Gold #1

      The first Squash Ontario Gold junior tournament was this weekend at Mayfair Parkway in Toronto and it saw a very large and impressive contingent from Windsor.  19 juniors from Windsor Squash and Fitness participated and Graeme also came up to provide coaching to each and every one of them.   Friday night got off to a bit of a rough start with many of our juniors drawing seeded players in the first round.  Despite this, every one of our juniors played these matches extremely tough and were never outclassed on the court.  At the end of Friday, only David Mill & Berto Mill stayed in the main round.  Amin Khan, Ananya & Aparna Maheshwari and Vishaal Mehta all played in a round robin format.
     Saturday saw a lot of activity as it seemed like our kids were playing every time you turned around.  Berto got knocked out of the main round by Ravi Seth while David advanced to the finals on Sunday.  Some of the juniors advanced in the consolation while other got relegated to the bronze draw.  Ananya and Amin were steadily beating all their opponents in the round robin.  By the end of the day Saturday many of our players took up table tennis and basketball for the remainder of the weekend.
      With only a handful of Windsor players still playing on Sunday, it gave everyone an opportunity to cheer on their teammates.  Mackenzie Elliot won her first gold match, advancing her to the finals of the U19 Bronze draw.  Unfortunately, Mackenzie came up against a very strong and older opponent.  Hannah Guthrie bounced back from a rough start by handily winning the U15 Bronze division.  Ananya breezed through her draw not even dropping a single game all tourney to win the U11 draw.  Great job Ananya.  

     However, the most exciting match of the day was a nail-biter between Amin Khan and Griffin Manley for the U13 championship.  Amin went down 2 games despite playing great squash.  Amin kept the pace up and worked his opponent around the court and easily took the next 2 games.  Game 5 saw long rallies and tense shotmaking.  In the end Amin pulled it out 11-8, winning the U13 division.  Well done Amin!
       The final match of the weekend saw David Mill and one of his training partners at the National Squash Academy, an Egyptian named Mohanad Hekel, play for gold.  Hekel has amazing array of deceptive shots (see Amr Shabana) as well as great retrieval skills.  David was out for redemption after losing to Mohanad at last year's Gold #3 at NSA.  This time around David proved too much for Mohanad to handle.  Congratulations to David for winning the first Gold tourney of the year!!!
      All in all it was a great weekend of squash.  Final results can be found here.  Many of us overheard how good the "Windsor crew" looked in their clothing and about what a big impact we are making in the draws.  When you think back one year ago, many of these players were playing the Gary Waite tour, if they were playing tournaments at all.  The other comment that we heard was how much people were looking forward to coming back to Windsor for Gold #2, October 23, 24, 25.  Speaking of which, we are looking for sponsorship and volunteers for this tournament which is going to be far bigger than last year.  If you are interested please contact Graeme or Victoria.