Maria Tsaptsinos: Spanish Open: First Day

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

Thursday, 23 November 2017

Spanish Open: First Day

Maria's task at the first day of the Spanish Open it was always going to be difficult since she was facing opponents higher ranked than her. The first game was versus Selena Selvakumar of India (ranked 310) for the Under21s with Maria winning. The full video is available at the ITTF web pages. Unfortunately despite a good start against Xuan Zhang of Spain (ranked 223) again for the Womens Under 21 with a 11-6 first set she lost 3-1 (11-6 6-11 9-11 2-11). The third set was the deciding one with Maria 9-7 up and serving unfortunately the serves did not serve their purpose. This game is also available at ittf.com.

For the Womens Singles Maria lost both games to Yousra Helmy of Egypt (r 317) with a 2-4 score and Stephanie Loeuillette of France (r 132) with a 0-4 score.

Next day to come is Womens Doubles with Lois Peake being her partner.