THE Isle of Man Squash Rackets Association's Spring Junior Grading tournament took place recently at the NSC, Douglas, writes Dave Griffiths.
There was an excellent turn out for group 6 so the players were split into two groups of six followed by play-offs.
In 6b Jack Rowlands was in fine form winning all five of his matches to win the group by seven clear points.
Meanwhile there was a real battle for second between Amaline Batty, Isabel Joubert and Finn Ledwidge.
Each won three matches but Isabel only lost by one point to Amaline which narrowly put Isabel through to the semi-final.
In group 6a twins George and Laura Dickinson were battling it out with Matthew Peach.
George eventually came first with Matthew second and Laura third.
George and Matthew then beat Isabel and Jack in the semi-finals.
The final was a classic with Matthew reversing a 10-11 loss in the round robin by winning 11-10.
Jack beat Isabel for third.
Amaline won the play-off with Laura for fifth.
Group 5 was decided by the match between Ahmad Anwar and Courtney Gilardoni, which Ahmad won 15-10.
Courtney won her other four matches to finish second.
Leena Anwar and Walid Anwar finished on the same number of points but Leena took third as she won the game between the two of them.
Group 4 was also a close run thing with Scott Jones and Harry Douthwaite both winning four matches and losing one.
However, Harry, in losing 13-15 to Oliver Dickinson, accumulated enough points to finish first. Scott came second and Oliver, who won three matches, came third.
Group 3 was a tense battle between Edward Batty, Ben Peach, Peter Baker and Sam Wilson. All five of Peter's matches were incredibly close and although he only won two Peter accumulated enough points to finish third.
Sam won three matches but had an off-day against Edward and finished fourth.
Ben beat Peter and Edward but lost to Sam to narrowly finish behind Edward, who beat everyone apart from Ben 14-15 and therefore only dropped one point.
Fraser Dorling made a welcome return to group 2 and took it by storm winning all his matches.
However he was pushed all the way by Peter Naylor who only lost one match 15-13 to Fraser.
Oscar Hill beat Sidney Batty 15-11 but Sidney's other results were good enough to clinch third by one point from Oscar Hill with Dewald Joubert only two points further back.
Owing to a variety of reasons, there was a small entry for group 1 so grading "graduates" Chris Moore and Ben Atkinson guested.
There was some excellent squash in this group with Patrick Fizpatrick beating both the graduates and Liam beating Ben.
The group was decided by another close match with Patrick beating Liam 15-13. There was also a creditable performance from Aareez Khan in his first Group 1 tournament.
Patrick now just needs one more trophy to graduate.
The trophies were presented by Isle of Man Squash Rackets Association president Les Callow.
