The 20th biennial Southern Caribbean Squash Championships will get underway at the Georgetown Club, Guyana this morning (Monday). The individual championships will be contested from Monday August 18th to Wednesday August 20th with the round robin team event being held from August 21st to 23rd. Teams from Barbados, the OECS, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela and host country Guyana will contest the Men’s team event. The Ladies team tournament will only be contested by Barbados and Guyana, while these two countries as well as the OECS and Trinidad and Tobago will contest the Veterans event. Barbados will be defending all three team titles which were won at the 2006 event that was played here at home at the Barbados Squash Club.
The defending individual champions from 2006 are: Nicolette Fernandes (Guyana) and Gavin Cumberbatch (Barbados) who have both been seeded this year at #1. The full list of top seeds is as follows:
Men: #1 ? Gavin Cumberbatch (B?dos); #2 ? Colin Ramasra (T&T).
#3/4 ? Josh Pinard (T&T) & Shawn Simpson (B?dos).
#5/8 ? James Bentick (OECS); Bryant Cumberbatch (B?dos); Kristian Jeffrey (Guyana) & Francisco Alberto Valecillo (Venezuela).
Ladies: #1 ? Nicolette Fernandes (Guy); #2 ? Karen Meakins (B?dos); #3/4 ? Cheri-Ann Parris (B?dos) & Lilianna White (B?dos).
In the Ladies Individuals the top two seeds will be heavily favoured to reach the finals for the fourth straight time. Fernandes who looks to be returning to her best after recovering from knee surgery that saw her plummet down the WISPA world rankings from a high of #27 (a ranking she held in May last year) won this event in 2004 and 2006, while Meakins , who won this title back in 2002 is playing better than ever this year.
The men’s event is expected to be much more open with any of as many as six players with a legitimate shot at the title. The two top seeds, Gavin Cumberbatch and Colin Ramasra, contested the Caribbean Championship Men’s Final in Jamaica in 2007 and the last Southern Caribbean Championship Final in Barbados 2006, with Cumberbatch winning both easily. However, since Ramasra turned pro in 2007 he has been moving steadily up the world rankings and is currently #172 in the world and will have benefitted from his recently international exposure. If either of these two slip up there are others waiting to pounce. Five time B’dos National Champion, Shawn Simpson, will be anxious to win his first squash title overseas while the T&T #2, Josh Pinard always seems to be full of running and fight. The Guyana #1, Kristian Jeffrey, recently won the St. Lucia Open, beating Pinard in the final and will have the backing of the always vocal home supporters. The OECS #1, James Bentick is always a contender and will be dangerous opponent in the quarter-final rounds.
Of all the men, however, only Cumberbatch has won this event before so there is every prospect of an exciting week of squash ahead. Let the games begin!
