Maria Tsaptsinos: Highs and Lows of the European Youth tournament

Maria Tsaptsinos

...started playing table tennis during the last year of her primary schooling and then joined Kingfisher club whereas she trained with Brian Halliday and later had weekly sessions with Gareth Herbert. Then she was invited to Lilleshall and Sheffield for the Youth Development Squad and consequently to the International Youth Squad. Represented England in various tournaments since 2012 and participated at the Youth Europeans as a Caded and Junior. In 2015 the first call for a senior cap came for the Europeans and Table Tennis Commonwealth.
Maria currently is a scholar at University of Nottingham studying Geography.
Her other interests include football, music and spends time socialising on facebook.

Sponsors: Tees Sport, Spire Dunedin Hospital, SSE with the help of SportsAid, Table Tennis 365, TASS

Tuesday, 21 July 2015

Highs and Lows of the European Youth tournament

Maria spent more than 10 days at Bratislava with fellow England squad members Tin Tin Ho and Lois Peake representing the country as Junior Girls for the 58th European Youth Championships.
In the team event the team finished 7th, the best performance for a very long time but a shoulder injury to Maria meant that once we qualified for the quarters she had to withdrawn for the rest of the games in the team, individual and doubles.

As a team England were drawn in Group F with Switzerland, Finland, Bosnia and Hercegovina and Greece as well for Level 2.

England had an early start on Friday the 10th of July against Greece and three wins for Tin Tin, Maria and Lois made sure the team started on a positive note.

Maria's game vs Chatzilygeroudi Georgia: -13, 3, 10, -8, 7

The afternoon game at three o'clock followed the same pattern and score for a 3-0 win over Finland.
Maria's game vs Kirichenko Anna: 4, 2, 9

On Saturday the team faced Switzerland with both countries having two wins under their belt. England won 3-1 with two wins from Tin Tin and one from Lois.
Maria's game vs Reust, Celine: -4, -8, -3

Against Bosnia and Hercegovina the team won 3-0 with each girl getting a win.
Maria's game vs Ehic Elda: 8, 6, 6

On Sunday for the play off the team faced Estonia and came winners with a 3-2 score.
Maria's game vs Vameri Airi: -9, 7, -7, 7, 9

At seven o'clock the team faced the mighty Germans and reached the last-8 by beating them 3-1 with two wins from Tin Tin and one from Lois.
Maria's game vs Wan Yuan: -6, 0, -9

Unfortunately this was the last game for Maria. Th team then went to lose to Romania and Sweden 3-2 and by beating Belgium 3-2 finishing seventh.