Mark Williams reports:
The first competition in the 2014 Marsh N/national Schools' Championships took place at Eton yesterday with the Ladies U15 tournament.
7 pairs from just 2 schools (Highgate and Ipswich) entered this competition. It was very good to see Ipswich travel a long journey to take part with their admirable coach and manager Tony Stubbs, and both girls improved enormously over the course of the day. Incredibly, Highgate have two girls at this level (Eve Smith-Bingham and Alvira Reimer) who have just reached the N/national Ladies Adult final, and Alison and Tony Brunner very sensibly split them up for this competition. Inevitably they both reached the final easily, but it made for an absorbing contest of an exceptionally high standard. Both supporting girls (Phoebe Bracken and Marjolaine Briscoe respectively) played very well, and the first game went down to the wire 14-13 to Smith-Bingham and Bracken. This gave them the confidence they needed, and they won the next two games 12-8, 12-4. Congratulations once again to Alison, Tony and Mark Collins for getting all of their girls to such an astonishingly high standard.
Plate A and Plate B were won by Highgate 4 and 3 respectively.
We are looking forward to 2015, when Shrewsbury will have some girls in this competition for the first time, and it would be lovely to have some entries from some other schools who do have Under 15 girls playing.
Semi-Finals:
Highgate 1 (E.Smith-Bingham & P.Bracken) beat Highgate 3 (S.Katz-Roberts & C.Valensise) 12-3, 12-3
Highgate 2 (A.Reimer & M.Briscoe) beat Highgate 5 (M.Griffiths & T.Augustidis) 12-0, 12-0
Final:
Highgate 1 beat Highgate 2 14-13, 12-8, 12-4