Butterfly National Junior Championships 2013
Sunday 21st of April saw Irish junior para table tennis players compete in their National Championships. This event was staged at ALSAA in Dublin and was hosted by ITTA . This is the second year running where the junior disability event was included as part of the national championships programme. This year it was a 32 county event with competitors from Northern Ireland also competing. Mostly the results went to form. Overall the standard of play was very high and we saw some very competitive matches.
In all there were 4 disability events:
Boys standing event, Boys wheelchair event, Girls disability event, Plate.
The winner of the boys standing event was Paddy Vaughan and the winner of the boys wheelchair event was Galway’s Jack Colbert.
The winner of the Disability event was Galway’s Sinead Keon.
Galway Speeder’s newest recruit and novice player Dylan O’Boyle was the winner of the plate. Dylan came out after tough opposition from fellow Galway Speeder Jessica Burke and from Munster’s Sean Og.
During the day there were some truly memorable battles. In particular, Mark Henderson lost in deuce 5th set to Alex Hennebry in what was probably the match of the day. Alex came out on top putting in a great performance.
It was great to see so many young players competing in such a competitive environment and as Ronan Rooney, Head Coach for Galway Speeders said, “it augers well for the future of para table tennis in Ireland when we see such talent among our juniors.”