The 2024 Ha Dong Singles - Doubles - Mixed Table Tennis Tournament - an annual tournament in the Ha Dong Super League table tennis tournament system - will be held on December 7-8.
Growing from team competition…
Starting as a grassroots tournament between district-level clubs, after more than a decade, Ha Dong Super League has become one of the table tennis tournament systems with the largest number of athletes and data systems in the country. The 2024 team tournament alone had more than 1,000 athletes participating.
Ha Dong Super League also owns a ranking data system of more than 1,600 athletes, along with a system of image data and competition clips of thousands of amateur athletes. At this playground, many young players from traditional clubs have the opportunity to compete with experienced amateur athletes, thereby improving their skills and abilities.
Therefore, the number of players participating in team tournaments as well as singles and doubles tournaments increases every season.
...to the Ha Dong Singles - Doubles - Mixed Tournament
The 2024 Ha Dong Singles - Doubles - Mixed Tournament is an annual tournament in the Ha Dong Super League table tennis tournament system, held after the team tournament ends.
For this year's tournament, some categories were filled within an hour of the announcement. The organizers had to consider expanding the "room" to increase the competition opportunities for athletes.
Increasing the number of athletes for a grassroots tournament using socialized funding sources like the Ha Dong Super League is a big challenge for the organizing committee.
Accordingly, the 2024 Singles - Doubles - Mixed tournament has a scale of 32 athletes for ABCD singles, 80 DEF singles, 80 FG singles, 64 mixed pairs from A-G, 32 mixed pairs from A-G.
The organizing committee collects a single entry fee of VND300,000/athlete and VND400,000/pair. The total amount collected from athletes participating in the tournament is VND96 million.
According to the organizers, this limited income is difficult to cover items such as: renting a field with a scale of 15 - 20 tables for 2 days is 25 million VND; prize money is more than 40 million VND; cup and medal money is 12 million VND and some other expenses such as backdrop, sound, medical, water...
Talking to Lao Dong, Mr. Dinh Cong Minh - Head of the organizing committee said: "Organizing a grassroots tournament from socialized resources is really difficult for table tennis. The reason is that players are picky because of difficult techniques, the audience is not popular and people who do not know how to play almost do not watch. Finding sponsors is very difficult because there is not much promotion.
Although there are still many difficulties, we still try to learn from experience and gradually improve in the organization. Currently, the Ha Dong amateur tournament has a smart data management method, scientific match arrangement, team formation, automatic minutes update, simple operations on smartphones and can be done anywhere.
Not only developing in quantity, the organizing committee also focuses on the quality of the tournament. The application of the rules in the tournament will be stricter, requiring more standard competition preparation. Ha Dong Super League will cooperate with the Vietnam Table Tennis Federation to train a class of certified referees to serve the tournament in the long term."
The representative of the organizing committee also expressed the desire to have a stable location to carry out the goal of training new athletes, and in the future, it can become a strong local table tennis cradle like Hai Duong.
Of course, to do this, we cannot do without the support and companionship of management agencies as well as benefactors, for the country's table tennis in general and Ha Dong in particular.
