HKFC Squash Japan Tour (By Rob Baseball Jones)

14~15 March 2015

It was a long, long time ago when HKFC Squash last visited Japan and spaces for this tour quickly filled up with excited players and supporters!  It seemed to fill up even before it was officially announced!  When the tour finally rolled around we had 15 HKFC participants comprising a good mix of husbands/wives, fathers/sons, and singles.    

We had a nice sleep in Saturday morning and then it was down to business at the Tokyo American Club (TAC) just after lunch.  Unfortunately for HKFC, the opposition stacked their team with very handy players and HKFC went down 10-3.  I hereby throw down the gauntlet for more highly ranked HKFC players to join us on these fun tours in the future!  Luckily, we felt much better after TAC threw a nice dinner and drink spread to get us started for the night. 

First stop afterwards was a Japanese ‘show’ that only photos and memories can adequately describe – words can’t do justice!   You can see from a few select photos here that our beloved tour captain Adrian Wildman Ng (John Travolta in disguise) rather enjoyed himself at the show.  After the show, we split into groups going after Japanese noodles, rugby watch, and other nefarious activities, with most of us ending the night past 1am, and some ending it just before sunrise.

On Sunday morning we were supposed to arrive at the Yokohama Country Athletic Club (YCAC) at 9am sharp.  Unfortunately, we all arrived late thinking surely our teammates would be earlier than us, after shaking off violent chills, dehydration, and other general hang-over ailments and sleep deprivation.  Once we got going, our HKFC squash training paid off in spades as we routed the YCAC 14-10.  And YCAC treated us afterwards to a wonderful lunch on the YCAC grounds.   Michael Yang then gave us a nice tour of some of the sights of Yokohama including a beautiful Japanese garden and a few of the local and visitor tourist and shopping districts.

As mentioned above, the tour is best described through photos rather than words so I’ll keep this short to make room for more of the action photos!   Special thanks to all of the participants that made this a wonderful tour, to Adrian Wildman Ng for organizing, to Michael Yang for setting up the YCAC visit, to tour men’s MVP Mark Sutcliffe who never dropped a game over the two days, to tour ladies’ MVP Vivi Thomas who won all of her matches, to Keith (Vivi Thomas’s husband) and Yasmin (Tom Chamberlain’s wife) for supporting HKFC on and off the courts, to Nathan Chan for stepping up and winning some epic battles as our #1 ranked player on tour, to George Chan for playing injured, and to Isaiah Jones who played through jet lag after arriving from New York. 

More Photos below (Click to enlarge)