4 Delhi players in squad for World Schools meet

 

New Delhi, February 29: It is a profitable time for Delhi table tennis. Four of its players—Parth Virmani, Shivjit Singh Lamba, Ishita Gupta and Sristhi Gupta—were selected to participate Team India in the 14th World Schools Championship Table Tennis to be held at Eilat, Israel, betweenApril 2 and 8, 2016.

 

Four other members of the team, representing the country at the ISF event, will be Asif Khan (Rajasthan), Pawan and Varuni Jaiswal (Telangana) and Shruti Amrute (Maharashtra).

 

This is an invitational tournament where school teams and selected school teams in both the boys and girls sections are allowed to participate. The school teams are chosen on the basis of merit generally by the School Games Federation of India (SGFI). Accordingly, two-day selection trials was held at Agra on Saturday and Sunday and the eight members, who are the regulars on the national ranking championships circuit of the Table Tennis Federation of India, have emerged on top to make to Team India.

 

Both Parth Virmani and Shivjit Singh Lamba are students of Hansraj Model School, Punjabi Bagh, while Ishita and Sristhi represent Manavsthali and DPS (Mathura Road), respectively. Incidentally, all of them train under Coach Sandeep Gupta, who has made many a players’ career, including reigning national champion Manika Batra and Olympian Neha Aggarwal.

 

The championship, which has the endorsement from the ITTF, is played under rules and regulations stipulated by the international body besides being supervised by international umpires, drawn from different participating countries.

 

The championship, conducted under the auspices of ISF (International School Sport Federation), is a prestigious event and it was Israel (Petach-Tikva) which hosted the first championship in 1991. Israel again hosted the biennial event in 1995 for the second time.

 

The championship has returned to the country for the third time after having made it to Belgium, Portugal, France, Czech Republic, Germany, China, Malta, Czech Republic, Italy and France, in that order from 1997.