It was Aug 09, 2009, a nice summer Sunday morning. I reached Nashua Table Tennis club, our tournament venue, around 09:40 am hoping to get a good participation for this first time ever IANH event.

Previous few months had been busy preparing for the tournament, deciding on the venue, sending out flyers and responding to emails. This being the first time for us, there were many more things that needed to be worked out. Registrations had started at a very slow pace eventually picking up as the event deadline approached. Success of the tournament depended on community participation.

As I entered the club, I was pleasantly surprised to see few participants already in there practicing.

Within next hour or so, the club was brimming with people. Some travelled from over 70 miles to participate. As this was open to all of New England region, there was a large participation from Massachusetts as well. By 10:30 am, we had 29 participants signed in. Although there was less participation in Junior category, the  Open category had much more than we initially anticipated. Some hadn’t practiced in many years and still came to try out. Many families also joined in to encourage participants.
 
We decided to go for random group selection for the first round robin play-off groups. We made five groups with the top two advancing to the next round. Within the next 2-3 hours, the following were determined to have advanced to the next round:

•    Vignesh Dharmarajan
•    Narasimha Reddy Karedla
•    Akshay Kothare
•    Srini Krishnamoorthy
•    Chirag Patel
•    Rajeev Sharma
•    Chandra Subramanian
•    Pratibha Varshney
•    Kalyan Verma
•    Anmol Wadhwa

These ten were divided randomly into two round-robin leagues and top two were selected from each group  to advance to the semifinals. After some tough matches, the following players moved to semifinal (as seen in the picture from left to right):

•    Anmol Wadhwa
•    Vignesh Dharmarajan
•    Rajeev Sharma
•    Pratibha Varshney
 
Final match in the Open category was played between Rajeev Sharma of Marlborough, MA and Vignesh Dharmarajan of Nashua, NH with Rajeev being the winner. Final match in the Junior category was played between Neil Cholli of Chelmsford, MA and Arjun Shah of Concord, NH with Neil being the winner.

Open Category
Winner: Rajeev Sharma
Runner-up: Vignesh Dharmarajan

Junior Category (5-15 yr group)
Winner: Neil Cholli
Runner-up: Arjun Shah

Trophies to winners and runners-up will be awarded during IANH upcoming Diwali festival in Oct 2009.

Participants orderly conduct and excellent cooperation was instrumental in making this event a big success. Dr Tej Dhakar, secretary of the Association, provided continuous support and guidance without which this wouldn’t have been such a smooth sailing. Bhanu, Vandana and Nitya also deserve thanks for helping out with the event.  Rajeev of tabletennisrocks.com also provided his assurance with organizing the event. Bob McPartlan, the owner of the Nashua Table Tennis Club extended his full cooperation in organizing the event.

Based on the feedback that I received during and after the event, many appreciated this initiative and some are already looking forward to the next year’s event.

We plan to add chess and possibly more sporting activities in the coming years and hope to get more participation especially from our junior members.  I believe this will encourage, foster and promote spirit of good sportsmanship among them and help them in their overall development.

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