Wing Ding Charity Tournament (by Channi Matharu)

The eagerly anticipated HKFC Annual Wing Ding Charity Tournament was held on the 2nd December 2017. This event has been held since 1999 and for the last 14 years, it has supported the charity Operation Santa Claus.

Link to full Gallery of 2017 Wing Ding photos Here

Operation Santa Claus (OSC) is the annual charity campaign, jointly organized by the South China Morning Post and RTHK. Over the years, Operation Santa Claus donors have raised over HK$110 million in funds and encouraged Hongkongers to share their good fortune with the needy during the winter festive season.

The Event was the culmination of six months of hard work by the Wing Ding organizing committee ably led by Steve Gollop, aided and abetted by his trusted sidekick, Mr Excel himself, aka David Murray and there was further support from a select team of volunteers from the squash section.

The Committee

The format of the tournament was no different to previous years but had some additional attractions this year.

For the first time in the history of the event, we included a junior Wing Ding as a warm up to the main event. The teams consisted of members enrolled on the various coaching programmes at the club.

For the main event, in addition to the requirement for fancy dress, additional points were awarded to the teams with painted faces and to cater for this, we had a face painting set up in the store room; of course, there was a nominal charge for this service, all in the name of charity.

Finally, we had the radar gun challenge running in parallel with the running tournament; this has in fact been running for a few years now and is always popular with the hard hitters.

JUNIOR WING DING

Junior Wing Ding players and coaches

The junior event was well organized by our coach Matt Robinson who managed to shepherd together a total of 18 juniors into six teams of three, each team being allocated a colour for the dress theme. The kids joined into the spirit of the event with appropriate attire, the best of them being Darth Vader in disguise as Shaun.

Shaun as Darth Vader

It did not take long for the juniors to get into their stride, producing some excellent squash and showcasing the efforts of all the coaches; there were some excellent individual efforts with the best of them being from Jillian Lam who was the runaway leader on the points table.

Individual winner – Jillian Lam

Action on the court and plenty of support off it.

The Red team was the overall winner and the event concluded with awards to the winners, the prizes being sponsored by Blade.

MAIN WING DING EVENT

The main event was as usual, a running teams fun squash tournament with 12 teams of 10 players competing in fancy dress. Team colours were allocated to each of the treams by the organizers and the teams had the freedom to select their own theme for the fancy dress. The creative geniuses may not be a threat to the Hollywood wardrobe designers but they did a pretty good job for OSC. We had:

While the outfits earned the teams bonus points which were added to the overall score, additional points were available for those team opting to indulge in face decoration; this was done admirably by our expert team, assisted by some juniors.

The Face Painting Team

In action – a definite improvement

After all the excitement over dressing up and touching up your eyebrows, the action moved onto the squash courts with six of the courts fully occupied for the next few hours with the Disco Groovers strutting their stuff while the Hawaiians sashayed their way from court to court. The Barbies, not to be out done, fluttered their eyelashes and with a flash of knickers, went in search from court to court, looking for Ken.

The Basket Ballers bounced their balls (what else) but had no hoops and the whole experience was a bit too much for some of the Xmas Trees, who ended up shedding their pines before Christmas.

While the Ironmen and Spidermen were battling it out to save the world (and collect some money for OSC), the Cowboys were up to no good, doing a bit of rustling of their own, for points not cattle. The Minions? Well, they just sat and waited for their orders from Gru.

The Female Prisoners saw their opportunity for a mass breakout amongst the chaos that was Wing Ding but did not make it far over the glass back walls of the squash courts; they were captured having a drink at the Captains Bar.

The normally feared Spartans tried plunder points out of their opponents with tantalizing offerings rather than spears and swords but it was all to no avail, being pipped to the post by the Olafs, who got their cake and ate it too, coming in at the top of the points table.