End of Season Message from coach Benny Lin
26 Jul 2010
Our 2009 - 2010 season has been the best season so far in terms of players progression, local / international tournament results and college placement successful rate. I personally feel this past season both players and coaches have had a very productive and fruitful season. Coaches see their players improving and moving to the next phase of their life, including winning numerous local tournaments and going to colleges in the US for some of our older players.
Our Future Stars program has done particularly well this season. Aditya Karunaratne won Under 8 Grand Masters last year while also being undefeated in single match in Under 8 tournaments. This year she has already made it all the way to the final of Under 10 Junior Series beating a few players ranked above her and almost 2 years older than her.
Another Future Star players, Kylie Tang, also won the Under 8 tournament this year making our Future Star program a very successful program with both Under 8 champions coming out from our Future Stars program. Moreover, Yash and Akash Panjabi have also achieved good results in their club tournaments.
Our College Preparation program couldn’t achieve better results for the year of 2009 – 2010 as four of HKITA players were accepted to the following prestigious schools:
1. Ryan Ho – University of Chicago
2. Low Kenji – Cornell University
3. Sher Pui Wing – Seton Hall University (Full Tennis Scholarship)
4. Lorraine Cheung – California State of Northridge (Partial Tennis Scholarship)
This year’s College Preparatory program players have also attracted the attention and interest of many prestigious schools at the Yale Showcase. Leung Lok Sze, Tyler Mallery, Shirlene Luk and Lee Sojung were recruited by top schools such as Brown, University of Chicago, Wellesley, Amherst and NYU, to name a few.
HKITA will continue to foster a stronger and better relationship with those prestigious schools, as well as with Division 1 scholarship schools. This year alone, HKITA was visited by the head coaches from University of Chicago and Wellesley College for direct recruitment of HKITA players and in the next season, HKITA will be tentatively visited by coaches from University of Chicago, Brown University, New York University, Wellesley College and University of Washington at St. Louis.
HKITA is the only tennis academy in Asia that coaches from above-mentioned universities will be visiting. This shows our commitment in providing our players a guided and secured pathway to US college tennis and the appreciation/ trust from those schools in HKITA and its players.
It will be one of our main goals for next season to build better relationship with US universities and strengthen our College Preparation program. We will also continue participating in Yale Showcase where every year our players are given automatic entries to the biggest college showcase in the US.
I am pleased to announce that the HKITA College Preparation program is currently the No. 1 College Preparation program in Asia. Our successful rate and relationship with US universities speak for itself.
HKITA will continue providing our players with a platform for gaining those irreplaceable international match experience, as well as life experience by arranging overseas tours. This past season we had successfully organized the following tours:
1. Shenzhen Tour (13 players)
2. Taiwan Christmas Tour (18 players)
3. Thailand Easter Tour (13 players)
4. Yale Showcase College Prep Tour (6 players)
5. US Summer Tour (17 players)
6. Europe Summer Tour (4 players)
7. Raffles College Singapore – HKITA Friendly Challenge in Hong Kong (20 players)
These tours have been very productive in terms of accelerating the improvement of our players as it gives them invaluable match experience. However, one of the most important thing is players will be learning many life-skills which they can transfer for conducting their daily life and hopefully the skills they learned, such as self discipline, time management, hard work, could help them become champions of life.
Of course the season will not be completed without our annual awards! It has been very difficult to choose the winners out of so many outstanding nominees.
HKITA Awards 2009 - 2010
- Most Outstanding Player – Marco Lam
- Most Improved Player – Aditya Karunaratne, Kylie Tang, Yash Panjabi
- Most Hard Working Player – Aditya Karunaratne
- Sportsmanship Award – Akash Panjabi, Shanaya Panjabi, Wilson Lai, Matthew Wong, Maxime Traversa
- Tennis Mom of the Year – Karen Lam
- Tennis Dad of the Year – Lloyd Karunaratne
For the year of 2010 - 2011, HKITA will continue guiding our players who are looking to taking their game to the next level, play at college tennis or even professional tour. With the addition of coach Bhagat Singh in the end of last year, HKITA has committed itself in providing our players with the highest quality of coaches who want to make a difference and care about their players’ long term development. HKITA has also upgraded its website. If you have time, please do check our new website at www.hkita.com. It has a lot of tennis information from all over the world. The next step will be completing My HKITA Page where every HKITA player can log in and personalized their tennis page where they can see their schedule, past matches, comments from their coaches, etc.
I am currently in Los Angeles for our annual US Summer Tour but I would like to wish everyone a good summer and I look forward to seeing everyone again soon and let’s all have a fruitful 2010 - 2011 season.
Thank you for your continued support to HKITA.
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