Team NMI finishes No. 2 in POJC

All age group winners in the 2023 Pacific Oceania Junior Championships pose for a group photo with officials during the awards ceremony last Wednesday in Lautoka, Fiji.(CONTRIBUTED PHOTO)

The 17-player strong CNMI team finished second overall behind powerhouse Tahiti in the 2023 Pacific Oceania Junior Championships in Lautoka, Fiji.

CNMI Sports Hall of Famer and national tennis coach Jeff Race said it was an unexpected surprise considering Commonwealth netters struggled in the first couple of days of the tournament. Add to this the fact that they didn’t have an actual tennis training facility for the better part of the past year.

“Just announced that the CNMI finished second among the 13 island nations in the POJC. So I guess we did awfully well after all. Tahiti was No. 1,” said Race in a social media message to the Saipan Tribune.

The CNMI bucked a lackluster start by taking the boys 14 singles, boys 14 doubles, boys 14 doubles runner-up, boys 14 singles second runner-up, boys 16 doubles second runner-up, as well as a couple of Top 10 finishes by the CNMI’s talented junior players.

At the forefront of the Commonwealth’s Fiji campaign of course was La Hunn Lam who won the boys 14 singles and teamed up with Nason Wessel to take the boys 14 doubles. Wessel then took third place in the boys 14 singles. 

Ryan Choi and Si Woo Lee came in second to Lam and Wessel in the boys 14 doubles, while Henry Choi and June Yu got third place in the boys 16 doubles.

Irin Chung and Hoo Wang settled for fourth place in the girls 16 doubles, while Anne Lee and Lina Tsukagoshi salvaged fifth place in the girls 14 doubles.

In the boys 16 doubles, Simon Tang tag-teamed with Cook Islands’ Luke Pierre to snare sixth place.

In more singles play results, Anne Lee finished seventh in the girls 14 and Si Woo Lee took ninth in the boys 14. The boys 12 team of Michael Jeon and Ryan Choi also came in fourth.

Race said it meant a ton that the Oceania Tennis Federation had funding for the CNMI to add an assistant coach to this year’s POJC as Colin Ramsey helped him and the youth netters plenty in Fiji.

“He did a lot as he did most of the coaching in the 12 age group in this POJC,” said Race.

As for possibly beating Tahiti next year and finishing No. 1, Race said the CNMI actually did it twice in a row back in 2017 and 2018.

“It’s super tough to beat Tahiti though. They have 11 private tennis clubs and they all have coaches. They also have a lot of tournaments year-round,” he said.

The plethora of tennis clubs translates to more competition in the French territory and this translates to a bigger pool of tennis players to pick their junior national team or senior national team from.

Plus, Race said, Tahiti also has a funding advantage compared to tennis development in the CNMI as their administration and development staff are all paid employees.

As opposed to the CNMI, which for more than eight months had no dedicated facility to train junior players as the Pacific Islands Club Saipan was used in last year’s Pacific Mini Games and was reopened only recently for national training under Race’s Ace Tennis Academy.

In the intervening months, the islands’ junior netters had to take their chances at public courts like the American Memorial Park tennis courts or facilities at hotels that are not exactly ideal if you’re training for high-level off-island competition.