It was an historic moment when the Gore T&C Club Team (Jonathan Wang, Willie Brocks, Nathan Geraghty) took out the A Grade title at the 49th South Island Clubs Table Tennis Tournament in Invercargill on Saturday. It was the first time the club has ever won the tournament. Gore dominated the A Grade, winning all seven matches. Richmond were the other top qualifiers from the round robin, but were eliminated at the semi-final stage by the IWMC No 2 team. Gore’s top player, Jonathan Wang had a great tournament winning all twenty-one games of singles and was the only player in A Grade to remain unbeaten across the two day tournament.
The A Reserve Grade was played in a round robin format which finished in a three way tie between IWMC, Richmond and Papanui. There was absolutely nothing separating the three teams and even after a countback on games they were still equal. The organisers then went back to a countback of points in every individual game and that saw IWMC (Craig McBurney, Gemma Buzzard, Trevor Colyer) eventually named the winners with Richmond the runners up. IWMC last won this title in 1997.
B Grade was dominated by Hokitika who won all seven of their round robin matches ahead of Hornby who finished with six wins. It was the first time that Hokitika have won the grade.
C Grade was won by Papanui winning all six of their round robin games. There was another three way tie for runner-up between Hornby, IWMC and Hokitika, all even on eight matches each, Hornby eventually taking the runner-up position based on a games countback. Papanui last won C Grade in 2002.
D Grade was dominated by IWMC (Anne McDermott, Fiona Davies Maureen Gill, Liz Grimwood) winning all six round robin games with the Gore T&C runners up. IWMC last won this grade in 2009.
Teams from all over the South Island travelled south for the event with teams from Invercargill, Gore, Papanui, Hornby, Richmond, Hokitika, Oamaru, Kaiapoi, Dunedin, St Albans and Shirley among the entries with 120 players in total.