Ontario Junior Team Squash Championships

     The Squash Ontario Team Tournament was held this weekend at the Ontario Racquet Club in Mississauga.  The province is broken up into 8 regions (Toronto gets 2 teams) and each team consists of 8 players.  All the regions are then split into 2 round robins.  The top 4 teams in the round robins move onto a 4-way playoff.  Team Southwest consisted of:

U13- Usman Khan/ Aparna Maheshwari
U15- Riley Bore (Sarnia)/ Hannah Guthrie
U17- Berto Mill/ Anna Houbtchev
U19- David Mill/ Arden McKillop (London)

      The tourney got off to a good start for Team Southwest with Aparna dominating her opponent with her improved play in the first match of the night.  However, in the end, Mississauga beat us 5-3.    
      The next day we took on Team North York.  In an interesting series of events Team North York had a new player on their team, one Amin Khan.  Amin actually lost out in a qualifier to Riley Bore  (Sarnia) to get into the tournament.  However, North York was short players (as was Team Western Ontario who recruited Sara Khan and Team Muskoka who recruited Ananya) so they recruited Amin Khan.  As luck would have it, Riley and Amin met on Saturday morning and the match did not let down the spectators.  Both players made incredible shots, showed incredible retrieving ability and entertained the ever-growing crowd.  However, thankfully for us Riley proved too tough.  Sorry Amin :).  We ended up defeating North York 5-3.
     Our next match was against Ottawa and again, we won 5-3.  This was enough to get us into the playoff round where we drew one of the Toronto teams.  Unfortunately, Toronto was just too strong and took the match 6-2.  However, we went out on a high note as Berto Mill pulled off an upset in his match by leaving blood, sweat and skin all over the court.
     Sunday saw Team Southwest in a battle for 3rd place with Western Ontario.  The battle went back and forth throughout the lineup.  By the time the last match of the tournament rolled around, Western was up 4-3.  That left a lot of pressure on David Mill's shoulders.  David had to win to go to a tie breaker.  David was playing Ravi Seth, yes Micaala's younger brother, and the match went back and forth until they reached the final few points of game 5.  It was standing room only as the crowd cheered and hollered after each point.  However, David made a couple of uncharacteristic mistakes in the last few points that allowed Ravi to take the match.  Team Ontario 4th place.
     This is definitely one of the more enjoyable tournaments for the kids as they hang around and cheer on their teammates throughout the weekend.  It is by far the loudest squash tournament you will attend.  Team Southwest proved that they are a force to be reckoned with.  Who would have thought the other teams would be looking to southwestern ontario for extra players???  Big thanks to Derek Moore of London for coaching the team this year.  Complete draws can be found here.