The 2006 Washington Open Badminton Tournament was held over the weekend May
19-21st at the Pro Sports club. There're 196 entries, one of the biggest ever,
if not the biggest. Even with 11 courts at the Pro Club, we could not have
A/B/C/D flights as in the past, we had to limit the open events to 3 flights.
There're players from Haiwaii, Oregon, California, Colorado, Alaska, our
friendly
neighbors from British Columbia and of course, the local players and players
from Spokane. There're even more players from BC came down to play than previous
years and we joked about calling the tournament Washington/BC open or eventually
BC/Washington Open in the future as there're more and more BC players coming
each year.

The tournament pretty much ran on schedule on Friday night and Saturday morning.
As the doubles events started, the tournament started to run late because of the
close matches. With players playing multiple events and holding up some matches.
Some of the scheduled matches had to be played on Sunday
at 8 am.

The last match for Saturday went to 3 games as expected and every game went
to set between Derek Adachi/John Tong and Karl Chan/Dave Cruthers of Vancouver.
The match finished around 9:30 pm and finally it's dinner time for the few
people who stayed to the end.

For the 1st time in several years, we had one 50+ event, the men's singles.
Russell Okuno of San Francisco won the event. Too bad, we could not
get the 3rd team to have doubles event.

"Super woman holding up all matches" Ying-Fang played all 4 events and she kept
playing the matches on Sunday with minimum rest in between and she closed down
the gym playing the last match of the tournament on Sunday.

Aki Ito and Jan Veiel of VRC decided to come up in the last minutes to defend
the mixed title and won against Ufilya Davis and Geoff Stensland.

Brooke Lowry won the women's singles against Ying-Fang Lai despite losing
her wisdom (teeth) just a week ago.

The men's singles finals are a rematch from last year, desplite Leslie Lau
of VRC effort and all the grunting, Pietor Mazur of Alaska came up
on top again.

Wendy Carter and Ufilya Davis adjusted and played better against the younger
Helen Yuen and Francesca Sediati of VRC to win in 3 games. Despite being
the eldest player on the courts, Wendy was ready to play the 3rd game without
rest.

Piotr Mazue and Bhaskar Neogi of Alaska have been playing together last few
years and played in tournaments all over US. They could not beat the very
experienced pair of Geoff Stensland and Rob Hankins and lost in 3 games.

There were a few gliches, so some players play against each other twice in the
same event.

Thanks to all the volunteers who helped out to make the tournament successful,
and I got play a couple of events, all the players and spectators and Pro Sports
Club for the wonderful facility.

Annie, Helen, Wendy, Joe, Carla, Patrick, Katherine, Hentley, James, Villette,
Raymond (sexy voice from BC), Nino, all of you are great help, hopefully, I
didn't forget anyone.

See everyone next year.

Clnton

The winners for this year's event:

Mixed Doubles

A - Aki Ito/Jan Veiel (BC)
B - Masako Cochran/Garrett Jetton
C - Helen Roome/Tao Yuan

Women's singles

A - Brooke Lowry
B - Flora So
C - Alice Lee (BC)

Women's doubles

A - Wendy Carter/Ufilya Davis
B - Alice Lee (BC)/Ying-Fang Lai
C - Shaolin Guo/Cindy Wong (BC)

Men's Singles

A - Piotr Mazur (Alaska)
B - Raymond Wong (BC)
C - Steven Ip

Mens' Doubles

A - Geoff Stensland/Rob Hankins
B - Mike Nguyen/Jason Nguyen (BC)
C - Simon Wu/Tony Lee (BC)

35+ Mixed Doubles

A - Ying-Fang Lai/Seong Cheol Cho
B - Wendy Carter/Clinton Chen

35+ Women's Doubles

A - Wendy Carter/Masako Cochran

35+ Men's Singles

A - David Jeschke
B - Sing Lam

35+ Men's Doubles

A - John Tong/Derek Adachi
B - Chengyang Li/Zhongyuan Li

50+ Mens Singles

A - Russell Okuno (San Francisco)


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