Sunday, November 6, 2016 (Ithaca, NY)- Just three weeks after holding its first tournament of the season, the Eastern Collegiate Taekwondo Conference (ECTC) held its second tournament at Cornell University. Unphased by the quick turnaround, each team returned to competition in full force, as 400 athletes from 26 schools attended the tournament.

 

The morning started off with Poomsae Competition. Like the MIT Tournament, each division contained five poomsae judges, and the Green Belts through Black Belt divisions were scored with Poomsae Pro, an electronic scoring system. Each division was extremely talent-packed, but walking away with the gold medals were Ali-Amir Aldan (MIT) and Anya Quenon (MIT) in the White/Yellow Belt Division, Pulkit Jain (Tufts) and Zihan Lin (University of Connecticut) in the Green Belt Division, Samuel Majors (MIT) and Sarah Evans (University of Vermont) in the Blue Belt Division, Jaydev Dave (Tufts) and Nina Anwar (MIT) in the Red Belt Division, and Andrew Hurd (Northeastern) and Josephine Wong (Cornell) in the Black Belt Division.

 

After Poomsae Competition ended, Sparring Competition began to ramp up. Each athlete fought hard in their respective division, and their teammates fervently cheered their athletes ringside. "I like that schools can interact, friendly, without hard feelings towards each other”, stated Yoko Nakatani, from Boston University. “It’s interesting to see lots of different [experience] levels."  said  Margaret Jeong, from Stony Brook University. In the C-team division, Lehigh C1 (Anuroop Albert, Ian Bender, Ben Bonner) and Cornell C1 (Marissa Polack, Sarah Novello, Kristine Lai) took first in the Men’s and Women’s division respectively. In the B-team division, Tufts took double gold by winning both the Men’s (B1 (Jaydev Dave, Sanggyu Suh, Pulkit Jain)) and Women’s (B1 (Yennie Jun, Caroline Scheck, Kira Tomlinson)) Division. Finally, in the advanced A-team division, Cornell A1 dominated the Men’s Division (Jared Gurba, Kyosan Ku, Jeremy Fredricks), while Brown A1 took gold in the Women’s Division (Nari Lee, Katelynn Pan, Juliette Randazza).

 

After an exciting day of competition, Cornell took first place in Division I, Brown University took first in Division II, and Stony Brook University took first place in Division III. Overall, Cornell took first place for the tournament, while Tufts and Brown University took second and third place respectively. The last ECTC Tournament of the semester will be hosted at Brown University on November 19th.