Tuesday Sep 17, 2024
Tuesday Sep 17, 2024
Thursday, 25 July 2019 00:29 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
The North Central Province Open Badminton Tournament, one of the prominent competitions in the country’s badminton calendar, will be held at two venues in Anuradhapura from 20-25 August.
The matches will be held at the Anuradhapura Urban Council courts and the Mike Cooke Indoor Badminton Stadium, as more than one thousand shuttlers will be in action during the six-day event.
North Central Province Badminton Association is organising the event under the supervision of Sri Lanka Badminton (SLB), and the organisers are expecting to host the championships on a majestic scale. The tournament event will see competitions being held under nine age groups, namely U-11, U-13, U-15, U-17, and U-19, over-40, over-50, over-55 and over-60.
The inauguration ceremony will be attended by Housing Construction and Cultural Affairs Minister Sajith Premadasa and newly elected Sri Lanka Badminton (SLB) President Rohan de Silva at 9.00 am on the first day.
Although located far from the action-packed capital, the region has produced rare talents in the calibre of prominent coach A M Wimalarathna, multiple South Asian Games silver and bronze medallist Renu Chandrika de Silva, former and current stars like Vimal Halangoda, Mike Cooke, Udara Jayasundara etc., over the years. Sri Lanka Badminton, which is under a new management following the recently held general election, hopes to bring back the past glory to the region through hosting such major ranking tournaments, and also expects to find and groom talented shuttlers and help them reach new heights.
The organisers also hope the tournament will play an important role in finding talented shuttlers for future international events.
Sri Lanka Badminton Association has laid down a few conditions to improve the standards of the tournament, in consultation with the North Central Province Badminton Association, among them, using the latest tournament software of the World Federation to handle the entries and the draw. It will also be used to do the match scheduling and notify the players well in advance of the times of their matches. This would almost eliminate players having to wander around the whole day waiting for their individual games.
Playing most of the matches on synthetic carpet is another improvement. Due to the large number of entries, the deployment of technical officers has also been strengthened in order to give an accurate decision.
This is the first top-ranking tournament that the new committee of SLB is organising, and it is gratifying to see all Vice Presidents and Executive Committee members working together with the NCP officials to ensure all arrangements are satisfactorily made.
