Paddlers to compete in Brazil, Gautemala

Young paddlers who performed well in the recent South Asian Junior Table Tennis Championships held here will represent India at the Gautemala Junior and Cadet Open ITTF Global Junior circuit event scheduled for Aug 7-10.

A nine-member team, comprising four boys and five girls, will participate in the event. Anirban Ghosh, Birdie Boro, Lalrinpuia and Arjun Ghosh form the boys unit and Sagarika Mukherjee, Harsha Vardhini, Akula Sreeja, Moumita Dutta and Aishwarya Pathak will competed in the girls category.

"We want to give them an early exposure of competing in international events in order to help them learn the ropes," said TTFI general-secretary Dharaj Choudhary. "We are also sending two new coaches - Raj Shanmugam Subramaniam and Jyoti Shah - to accompany the team to Gautemala City."

The TTFI will also be sending an eight-member team to take part in ITTF World Tour Brazil Open in Santos Aug 8-11.

The team includes G. Sathiyan, Nitin Thiruvengadam, Soumyajit Ghosh and Harmeet Desai in the youth boys section and Kritiwika Sinharoy, Ankita Das, Suthirtha Mukherjee and Manika Batra in the opposite class. Muralidhara Rao Achanta and Vijayasarathi Seshadri will coach the squad which leave for Sao Paulo on Monday.

Meanwhile, Abhishek Yadav and Suthirtha Mukherjee, the winners of the singles events at the South Asian event here last month, have been chosen for the second Asia Youth Games to be held at Nanjing, China from Aug 16 to 24.

Arup Basak has been nominated as the coach while Prem Chand Verma will be the manager of the squad.