Aditya Madkekar and Isha Lakhani top seeded in National tennis

New Delhi, Sep 29 (UNI) Mumbai's Aditya Madkekar and Isha Lakhani have been top seeded in the Men's and Women's section respectively in the DSCL National Open tennis championship starting here from tomorrow.

Aditya has an easy first round as he runs into a qualifier, while second seed Ashutosh Singh is drawn to play Navinderpal Singh.

The rest of the seeds are Vishnu Vardhan seeded thrid, Vivek Shokeen (4th), Vijay Kannan (5th), Tushar Librahan (6th), Vinod Sridhar (7th) and Navdeep Singh (8th).

As defending champion Purav Raja has opted out, the field now is open for a new champion to emerge.

Delhi's Yuki Bhambri, who got a wild card in the tourney, could also cause a few ripples as he did well in the qualifiers of the ongoing Kingfisher Open, an ATP tennis event being played in Mumbai, earlier this week before losing in the final round.

There are some familiar faces like Rupesh Roy as well in the main draw who runs into Navdeep Sigh in first round. Among the hopefuls considered to be good enough to represent the country in the coming years, Chandigarh based Tushar Librahan faces Vijayant Malik in the opening round.

Tushar did well in the qualifiers in Mumbai before eventually losing to Chen Ti, whereas Vijayant is in the transition stage.

However, the battle of the baseliners promises to be interesting.

The return of Rushmi Chakravarthy in the women's section should lend weight to the competition where she is the seeded second, while Sanaa Bhambri is the third seed, followed by Sonal Phadke (4th), Parija Maloo (5th), Asha Nandakumar (6th), Shweta Solanki (7th) and Parul Goswami (8th).

In the boys' under-18 section, Vijayant Malik is the top seed and G P Prajnesh is the second seed.

Meanwhile, as per expectations, some of the good first round matches are going to take place between Lakshit Sood and Navinder Pal Singh; A S Suresh Krishna and Tariq Jacob; Pulkit Mishra and Sitaram Sudhanwa.

In girls' under-18 category, Kyra Shroff is the top seed and Shweta Solanki from Delhi is the second seed. The seeded players in girls' section have a first round bye.

UNI