Fremont Table Tennis Academy sent 9 of its best students to the US Open in Ontario, CA this past week playing against the best players in North America. Students showed good team spirit, supported each other, and went through the ups and downs that go along with every major tournament. There were many exciting, tense, and close matches of which we came home with 3 medals. Rohan Bubna and Tanishq Dhavali won silver in the Under 2000 and Under 1700 rating events, respectively, and were very close to gold. 11-year old Rayan Chatterjee, the first student from the Fremont TTA Tri-Valley Branch to play in a major tournament, is now also the first to medal! He won bronze in the Under 3100 doubles thanks to the good teamwork with his doubles partner Tarun. Most the games they play upto the semifinal were decided by the minimum 2-point margin!
Shaarav Sunil made the quarterfinals of the Under 1300 and Ruhi Majumdar made the quarters of the Under 1000 so were one match away from a medal. They both lost to the eventual champions in the quarters.
One thing about this tournament is players with inaccurate ratings, mainly Canadian players, due to infrequent play in US tournaments. They were often the toughest matches. Ruhi lost to a 1700+ rated player in the Under 1000 as he didn’t have an accurate rating of below 1000 at the cutoff. There was another foreign player in Under 1000 that beat a player over 2100 and a player over 2200 in age events as his rating was below 1000 from 2018 but hadn’t played a tournament since! Canadian players in the higher events such as Under 1700, 1800, 1900 were often our students toughest matches and knocked out our students at times. The Canadian players seemed much better than their ratings suggested. Karthik Kalle and Tanishq had to come from 0-2 behind to win 3-2 against Canadian players just to advance out of the round robin stage in Under 1800 and then did get knocked out by other Canadian players after. I thought Karthik played really well in the single elimination match in under 1800 but still lost 3-0. Tanishq had to play really good to win the quarterfinals of under 1700 against a Canadian player which was his toughest match en route to silver. I’m not sure if it’s fair to allow foreign players who don’t play in regular US rated tournaments to play rating events or at least advance as their ratings are inaccurate. An adult Canadian player won 5 rating event golds because she hadn’t played a U.S. tournament for a while.
Overall, it was a great experience for students to go through the ups and downs of such an important tournament with every player being new involving new strategies. It was a great learning experience for the kids and to see what students need to work on.
