Junior players settle for runner-up honors

Jimin Woo will be the North Pacific Team’s first U16 singles player for the 2019 Pacific Oceania Junior Championships’ team event that will start today in Fiji. (Saipan Tribune)

The CNMI’s Jimin Woo fell short in his twin title bids in the 2019 Pacific Oceania Junior Championships in Fiji yesterday.

Woo first lost in the boys U16 singles finals, which Pacific Games bronze medalist Clement Mainguy of Vanuatu dominated, 6-0, 6-0. Then in the doubles championship game, Woo and Lee were defeated by Mainguy and the Solomon Islands’ Junior Miki, 6-2, 6-1.

In other results, Fiji’s Saoirse Breen duplicated Mainguy’s pair of titles in the girls U16 age group. Breen was handed the singles crown, as Samoa’s Eleanor Schuster got injured and could no longer continue to play in the finale. It was a tough luck for Schuster, as she won the first set, 6-1, and was still ahead in the second, 5-4, when she was forced to quit the match.

With Schuster out, she and Penina Kamu had to give up the doubles title to Breen and the Solomon Islands’ Zorika Morgan.

In the girls U14 doubles finals, Tahiti’s Vaiani Dusserre-Valleaux and Samoa’s Roselyn Tupuola recovered from a first set loss to slip past the Cook Islands’ Te Akaiti Toa and Moana Une, 1-6, 6-1, 10-4.

Earlier in the battle for the singles crown in the same age group, Dusserre-Valleaux swept Tupuola, 6-0, 6-2. In the third place game, Guam’s Alicia Addison won over Une, 6-0, 6-4.

In the boys U14 singles finale, Fiji’s Makati Ofati topped Vanuatu’s Zachary Sands, 6-3, 6-3, while the former’s compatriot, Storm Charles Cornish, edged Noah Molbaleh, also from Vanuatu, in the consolation match, 6-0, 2-6, 10-8.

Fiji went on to sweep the boys U14 after Ofati and Cornish clinched the doubles crown following a 6-2, 6-3 triumph over Molbaleh and Sands.

Team event starts
Meanwhile, there will be no breather for Pacific Oceania players, as the team event will kick off today.

Day 1 schedule will have the CNMI-led North Team facing the West in the U16 age group, the West and East squaring off in the U14, and the East and North meeting in the U12.

Woo will be the North’s first singles player, while the three others are Lee, Guam’s Aidan Schembari, and the Federated States of Micronesia’s Noel Narruhn. Addison, FSM’s Anne Skilling and Ridianne Wolphagen and the CNMI’s Maria Gregoire will play in the girls singles. There will also be doubles games in the team event—boys and girls and mixed.

In the U12 age group, the CNMI’s has only one player on the North—Juncheol Hwang—and he will be the squad’s second singles player and will also compete in the boys doubles (with Guam’s Johnny Jackson) and mixed (with Freemont Gibson).

The North’s U14 team won’t have its first game until tomorrow and it will be against the West. Daniel Kang, Anthony Gregoire, David Kwon, Serin Chung, Hyejin Elliot, and Helen Kim are the CNMI players on the North crew.