New Delhi: All those young paddlers, who performed well in the recent South Asian Junior Table Tennis Championships held last month in Delhi, were deservingly chosen to represent India at the Gautemala Junior and Cadet Open ITTF Global Junior circuit event to be held between August 7 and 10.
A nine-member team, comprising four boys and five girls, will participate in the Gautemala event to get the first-of-its kind exposure. Anirban Ghosh, Birdie Boro, Lalrinpuia and Arjun Ghosh in the boys section and Sagarika Mukherjee, Harsha Vardhini, Akula Sreeja, Moumita Dutta and Aishwarya Pathak in the girls category were picked by the junior selection committee that witnessed the championships here.
“We want to give them an early exposure of competing in international events in order to help them learn the ropes,” said TTFI general-secretary Dharaj Choudhary. “We are also sending two new coaches—Raj Shanmugam Subramaniam and Jyoti Shah—to accompany the team to Gautemala City. The team will leave tomorrow,” added Choudhary.
The TTFI will also be sending an eight-member Youth team which will compete in the 2013 ITTF World Tour Brazil Open event to be held at Santos between August 8 and 11. The team members include G. Sathiyan, Nitin Thiruvengadam, Soumyajit Ghosh and Harmeet Desai in the Youth boys section and Kritiwika Sinharoy, Ankita Das, Suthirtha Mukherjee and Manika Batra in the Youth Girls category. The youth teams will be accompanied by coaches Muralidhara Rao Achanta and Vijayasarathi Seshadri. This squad will leave for Sao Paulo on Monday.
Youth Games team
Meanwhile, the TTFI selection committee has chosen two paddlers in Abhishek Yadav and Suthirtha Mukherjee, the winners of the singles events at the South Asian Table Tennis Championships in Delhi last month, to represent the country at the second Asia Youth Games to be held at Nanjing, China, from August 16 to 24.
Arup Basak has been nominated as the coach while Dr Prem Chand Verma will be the manager of the squad.
The Youth Games team’s proposal has been submitted to the Sports Authority of India for government clearance.
