Defending champions Gary Wheadon and Lizelle Goosen delivered decisive victories to retain their titles in the NMMU Madibaz Open squash championships in Port Elizabeth at the weekend.<\/p>\n
The 36-year-old Wheadon, from Milnerton in Cape Town, settled a score by overturning a defeat he suffered to Rudi van Niekerk in the Londt Park Open this year with a 3-0 result in the final.<\/p>\n
Since the tournament was revived in 2012, the lefthander has dominated the proceedings and added a sixth straight title to his collection on Sunday.<\/p>\n
The top eight men were divided into two pools, with Wheadon and Van Niekerk ending comfortably on top to qualify for the final.<\/p>\n
Goosen has also been a regular winner of the title and she went through the women’s section unbeaten to be crowned the champion again.<\/p>\n
The top four women also played in a round-robin format. Jacqui Ryder and Bianca Brown both took games off Goosen, but got no further than that.<\/p>\n
Ryder beat Brown and Janet Byrnes to finish second. NMMU’s Brown finished third after defeating Byrnes.<\/p>\n
Tournament organiser Sarah O’Grady said they were delighted with how the tournament unfolded after receiving 40 entries.<\/p>\n
“We divided the players into three men’s sections and two women’s divisions and we were very happy with the number of competitive matches we had over the weekend,” she said.<\/p>\n
“The time allocations ran well, the players marked after their matches and the games were all played in a good spirit.”<\/p>\n
Although they did not have a title sponsor, O’Grady said the committee had done much work to ensure an attractive line-up of prizes.<\/p>\n
“Besides the entry fees, we did not have a guaranteed cash sponsorship. But I must thank all those who came on board to support the tournament such as Romans Pizza, Sportsworld, Red Bull and Mount Vernon wine.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Defending champions Gary Wheadon and Lizelle Goosen delivered decisive victories to retain their titles in the NMMU Madibaz Open squash championships in Port Elizabeth at the weekend. The 36-year-old Wheadon, from Milnerton in Cape Town, settled a score by overturning a defeat he suffered to Rudi van Niekerk in the Londt Park Open this year […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":58746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2638,2642,1995,1770,2639,1234,1776,2005,2640,2006],"class_list":["post-6330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-more-sport","tag-gary-wheadon","tag-lizelle-goosen","tag-madibaz-squash","tag-nmmu","tag-nmmu-madibaz-open-squash-championships","tag-port-elizabeth","tag-port-elizabeth-news","tag-squash","tag-squash-championships","tag-squash-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}