys Under 19. On Saturday 10 players didn’t play for some reason and on Sunday 12 players didn’t play due to injury or inability to get to the venue.
This was the 3rd tournament that used TTAurora software. I made some small improvements to score entry screen and fixed several bugs and I heard good opinions about the software. Most importantly it performed as expected and allowed control desk personnel to focus on table management instead of entering scores.
Setup and Takedown
I would like to express my gratitude to the Fox Valley Park District management team for allowing us to set up the tables and barriers on Friday evening. This way when the players arrived on Saturday morning everything was ready to go.
I want to thank all the players who attended our Friday evening Open Gym Table Tennis session and set up the tables and barriers. Your help was vital to the success of this tournament. We started setup about 6:00 pm and were done in about one hour because the north side of the gym was occupied by children’s soccer activity until about 6:30. I was able to adjust all the nets and clean the tables before 9 pm closing time.
On Saturday the U1650 event finished late i.e. about 9:20 pm which was past the 9:00 pm ending time specified in the rental agreement so I will probably not add such late events in future tournaments. Playing till 7:30 or 8:00 pm is sufficient and lets both the players and the tournament team go home earlier.
On Sunday we started the takedown at around 6:00 pm and finished at 7:15. The last match finished at 7:00 pm. We even put all the tables, and the podium back in storage. I want to express thanks to the following individuals who helped with the time-consuming hanging of the purple barriers on the rack and putting away the tables: Qazi Rehan, Reese Ramos, Sameer Komoravolu, Jim Biggs, and Arjun Rajput.
Tournament Crew
Tournament was staffed by Swavek Lorenc (Tournament Director & and organizer) and umpires Alexander Cai and Lijian Cai. Alexander is working on his International Umpire certification and that is why he umpired several matches in the single elimination round. Lijian was kind enough to umpire some matches as well. They also helped run the tournament using the software, answer questions, and help our players deal with ‘technology’ issues posed by the website. Thank you, Alex and Lijian.
Ratings files were sent to USATT for processing on Sunday evening. After some corrections in the tournament report and match results file the tournament was processed successfully on Tuesday afternoon. New ratings were uploaded to ttaurora.com on Wednesday evening since Thursday was a Thanksgiving holiday. I also had to program a new report that shows rankings in all 3 state qualification events – Men’s Singles, Women’s Singles, and Boys U19. After a couple of corrections, the report was generated successfully and sent to USATT for processing on Saturday 11/30 right before these rankings are needed for publishing on December 1st.
Coaching
USATT chose our tournament for audit to ensure that we comply with Safe Sports requirements imposed by the USA Olympic Committee. USATT requested that only Safe Sports-certified coaches coach minor athletes but coaches coaching other adults or their own children don’t have to be Safe Sports-certified. So we collected the names of all individuals who wanted to coach and gave them USATT-issued credentials to carry around when coaching. Here are their pictures.
Winners
You can view all results of matches on the tournament results page accessible via the tournament page on ttaurora.com. The ‘Results’ button is in the same spot where you find the Enter and View Entry buttons on that page. You can see both the round-robin and single-elimination match results for each event.
Pictures
fvttc.org 