St. Louis Tournament Recap

February 5, 2018
St. Louis, MO
By Rick Randall

We played over 120 matches in the 3 day event with lots of great competition, camaraderie and tall tales. 

Dick Baldwin invitational 110s
We played an 8 team 110 draw out in all directions on Friday with great play all day. The event was won by Frank Childress and Bob Stratton over the tournament namesake, the ageless wonder Dick Baldwin and his partner, Peter Hantack, in a hard fought match. In the consolation final, Scott Seyfried and Bruce Erickson prevailed over friends and foes Dr. Mike Nogalski and Joe ingram.

Open Draw
In the open Draw, we had 39 teams compete all weekend and with some long and closely contested matches. The tournament was won in a two and a half hour match by Ian Hintz and Jay Schwab over Garrett Gates and Graham Battle 6-1, 6-7, 7-6. The match finished with snow coming down and the crowd cheering for the incredible play by both teams. Both finalists got through with upsets in their semifinal matches with Gates and Battle beating the top seeded team of Guy Moore and  Dane Schmidgall 5-7,6-4,7-5 and Hintz and Schwab beating the second seeds, Jeronie Barnes and Jake Wilson, in three long sets. We all were lucky that those teams came to St Louis so we could see Platform Tennis played at that high level.

In other finals the winners were:
Consolation final-Peter Gunther and Alan Douglas
Quarterfinal Reprieve- Scott Triplet and Edwin Lewis
16 reprieve-Tim Miller and Michael Laycob
In the last-last chance, fan favorites Bill and Chase Richards won both their Sunday matches to head into next year with a lot of momentum.

The Calcutta       
The Calcutta was down to the wire with the yellow team taking it for their 17 owners on the strength 5 back draw wins. Winning tickets paid a cool $67/share.                                 

The Bags event
The 1st annual Bags Tournament was a great success with 24 teams participating. At the end of the night, the team of Calvin Kinsella and Piotr Wianecki held on to win the two Master Woody paddles. Thanks to CCRC for a great Saturday night party.