IC Week - Columbus Trophy

IC Columbus Trophy 2022

Venue: Chevy Chase Club, Washington DC, USA

Overall Result: Champions

Match Report:

We arrived in Washington DC then on to our excellent hotel, the Hyatt Regency in Bethesda.

Our team consisted of Chris Hearn,Nigel Mann +55 age group and Martin Cornish,Paul French,Mike Dawe+65

GB was seeded 2 and our first match was against Belgium. We had a fairly comfortable win 5-1.

Second day we had a match against France who had a strong team being defending champions. Chris and Paul had good singles wins ,while Martin lost narrowly in the match tiebreaker .Nigel lost in straight sets. So the match score was 2-2 after the singles but one set up.

Chris and Nigel had a good win in the doubles while Mike and Paul lost narrowly in a match tiebreaker.The score was 3-3 but we won by two sets.

In the final we played the favourites USA .

Chris won his match in the match tiebreaker while Paul won in straight sets. Martin and Nigel both lost tough matches. So the score was 2-2 after the singles but we were one set down.

In the doubles Chris and Nigel lost in the match tiebreaker while Martin and Paul won in straight sets after saving a set point.

That meant the score was 3-3 and 1 set all ,so we had to play a super tiebreaker ( 1+55 and 1+65). Chris and Paul were selected to play with the match being on a knife edge.It was very close all the way through and with Chris serving at 9-8 he breaks a string on his second serve and double faults!Happily we survived to win 11-9 with Chris hitting a magnificent forehand winner to clinch the title.

We were treated extremely well by the USIC . Chevy Chase and Columbia country club’s were fantastic venues and they could not have been more helpful.

Paul French, Team Captain

Result:

Day 1 - beat Belgium 5-1

Day 2 - beat France 3-3 (won by 2 sets on countback)

Day 3 - beat USA 3-3 (won in a tiebreak shootout 11-9 as sets were equal)