2024 Australian Open Racquetball Championships
Published Sun 03 Nov 2024
The Commercial Club Australian Racquetball Open was conducted on Saturday 7th October (singles) and Sunday 8th October (doubles), held at the Commercial Club, Albury and the Wodonga Squash and Racquetball Complex. Total numbers were up compared with 2023, with 96 singles (100 last year) and 90 doubles entries (74 last year). This is the seventh time the Commercial Club have hosted the tournament since 2016 (There was no Open in 2019-20 due to covid) and they should be congratulated for providing the annual $10,000 sponsorship over the era. Due to this, we once again had extremely strong Men’s and Women Open Singles fields, including four players from Tasmania and also top junior girls and boys in both draws.
The Men’s Open was won by Cam White for the 21st time over his most recent rival, Sam Ejtemai in a repeat of last year’s final. This match was much closer than last year with many long, grinding rallies and Cam’s patience finally proving the difference. The Women’s Open was won by last year’s winner, Selena Shaikh in convincing style over previous winner Sarah Quinlivan. Selena’s speed and consistency proving too much for Sarah. The Open doubles was won by top seeds Sam Etemai and Alex Baines over the strongly performing Matt Creely and Leigh Mitchell, in a match highlighted by power hitting from both teams.
On the Saturday night, the Commercial Club hosted the presentation dinner, with the usual quality meals. Winners of the President Choice Junior awards were Lexi Sutcliffe (Girls) and Cooper Watts (Boys), both whom have been very strong supporters of the tournament circuit over the past couple of years. In an extremely popular decision, the prestigious Paul Vear award was jointly awarded to junior siblings Maddy and Elijah Rolls. Both players have competed in most tournaments since first playing at Wodonga in 2021. They have both won U/13 player of the year in Girls and Boys respectively and now in their mid teens, Elijah has risen to be a strong B Grader and Maddy has just progressed from C Grade to play in the Woman’s Open for the first time at this tournament. At their age, we hope for even more advancement over the years to become our next top ranked racquetballers.
Congratulations to Tournament Director, Sarah Quinlivan, who performed the role for the first time and did a wonderful, efficient job. She was ably assisted by Carolyn Takle and Mark Treloar. Once again thanks to Will O’Connell for running the tournament at Wodonga and assisting with online forms. The 2025 Open will once again be hosted at Albury, that being the last year of their 3 year hosting rights, we are looking forward again to another successful, well run tournament next year.
Review and results can be viewed here: https://tinyurl.com/2vzde3js
