Visakhapatnam: Group leaders in both the men’s and women’s singles events were, more or less, well entrenched themselves on the opening day and headed towards securing their top slots in the 11Even Sports National Ranking (South Zone) Table Tennis Championships at the Rajiv Gandhi Indoor Stadium here today.
With the South Zone championships attracting quite a large number of entries, it was a tough job for the competition department, led by N. Ganeshan, to divide players into 48 groups (men) with G. Sathiyan, Sanil Shetty, Harmeet Desai, Jubin Kumar, Manav Thakkar, Subhajit Saha, Utkarsh Gupta and Devesh Karia getting direct entry into the main draw.
Similalry, Suthirtha Mukherjee, Madhurika Patkar, Manika Batra, Mouma Das, Mousumi Paul, Pooja Sahasrabuddhe, Anika Das and Reeth Rishya have been given qualification byes because of their overall rankings.
All the men and women players will play a couple of rounds today and after two days of qualification matches, a clear picture will emerge about who all make the second stage cut before the main draw events begin. Meanwhile, the Youth Boys (32 groups) and Youth Girls (20 groups) will also play one round of matches today.
Earlier in the morning, Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu declared the meet open. At his inaugural address, the chief minister, stressing on the need to pursue sports announced a couple of bonanzas which included setting up of an exclusive table tennis academy at Kommadi. He also assured that his government will help Vizag host every year one national and one international table tennis tournament every year.
Naidu made this announcement after TTFI president Prabhat C. Chaturvedi’s made a request to him for a full-fledged academy in the state to nurture talent. The chief minister also gave his nod to the TTFI chief’s suggestion of AP’s continuous support in hosting national and international TT events.
The chief minister asked his Labour, Youth and Sports Minister K. Atcham Naidu, who also graced the occasion, to earmark for land for the academy at Kommadi besides making a fervent appeal to the corporate sector to come forward and assist the government establish different academies in Andhra to make it a model state. “We should be able to produce quality players who can go on to replicate what P.V. Sindhu did at Rio,” he said.
Naidu also announced that Andhra will be too happy to host the National Games in 2019 and his government will extend all help that is needed to create state-of-the art infrastructure in the new state.
