CNMI junior tennis players off to Fiji

Thirteen CNMI junior tennis players will leave Saipan for Fiji this morning to represent the North Pacific Team in the 2015 Pacific Oceania Junior Championships.

Vincent Tudela returns to Ji Min Woo during a training session at the Pacific Islands Club tennis courts. (Roselyn B. Monroyo)

The list includes U12 players Coume and Conatsu Kaga, Ericka Tuttle, Ji Min Woo, and Seung Jin Paik, U14’s Robbie Schoor, Ken Song, Vincent Tudela, Mimi Sakano, Tania Tan, and Malika Miyawaki, and U16’s Isabel Heras and Ami Tsukagoshi. Joining the group in Fiji are coach Jeff Race and Northern Mariana Islands Tennis Association officials Lydia Tan and Jeff Schorr. The bulk of the CNMI delegation will also reunite in Fiji with Carol Lee, who has been in the host country for over a month, training at the regional facility. Guam, Palau, and the Federated States of Micronesia players will join the CNMI bets on the North squad that will battle the East and West teams in the annual competition.

The POJC will run from Aug. 17 to 26 in Lautoka and Nadi.

Race said the 13 CNMI players competing in the POJC are all set for the tough matches in Fiji.

“I am so proud of this dedicated bunch of players. I and coach Luke (Beling) were off-island last month so our players trained on their own. It’s very hard to train without a coach, but these kids stepped up and prepared hard for the tournament. They practiced consistently and worked on their games,” Race said in a telephone interview with Saipan Tribune.

The 13 Commonwealth players leaving for Fiji earned slots on the North Pacific Team after placing in the Top 4 in the singles competition in the 2015 North Pacific Regional Championships in Guam last June, while Lee gained an automatic ticket to the POJC for ruling the U12 division of the competition last year.

Conatsu and Heras topped the girls U12 and U16 singles events in the regional tournament, while Tan and Schorr prevailed in the U14 age group. Sakano, Coume, Tsukagoshi, and Song were runners-up in their respective age groups, while the rest made it to the semifinals of their events.

The Kaga siblings also won the girls U12 doubles championship, while the pairs of Tsukagoshi and Heras and Tan and Miyawaki had the same fetes in the U16 and U14 divisions, respectively. Tuttle and teammate Maria Gregoire took the second place medal in the girls U12 doubles, while Sakano and Asia Raulerson and Steven Goodwin and Tudela brought home similar hardware in the U14 age group. Song and Schorr placed third in the U14 division, while Woo and Paik had the same ranking in the U12 category.