The first serve in the first professional squash tournament to ever take place in Trinidad and Tobago is scheduled to be hit just after 5pm today.
There will be eight matches on the schedule as the entire first round of the QPCC (Queen’s Park Cricket Club) Professional Squash Association (PSA) Tournament will be played at the QPCC Indoor Racquet Centre, Queen’s Park Oval, St Clair.
The top eight teams have received recognition and will begin their campaign in the round of 16 tomorrow. All six players from the host country will be in action today and all will be up against top seeds as half of the 32 players involved are seeds.
Colin Ramasra, perhaps the most successful player this country has ever produced, and two-time Caribbean junior champion Seth Thong, the brightest youngster in at least the last decade, will feature in the first two games.
This will be Ramasra’s first competitive match since he was ranked No. 1 in the spotlight age group (35-39) at the European Squash Federation Masters when the sport was shut down for Covid-19 in March 2020. Ten – Champion The one-time international, who managed to break into the top 150 in the world during a brief professional career over a decade ago, will oppose Leo Vargas, a Mexican ranked 245 and ninth.
The 15-year-old thong will emerge ten-time national champion of Barbados, Shawn Simpson, the only unbeaten of the 16 seeds. In the second round an hour later, Brandon De Montrichard, the 2018 National Championship runners-up, will face the only world-ranked Caribbean player in the field, Bermudan Taylor Carrick – ranked #666 and ranked 14th .
Britain’s Nick Sutcliffe, who was ranked just behind and is ranked #712, will be up against Joel Augustine at the same time. T&T’s other two players are scheduled to take the field at 8pm in the fourth and final round.
Zachery Loquan will face Mexico’s Arturo Vidal, ranked #562 and ranked 13th, and Caribbean Under-15 silver medalist Nicholas Lequay faces tenth-ranked and 350th-ranked Santiago Orazco of Colombia.
National over-40 champion Julian Chin, who has local roots but represents his native Guyana, will face world number 364 11 Jan Wipperfurth of Germany an hour earlier.
And in the other first-round contest, also at 7 p.m., Guyana’s Jason Ray Khalil will face 12th-ranked and 533rd-ranked Filipe Tovar of Colombia. Compatriot Andreas Herrera is the 15th highest ranked player in the world on the field at #158 and he is followed by eight players between 200 and 300.
The list of foreigners contains three players from Colombia and Mexico, as well as two each from England and New Zealand and one each from Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands.
Sports and Community Development Minister Shamfa Cudjoe and QPCC president Dr Nigel Camacho will be the guests of honor during the opening ceremony at 3.30pm The tournament will continue daily until Saturday.
