UPBA’s Shraddha flies high
BADMINTON C’SHIP Young shuttler outplays home-court favourite Aruni
Unseeded Shraddha Gupta of UP Badminton Academy made her presence felt at the Flypower District Badminton Championship on Thursday, shocking second seed and homecourt favourite Aruni Gulati in straight games to book a place in the final.
Much to the surprise of all, Shraddha exhibited her class, tossing the shuttle all across the court to keep Aruni moving on her toes while winning by 21-6, 21-3, at the KD Singh ‘Babu’ Stadium court in the only semifinal of the girls under-17 category. Another trainee of academy Samriddhi Singh, who has been given top billing, didn’t go hard against seventh seed Vaishanvi Kadam to win by 21-15, 21-7 to make it to the final of the girls under-15 singles. Now, she meets home-court favourite and second seed Sunali Dubey, who outplayed fifth Ishhita Nigam of badminton academy 21-8, 21-10 in other semifinal of the day.
It was a mixed outcome for the academy and KD Singh ‘Babu’ Stadium trainees in the girls under-19 singles semi-finals. Ashi Sawant of stadium outplayed academy’s Simran Joshi 21-9, 21-15 first, and then academy’s Sadia Khan brushed aside stadium’s Shweta Singh 21-16, 20-22, 21-18 in a marathon thriller. In the women’ singles pre-quarters, Sashi Prabha defeated Asma Jued 30-13, fourth seed Ashi Sawant beat Jyotsana Gupta 30-16, Subhi Agarwal defeated Shivani Singh 30-17, and Pooja Tewari beat Sonal Singh 30-13. In the only quarter- final in the men’s (+35) doubles, the duo of Abhinav Bhargava and Sanjay Pathak defeated Mritunjay Chaudhary and Ravindra Singh 21-11, 21-13.