YB Dato Freddy Choong Cup

The PSC put two teams into the other YB Dato Freddy Choong Cup competition (the annual match against Hat Yai is also referred to as Freddy Choong Cup ) on 18-19 Oct. The Freddy Choong Cup is for veterans 45 and above. Our PSC Red Team had a bye the first round and defeated FTS in the semi-final 2-1 . Our Red Team went on to win the final against Penang CRC 2-0.

The PSC Black team cleverly avoided a PSC vs PSC clash by losing in the first round and going on to victory in the Plate competition.

Our Captain, Loo Choo Teng, generously hosted a wonderful dinner at a Chinese Restaurant for both the teams as well as the tennis committee...

Well done PSC and congratulations to all the players and participants in this year's YB Dato Freddy Choong Cup.

PSC mixed doubles league

We had our annual mixed doubles league event on 8th and 9th November 2008. In the past, the league is a rather long drawn out affair lasting a few weeks... there is often scheduling problems, missed matches, and walkovers... So this year we decided to have it all in one go over one weekend..more like a tournament... except the format was round robin.

The response was quite good and the winners are as follows:

Group A Champions - Masami & Keiko "Go Sasaki Go!"
Runners up - Jos "Dutchman" Fraaije and Jenny "Karaoke" Khoo

Group B Champions - Loo Choo "Don't waste" Teng & Ngiam "Shiok" Li Sheok
Runners up - Dr. "Bones" Alif & Zurina "Ju Ju" Meah

Group C Champions - Robin "Netman" Cheah & Ivy "Never Miss" Goon
Runners up - Fuji "San" & Leanne "Profile" Cheam

Congratulations to the all the winners and participants and please give a nice word of thanks to Zurina for organizing the event this year.

PSC vs Hat Yai Municipality Tennis Club - Freddy Choong Cup

We were delighted that the folks from Hat Yai could come and visit us this year. Last year they had to postpone because of the elections and so forth... Mostly we were delighted because it means now we can go to Hat Yai next year....or next week!

The Hat Yai Team was captained by Colonel Soonthong but their true Patriarch is General Pingphang . Myself and KL Tan played a VIP friendly against the still strong 82 year old General Pingphang and his partner. We won by a nose 9 - 7...

The score of the Cup match was 5 - 2 but that scoreline doesn't show the anxiety that our Captain experienced when 4 of our top pairs started out losing...

EC and Datin Lau MA were down 1 - 7 , Robert and Sasaki were down , Lisa and Keiko were losing, as were Albert and Soon Hong...

Luckily Robert and Sasaki pulled thru in a tie break and we were all stunned to see Datin carry the balls off the court, indicating they miraculously recovered and also won by tie break!

Jim Arthur and Jimmy Boon sailed thru their match 9 - 0 and Koay and Chee also won as did Naidu and Paul Lim...

After having narrowly escaped disaster... we began to relax as the beer began to flow and our visitors enjoyed a nice buffet dinner with plenty of food, beer and karaoke.

We certainly look forward to visiting Hat Yai next year.... or next week!

To see more photos of this event, click here

Courts 1 - 4 are OPEN!

Our resurfacing project for courts 1 - 4 was completed on 25 September 2008 and the courts are once again open for members to play. As you can see from this photo, we decided to go with dark green courts, a light green outer court and white lines... This makes it quite a bit easier to make line calls when the yellow ball strikes the white line, unlike the yellow lines on our old courts.

The courts are new and 19 mm thick, so the first thing you notice is that they feel very much more "cushiony" and comfortable to your joints than our old courts which have worn down to around 5 mm and now feel almost like hard courts. This difference in thickness , as well as the fresh sand dressing, makes a slow ball sit up a bit more... so you have plenty of time to hit it... thus, you may describe this surface behaviour as "slow"... However, the material has a lower coefficient of friction than the old courts, and if you whack a serve or a strong shot with a lot of pace, the ball will "shoot" ...the surface can be surprisingly fast and grass-like in that situation... Also, you can "slide" quite well on these courts, even though they are brand new and yet to be "broken in".

Before we laid the new courts, I was a bit concerned about this "slippery-ness" when playing on the courts when they are wet, but I played in the rain yesterday and was delighted to find the footing to be very sure and I had absolutely no sense of it being too slippery or dangerous to play on when wet. Only effect was slightly more tendency of the ball to shoot as described above...

The other thing I was delighted to see was that the ponding situation has been improved immensely on courts 1 - 4... During yesterday's heavy rain, courts 1 - 4 were still playable with very little ponding, while courts 5 - 8 were completely flooded... The only thing i noticed about the new courts is that they have a slight tendancy to trap air and form sort of a blister or bubble underneath...but this is not dangerous, and it quickly disappears about the same time the court drains completely. Finally, members should be aware that the sand dressing will be an ongoing process. The heavy rains recently will distribute the sand unevenly... We are aware of this and have scheduled the next round of sand dressing for 15 Oct 2008. This will be done during the day and should not affect your club nite play...

Come out and have a hit on the new courts and tell me what you think of them... I'll be delighted to hear your comments!

PSC vs CRC Taiping

As part of the annual series of games, we hosted CRC Taiping for tennis on 27 Sept 2008. Our Wong Poh Lam was our Captain of the day for this event... The CRC Taiping team was a bit short handed... so we were gifted two walkovers ... We lost in our first pair, and our mixed doubles pair...but we went on to win the rest of the matches for a final score of 5 - 2.

Sabah team tennis invitational

We got an invitation to the Inaugural Sabah Team Tennis Invitational when we were playing at Raintree earlier this year... One of the Sandakan fellows passed us the invitation.... We thought it would be nice to play in Kota Kinabalu since we were planning to go there for a friendly match with another club anyway.... Also the venue turned out to be the incredibly beautiful Sutera Harbor Resort...
Pictures really can't describe how beautiful this place is...but if you're like me and haven't been to Kota Kinabalu in 12 years or so..its really worth going to see how nicely they've done up this resort...

We took a team of 13 players... all of which you can tell from the smiles below enjoyed themselves...
Most probably, those smiles were as much from the food in KK as the tennis... Here's an example of the giant tiger prawns you can get over there, note the size in relation to lisa's hand holding the fork

The lovely sunsets in Kota Kinabalu also contributed to the smiles

The tennis venue was also very nice with 3 covered courts and 2 outdoor courts. The covering was a reinforced fabric canopy structure and it provided excellent relief from the heat... play was comfortable throughout the day... although we all had some difficulties with seeing the ball and tracking it for volleys and overheads...

If you can't tell by my writing so far, the tennis on this trip was considerably more relaxed than other tournaments... and as there were eight teams participating in a knockout format, we rather unexpectedly found our selves in the finals after only two rounds....

The final was played indoors on Sunday 14 September against a team from Tarakan, Indonesia... They were an extremely fast group of players... Our ladies had a tough time of it. Lisa and Keiko lost the first set and had to go to super tie break to win their point. Our men's 45, Nick and Soon Hong put up a good fight, nearly forcing a super tie break in their second set before coming up short 5-7. Our chances were still looking good with Robert and Sasaki up one set and our heroes Jin Ghee and Otto yet to play... However, even though they puasa (muslim fasting) the Tarakan veterans were too "fast" for our veterans and managed to force and win the super tie break... and their men's 35 were even faster! they beat our captain and Koay in straight sets.... this left our heroes to playing an entertaining exhibition match as the Indonesians were already up 3 -1...

Nevertheless...we certainly enjoyed ourselves and the captain happily accepted the runner's up check for $1000 !

Kings of Tennis?

Last year Federer played Sampras in an exhibition match in KL after he finished the Masters Championship in Shanghai... a similar match is also planned this year... which is again in KL...

http://www.showdownkl2008.com/

this time Federer supposed to play Nadal... and/or Blake... plus some more matches with former greats Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe on 18th November

And I'd been hearing some rumors about some kind of similar match which was going to be held in Penang about this time... So I sort of assumed that someone was going to get these guys to swing up to Penang and play one day...

but while researching all this online for a friend who wanted to see the above match in KL..i discovered that there IS a match planned for Penang, and its something quite different:

http://www.kingsoftennis.com/

rumor has it that the venue is planned to be a portable court set up in the Esplanade...

this seems to be borne out by this link

http://www.kingsoftennis.com/aboutmalaysia.html

but its seems to me that the PSC would be a much better venue for this kind of event....

Do you agree?