Today, Turkmen tennis players traveled from Ashgabat via Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan for the Junior Davis Cup U16 final qualification, which will take place from 18th to 23rd of May in Shymkent with the participation of 16 of the best teams from the Asian region.
The Turkmenistan team earned its first place in the final qualifying round of this prestigious tournament following its performance in the preliminary qualifying round, which took place in Colombo in March of this year.
As a reminder, 15 teams participated in the DCJ Asia/Oceania Pre-Qualifying tournament, held in the capital of Sri Lanka under the auspices of the International tennis federation (ITF) jointly with the Asian tennis federation (ATF).
The sixth-seeded Turkmenistan team was represented by Suleyman Hudayberdiyev, a 9th-grade student from Ashgabat specialised secondary School №86; Ali Geldiyev, a 9th-grade student from the Young Olympians Training School; and Kerimgeldi Guldurdyyev, a 9th-grade student from the Joint Turkmen-Russian Secondary Comprehensive School named after A.S. Pushkin. Our team captain at the Junior Davis Cup was 31-year-old coach and teacher at the Higher School of Sports Mastery of Turkmenistan, bronze medallist of the 2024 Turkmenistan Cup, Gurbanberdi Gurbanberdiyev.
In the first stage, our compatriots took first place in Group «B», defeating the Omani team 3:0 and achieving comeback victories with the same score of 2:1 over the teams of Myanmar and Singapore (2nd seed). In the quarterfinals, the Turkmen juniors defeated their fifth-seeded peers from the Philippines 2-0 and entered the top four teams of the tournament for the first time in history!
In addition to representatives from Turkmenistan, teams from Australia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, China, the Republic of Korea, Pakistan, Thailand, Chinese Taipei, Uzbekistan, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka will compete for four spots in the main tournament at the U16 Junior Davis Cup Asian Qualifiers in Shymkent.
The opponents of Turkmen team will be determined by a draw that will take place before the start of the tournament.
The Junior Davis Cup was launched by the International tennis federation (ITF) in 1985 as the Junior World Cup for boys under 16, and was renamed to its current name in 2002. Each year, countries participate in regional qualifying competitions, the winners of which advance to the finals, where they compete for the title of champion.
