Top seeded Girls cruise into quarterfinals
Bhubaneswar: Three girls including top seed Yubrani Banerjee of West Bengal cruised into the quarterfinals of the AITA-OTA Championship Series Girl’s Under-14 Tennis Tournament on the opening day of the five-day contest at the SOA University Sports Complex here on Monday. Yubrani, who received a bye into the second round, crushed Anjum Shaikh Mushrath (AP) 9-1 while Odisha’s Alisha Samal and Rutuparna Choudhury (seeded second and third respectively) had little difficulty in reaching the quarterfinals.<br. While Samal demolished Shreya Chakraborty (WB) 9-0, Choudhury crushed Khushi Rajpuria, also of WB, 9-0. In the Boy’s singles, the first round matches were completed with the top five seeds led by Odisha’s Swostik Pradhan getting byes into the second round. The other top four seeds are Arvind Sundar of Karnataka, Mahesh Mohapatra (Odisha), Pratyush Chhotray (Odisha) and N. Kirandeva (TN). All the matches are being played on the basis of best of 17 games with the player winning nine games being declared the victor. The tournament, being organized by the SOA University under the aegis of the Odisha Tennis Association (OTA), was inaugurated yesterday by legendary tennis coach and
former Davis Cupper Akhtar Ali.
The matches are being played on the newly-laid synthetic courts of the University in its Kalinga Nagar campus.
Results: Boy’s singles: (1st Round) Raghava C. Gannavarapu (AP, Seed No. 6) bt Samarjit Sethy (Odisha) 9-0, Mohd. Iftikhar Sheikh (As, 7) bt Amrutjay Mohanty (Od) 9-0, Pratyush Mohanty (Od, 8) bt Aryan Bal (Od) 9-2, Asish Sinha (Jh, 9) w/o Suvankit Sahoo (Od), M.V. Surya Sushant (AP, 10) bt Justin Panmei (Od) 9-6, Kabir Hans (Od) bt Ashish Parida (Od) 9-1, Rahul Behera (Od) bt Abhishek Mohanty (Od) 9-1, Sahil Kumar (Od) bt M. Sai Divya Charan (AP) 9-3, Aditya Satpathy (Od) bt Kushang Agarwal (AP) 9-0, Varun Ku Mudipalli (AP) bt Swastik Pattanayak (Od) 9-5, Sumit Mallick (WB) bt l. Vasanth Krishna (AP) 9-3. Girl’s singles: (1st Round) Anjum Shaikh Mushrath (AP) bt Shatavisa Ghosh (WB) 9-5, Sonal Sristi (Bihar) bt Sai M. lalitha (AP) 9-0, Shreya Mondal (WB) bt T.Bhattacharya (Od) 9-1, S.Harshada (Od) bt Khushi Agarwal (AP) 9-5 (2nd Round) Yubrani Banerjee (WB, Seed No. 1) bt Anjum Shaikh Mushrath (AP) 9-1, Alisha Samal (Od, 2) bt Shreya Chakraborty (WB) 9-0, Rutuparna Choudhury (Od, 3) bt Guttikonda Delisha (AP, 7) 9-0 .