Kali­fa Mc Collin-Lopez and Keon Rus­sell com­bined to lead the Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T (UTT) to vic­to­ry over MIC Tigers to re­tain the Courts Open Knock­out ti­tle in the All Sec­tors Net­ball League at the East­ern Re­gion­al In­door Sports Are­na in Tacarigua on Sat­ur­day.

In the fi­nal of the com­pe­ti­tion which fea­tured 11 clubs, UTT emerged with a hard-fought 30-23 win over the Tigers in the 20-minute-a-half con­test. Two men were al­lowed on the court in this event and they showed up to play, sev­er­al of them mem­bers of the na­tion­al men’s team, which fin­ished sec­ond at the Amer­i­c­as Tour­na­ment last year in St Kitts and Nevis.

Rus­sell was one of them, in fact, he was the “Most Valu­able Play­er” (MVP) for the T&T team and dis­played some of his shoot­ing abil­i­ty to get the win for UTT. The goal-shoot­er con­nect­ed 11 goals from 14 at­tempts and his goal-at­tack Mc Collin-Lopez did well to feed him while pro­duc­ing a match-high 18 in 23 tries.

The duo had the even­tu­al win­ner ahead at the half, 15-11, be­fore seal­ing the sev­en-goal win. This af­ter beat­ing Sn Juan Jabloteh in the semi­fi­nals, 43-15. The Uni­ver­si­ty team ad­vanced af­ter Po­lice, who was on a bye in the first round, for­feit­ed in the quar­ter­fi­nal round, while UTT claimed a huge 47-12 win in its open­ing round match against De­fence Force.

For MIC, goal-at­tack Janeisha Cas­simy net­ted the bulk of the goals with 16 in 19. She shared the goal-at­tack bib with Jabari Perez and he scored four goals off six tries. Na­tion­al men’s cap­tain Steve Mc Sween, net­ted the oth­er three goals from four at­tempts.

MIC’s route to the fi­nal in­clud­ed wins against Bermudez, 32-22, in the quar­ter­fi­nals and a com­fort­able 41-12 vic­to­ry over the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) in the oth­er semi­fi­nal.

The ac­tion restarts on Thurs­day, with the con­tin­u­a­tion of the knock­out com­pe­ti­tions in the Al­ter­na­tive and Cham­pi­onship Di­vi­sions which be­gan on Sun­day. Teams in the Al­ter­na­tive sec­tion are com­pet­ing in match­es 15 min­utes each way while teams in the oth­er cat­e­go­ry are com­pet­ing in match­es four quar­ters of 15 min­utes, bat­tling for the Jean Pierre Chal­lenge ti­tle.

Sat­ur­day’s re­sults

Fi­nal

UTT 30 (Keon Rus­sell 11/14, Kali­fa Mc Collin-Lopez 18/23, Jelis­sa Goodridge 1/2) vs MIC 23 (Janeisha Cas­simy 16/19, Jabari Perez 4/6, Steve Mc Sween 3/4). Half time: 15-11 (UTT)

Semi­fi­nals

Jabloteh 15 vs UTT 43

UWI 12 vs MIC 41

Quar­ter­fi­nals

UTC 17 vs Jabloteh 20

UTT vs Po­lice. UTT won by de­fault.

UWI 34 vs Fire Youth 6

Bermudez 22 vs MIC 32

First round

UTC vs TT Post. UTC won by de­fault

De­fence Force 12 vs UTT 47

UWI 29 vs PNYC 12