SINGAPORE - Glenda Teo and Ng Yi Hsuan have had mixed results in playing deciding matches.
In their first year of partnership, the girls clinched the 2016 C Division Table Tennis Championship for Nanyang Girls' High School after winning the decider. The next year, however, they lost and Nanyang finished second.
Competing in the B Division this year, the 15-year-olds were determined to return to winning ways and they did it at the Pasir Ris Sports Hall on Friday (April 20), after beating Cayla Tan and Lim Ye Ning of Raffles Girls' School (RGS) to seal a 3-1 win and make history for their school.
Nanyang's C Division team had earlier dethroned defending champions RGS 3-1 in the final yesterday - this is the first time Nanyang have won both titles in the same year.
Said Glenda: "We're very happy... we can't believe it."
An emotional Yi Hsuan, who wept tears of joy after the match, added: "We were quite nervous because we were the deciding pair who won two years ago, but we played the decider last year too and we lost."
The key to their win yesterday, she explained, was spending more time training together.
The duo hit it off immediately during their first training session two years ago and became good friends.
But external commitments subsequently resulted in less time training together, and the girls drifted apart from each other.
Said Yi Hsuan, who estimates that they saw each other only about thrice a week last year: "(This year) we tried to coordinate when we could go for training together so we could train as a team. We see each other a lot now, from Monday to Saturday."
Glenda added: "We talked to each other more during our match today, and it was the mutual trust (that got us the win)."
In the boys' C Division final, Hwa Chong Institution upset defending champions Raffles Institution (RI) 3-0 to win their first title since 1999.
But there was joy for RI in the B Division, as they retained the boys' title with a 3-1 win over Hwa Chong. They also successfully retained the A Division boys' and girls' crowns.
