Shetland Squash U19’s played a three way inter county recently against Orkney and Caithness. This was the first year that the inter county was played with the new European Squash format. This consists of best of 5 games and first to 11 points in each game where a point can be scored on every rally. The number of matches was also changed to the top 12 players rather than the previous format of top 6 boys and top 3 girls. The Shetland team was short its top two seeds and another player in its top six with only two of the Shetland Team having played competitive inter county squash previously. The unchanged Orkney team made up for last years defeat by winning all 12 matches. However the young Shetland team still managed to push them in each game scoring a total of 183 points. The closest match was between Shetlands second youngest player Hannah Garrick and the Orkney number four seed Andrew Moar with Hannah just missing out 3 to 2 in games after some fine squash.  

The match against Caithness was not anymore pleasant viewing for Shetland. Caithness have a strong team which is shown by their number one, Jamie Henderson, who at only 14 years old, is in the top 4 in Scotland in his age group and has beaten all the adult players in his club. Shetland only scored 150 points in total. However there were some strong performances from Calvin Leask, Hannah Garrick, Leanne Jamieson and Abigail Kellman. However the match of the tournament had to be the friendly between Amir Ahmed and Patrick Nicol the five setter had three games that went over 11 points and an electric atmosphere through out. Patrick eventually closed out the match 12-10 in the fifth. 

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