All the teams did their best to win, there were LOTS of very close matches. In the morning’s round robin there were two groups, which means there were 6 matches in each group and amazingly 4 of the matches in each group went to dream breakers. So total of 12 matches and 8 dream breaker games in the morning.
The top two teams went through to Semi-Finals with Roehampton beating Scantastics 3-1 and Franklin Family beating Team 305 3-1.
In the Bronze medal play off, there was another dream breaker with Scantastics victorious.
In the Gold medal final, Franklin won the Women’s Doubles and Roehampton won the Men’s Doubles, which was a reversal of how it went when they met each other in the Round Robin. Then Roehampton won the Mixed Doubles 19+ which meant that Franklin Family needed to win the Mixed Doubles 50+ to force another Dreambreaker, which is exactly what happened! Franklin Family lost the toss and named their player order: Thaddea, Jamie, Chris, Karen. Louis decided that he would set up a battle of the sexes between himself and Thaddea, so played himself, Mark, Rachel and Anty. It was a REALLY close game with the lead being taken by both teams several times along the way. Thaddea managed to take 4 points off Louis, Rachel took 4 points off Chris. In the end the youngest player in the event, Jamie Basford, hit the winning ball for Franklin Family to win 25-23.
During the event, the team sponsors represented by Jared Franklin and Aaron Stahl watched every game played by their team with smiles on their faces throughout but their joy when their team were victorious was pure. They proudly received the ‘Medhurst Cup’, named after Ian Medhurst who sadly died a few years ago. Ian was a father figure to many in pickleball and epitomised fair play, fun and competition. He was the first Team Europe captain for the Bainbridge Cup.
The Franklin Family team players proudly received their trophies and prize money. £500 for each player is nothing compared to the original MLP but the players were all pleased to receive it. Roehampton Club players received £200 each and Scantastics won £100 each.
In addition to the prize money we were also able to make a £1,000 donation to ‘Boot Out Breast Cancer’ a local charity focussed on providing equipment to local hospitals to help earlier diagnosis.