Indore, February 26: Suhana Saini of Haryana will be the top seed in the Sub-Junior Girls category of the UTT 82nd Cadet & Sub-Junior National Table Tennis Championships, being held at the Abhay Prashal here.

When seeding for the girls takes place, the Haryana girl will have the upper hand against defending champion Pritha Vartikar of Maharashtra. With no tournament possible in 2020, the competition department will rely on the 2019 national rankings of players. The seedlings will take place in the presence of the top-eight ranked players.

Pritha blanked out Suhana in the semi-finals and went on to win the title at the Dharamshala Nationals. But the Maharashtra girl (390), laying behind Suhana (435) in the national points ranking tally, gets the second spot in seeding. The rest of the higher-ranked six players will know their seeding place tomorrow.

The group qualification matches began this morning in the Sub-Junior Girls section, along with the Cadet Girls.

With two rounds scheduled for the day, the final round tomorrow will decide the 40 qualifiers, who eventually join the seeded players in the main draw. With 16 byes to be provided, the top eight players will enjoy first-round free time before getting down to serious business from the round of 32.

Undoubtedly, Pritha will want to defend her title stoutly, while Suhana will look to settle her score with the reigning champion. There are others in the fray, minus the runner-up Lakshita Narang from Delhi. The latter has moved on to the next category. Nevertheless, Taneesha Kotecha (Mah), Nehal Venkatasamy (TN), Kaashvi Gupta (Del), Ananya Chande (Mah), Sampriti Roy (Ben), and Manni Ramamoorthy (TN) are there to pose challenges. In other words, life will not be easy for the title-contenders.

In the Cadet Girls section, 114 entrants are divided into 32 groups—the early groups having three and the latter four. The winner from each group qualifies for the main draw. This category not only adds freshness to the championships, besides introducing the new winner every season.

In the morning, players went through the motion of first-round matches in both categories. And even in the second-round matches the results were one-sided with the exception of Khushi Jadava of Gujarat beating Sharvaani Nagam of TTTA 11-8, 4-11, 11-9, 10-12, 11-7. In the rest of matches concluded so far, Pranati P. Nair of Kerala defeated Mahi Gutpa of Bihar 11-5, 11-1, 11-1, Diya Bramachary of Bengal downed Anika Gupta of UP 11-2, 11-7, 11-4, Karnataka’s Trupti Purohit accounted for Ekta of Punjab 11-4, 11-7, 11-6.