Teenager steps up a grade

Mangakahia's Sasha Pou-Tito showed good early-season form to defend her women's title against a higher-ranked player in the final of the Whangarei Squash Open.
Her A2-ranked opponent, North Shore's Michelle Heron, started well, winning the first game, but Pou-Tito, currently a B2-ranked player, came back at her, taking the next two games easily.
The final game was a thriller and kept the audience riveted. Heron lifted her game again and came back at the teenager but Pou-Tito wasn't willing to give away her advantage and finally won 13-11 to complete the 3-1 win.
"I don't know how I did it but it probably was younger legs in the end," Pou-Tito said.
"She was ranked higher than me, about 200 points ahead, so I was pretty stoked with the win." The 18-year-old Pou-Tito is hoping to cap off her last year as a junior with a good result in the New Zealand Age Group Nationals in Auckland in April and has been training over the off-season.
She defeated Wellsford's Brittany Gibbons 3-0 in her semifinal, with Heron beating Pou-Tito's club teammate Miranda Jex-Blake 3-0 in the other semifinal.
There were no such upsets in the men's open final, with Kamo 19-year-old Daniel Notton beating fellow B2 grader Ron Houben, from the Whangarei club, 3-0 to take the title. Indeed, the upsets came earlier.
The up-and-coming Notton beat one of the two B1 players in the competition, Waipu's Gordon Pryor, in the semifinal, while the other B1 player Mike Hebditch - the top seed - was knocked out by Whangarei's Jared Gravatt in a five-set marathon.
Hebditch was a little under the weather physically, but the effort of beating him may have cost Gravatt a place in the final, after he lost to Pryor in another five-setter in the second semifinal.
Byrce Phillips beat Alan Bee 3-0 in an all-Whangarei club final to win the men's Division Two final while Maungaturoto's Kaitlin Foster beat Mania's Nicola Pryor to win the women's title 3-0.
The Division Three men's title went to Whangarei top seed Sam Sayes, who beat Peter Houben 3-0, while Whangarei's Robyn Hammon beat Kamo's Bridget Johnson by the same margin in the women's final.
Kaitaia's Jerrie Coetzee won the men's Divison Four title, with Whangarei's Zoe Dykzeul taking the women's, while her brother Sam won the Division Five title and Taka Skipworth took the women's title.