A TRIO of Wiltshire tennis coaches have made a fine start in their quest for medals at the 21st Summer Deaflympics in Taipei, Taiwan.
Devizes Sports Club's Daniel Tunstall and Lewis Fletcher and Catherine Graham, joint head coaches at Ramsbury Tennis Club, have all reached the second round in their respective men's and women's singles events.
Tunstall has also progressed to the second round of the men's doubles.
Fletcher pulled off the most notable result during Monday's second day of action in Taipei, coming from a set down on his Deaflympic Games debut to beat Austrian second seed Daniel Elbacher 4-6, 6-2, 6-1.
He was joined in the second round of the men's singles by Tunstall, who turned up for his first round match on Sunday, only to be awarded a walkover after his scheduled Nigerian opponent did not show.
Fletcher plays the Slovak Republic's Peter Karlik in the last 16, while Tunstall has a much more difficult task against Hungarian top seed Gabor Mathe.
Like Tunstall, Graham is competing in her fourth Deaflympics and she got her women's singles challenge underway with a comfortable 6-0, 6-0 win over Japan's Mizue Tsujioka.
The 26-year-old six-time national champion, who won a women's doubles bronze medal four years ago in Melbourne, plays Chinese Taipei's Chiu-Mei Ho in the last eight as she bids to go beyond the quarter-final stage that she reached at the Melbourne Deaflympics in 2005.
The start of the men's doubles brought further success for Tunstall, who paired up with Hampshire's Jamie King to edge their way in to the second round with a 7-6(2), 6-4 victory over Australians Jamie Zafir and Peter Lui.
Tunstall and King meet Austrian third seeds Erlbacher and Mario Kargl in the quarter-finals, with the two Austrian likely to be tough opponents as they bid re make up for first round singles losses.
Fletcher and Cheshire's Darren O'Donnell, Britain's other men's doubles pairing, are the fourth seeds and had a first round bye.
They start their doubles challenge on Tuesday against Japan's Kajishita and Tetsuya Matsushita. Graham and Northern Ireland's Anthony Sinclair are second seeds in the mixed doubles, an event in which they were semi-finalists in Melbourne in 2005, and they also had a first round bye before taking on Chinese Taipei's Yu-Chen Lai and Ta-Li Kao later in the week.
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