Sunday 19 and 26 June TTV Amstelveen held the annual club championships.
Sunday 19 June 16 participants started with the senior championship that was organised by TTVA chairman Arjan Verburg. In the preliminaries there were a couple of thunderous surprises. Wanda Prorok, unfortunately the only female participant, managed to win over a number of competition players considered to be stronger than her and former member Jefferson Yeh surprisingly qualified for the semi-finals.
After more than 4 hours of play, Harish Kumar proved easily strong enough to take the bronze. The thunderous final between Brian van de Heuvel and Ryan Saheblal was decided 13-11 in favour of Ryan in a very exciting 5th game, so Ryan can call himself “Club Champion of TTV Amstelveen” for one year.
On 26 June it was the youth’s turn. No less than 20 of the 43 youth members had registered for the final event of the table tennis season. As usual, this was organised by Guus Korper.
Here too, the participants initially competed in poules in order to later advance to a final round. The preliminaries held few surprises, although the play of Ioanna Nicorescu was particularly good.
In the finals of the losers’ pool, Mike de Boer won the gold against an extremely enthusiastic and (for her age) strong playing Lina Mansri.
The winner’s group consisted exclusively of league players. In the final round the only 8-year old Leon Ma (TTV Amstelveen’s up-and-coming talent) managed to win surprisingly from the tired birthday boy Taha Mansri, only to be defeated by the much older and taller Aris Negrin.
The final was between two unbeaten players: the very skillful Yavuz Dogan and Ilia Borisochkin, who unfortunately will leave the club. Yavuz played very strong and Ilia, overcome by nerves, did not show his best game. This resulted in gold for Yavuz and silver for Ilia.
After 5 hours of table tennis fun and a nice prize-giving ceremony, TTV Amstelveen concluded the youth table tennis season.
This article was also published (in Dutch) by the Amstelveens Nieuwsblad .
