ITF junior tennis meet to start from January 15 (Lead, Correcting para 5)

Budding talent from India and 16 other countries will be seen in action at the International Tennis Federation (ITF) Junior Tennis championship, starting from January 15, the organisers said here on Friday.

The six-day competition, set to end Jan 20, would be staged on five clay courts of the Dakshin Kalikata Sansad (DKS) sports complex.

From this year onward, the tournament will be upgraded to Grade 2, meaning the singles winner will now pocket a whopping 100 points compared to 60 in previous years when the meet was at Grade 3 level.

Each partner of the pair winning the doubles championship will get 75 points, the singles runners-up will collect 75 points, and each player in the losing finalist doubles team will bag 50.

"We have been upgraded to grade 2 level tournament meaning the singles winner will bag 100 points which is huge. To the juniors, it is much bigger than the prize money," Hironmoy Chatterjee, All India Tennis Association (AITA) secretary general and Bengal Tennis Association president told reporters.

"We will be holding 12 ITF juniors across India this year. Like China, we need to do more international events for out budding players as the cost of going abroad and taking part in international events is huge. Overall, we have plans to host 44 international events this year in the country," Chatterjee added.

The boys and girls singles will be a draw of 32, and the doubles 16.

This year, entries have come from 16 countries, including, Poland, USA, Belgium, Thailand, Morocco, Venezuela, Turkey, Hong Kong, Serbia, Netherlands, Japan, Ukraine, France, and Korea.

In boys category, Rithvik Bollipalli, VM Sandeep, Anurag Agarwal and Aditya Vardhan Roy Chowdhury have got the wild cards.

Sharanya Gaware, Mubashira Anjum Shaik, Yubrani Banerjee and Shreya Chakraborty are the wild card entrants in the girls' contest.

--IANS

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