Three of Saint Lucia’s table tennis champions travelled to Grenada on Thursday to participate in the LQ Classic Junior Tournament, presented by Life Quality Sports Inc.
The competition runs from Friday to Sunday and will be held at the Grenada Youth Centre and Trade Centre in the capital, St George’s.
Saint Lucia will be represented by student-athletes Joshua Lubin of Sir Arthur Lewis Community College, Manie Eleuthere of Ciceron Secondary School, and Shatal Charles of Saint Lucia Sports Academy. They will compete in the mixed team junior Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) format, boys’ and girls’ singles, boys’ doubles, and mixed doubles.
“Well, we are embarking on this trip because the organisers stressed on the fact that they’re trying to build back the junior OECS, and that the format will take the junior OECS format,” explained head coach Chris Wells. “It’s a tournament they’ve had for the last six years, and we have not been able to compete in it because we never saw it as a priority since it was not one of the main tournaments on our calendar.
“So this year, one of the athletes decided that they’ll take part in it, and so it got the ball rolling. And so we needed two boys and one girl to make the team, and things happened, and now we’re able to fill in our best students from the secondary schools tournaments to represent Saint Lucia.”
Charles, a Caribbean junior champion, was recently named female student-athlete of the year at the National Sports Awards. Lubin won the secondary schools’ singles tournament in 2024. Eleuthere, another former Caribbean Under-15 champion, is fresh off his maiden Under-19 and senior open titles.
Wells indicated that with a busy year ahead, including the Caribbean Senior Championships, this will be an important outing. The team will be able to take part in Under-19, Under-15, doubles, singles, and team competition.
“It’s a team event for us,” he said. “It plays into the preparation in terms of me being there as a coach. They wouldn’t just be playing a tournament. I’m going to be evaluating them on a different level. They’ll not be competing against their opponents as such. In my eyes, I’ll be seeing them compete against the best, but I want to make sure that they execute the game plan, and how well they can execute under pressure, the tactics they use, what we’ve trained, how consistent they are, the amount of unforced errors – if they could limit it to very few, I’ll be a happy coach.”
