Every year when September rolls around it means two things for uni students; mid semester break and uni games.
The Australian Uni Games is an annual event where universities from all over Australia come together to compete in a number of sports to be crowned the Australian Uni Games Champions. Whilst it sounds like a prestigious event, it’s also a great excuse for students to congregate and party together and luckily for everyone it was held at Surfer’s Paradise this year in comparison to last year where it was held in Perth.
This year UTS (The University of Technology Sydney) sent 9 members to compete in the individual matches and also formed a team for the Kyu grade team matches as well as the opens team matches. For the individual matches, Ben Fung endured a 30 minute long match in the quarterfinals and came out victorious but lost in the semi finals to the eventual winner, Tom Hu, to claim 3rd overall in the Kyu grade individual matches.
After the Kyu matches were over it was time for the opens individual matches, even though there weren’t as many members participating in opens individual matches the competition was just as fierce, if not fiercer. Duy Pham, a long member of UTS Kendo Club, prevailed through the tough competition and made it to the finals against Trent Reeves from Monash University. Both players possess a very high level of kendo and it was seemingly suitable that these two faced each other in the finals. Duy came out on top and won the final match 2-0 and brought home the gold for UTS after showcasing some very fast kendo.
The team matches came shortly after and UTS was up against some very tough competition again in both the kyu grade and opens matches. In the Kyu grade matches UTS played exceptionally well considering that nearly half the team only started kendo at the beginning of the year. One of the highlights had to be the match between UTS and USYD (The University of Sydney) where UTS won all their matches 2-0 yet it wasn’t enough to make it to the finals, this just goes to show how tough the competition was.
In the opens team matches UTS again played exceptionally well with some of our newer members playing against some much more experience players from other universities. There was a slight chance that UTS would be able to make it to the finals but unfortunately our loss to UNSW (The University of New South Wales) meant that we wouldn’t make it to the finals. Once again UTS lost to the eventual champions of the competition.
Overall it was a very good performance by UTS and UTS Kendo Club, all the members should be very proud of their performances on the day. We’d like to thank all the members who have put in a lot of hard work over the last couple of months in preparation for this year’s Australian Uni Games and also to Jayson Chaplin, our coach for this year’s uni games. Jayson is also representing Australia next year in the World Kendo Championships so we’d like to take this opportunity to wish him good luck!
For full results of the competition visit:
http://www.utskendoclub.com
http://www.unisport.com.au