Unfortunately, the Homer Shoop Scholarship has been discontinued beginning with the year 2004. We're sorry that decision was made as we think Mickey Creech would have been a good candidate. He picked up his first Masterpoints on August 23, 2003 at John Knox Village Duplicate Club with .28 points and went on to collect more points including silver at various Sectional Tournaments in and around Kansas City. Mickey is currently ranked as a Junior Master. Keep up the good work, Mickey, as the King of Bridge Scholarship is still a possiblity in your senior year of high school. Mickey picked up his first red and gold points at the Lawrence, Kansas Regional in the Swiss Teams event on September 11, 2005. Good Work!
The 2005 Instant Matchpoint Competition was held all over North America on April 22. This competition provides for the highest scoring students in the North-South and East-West pairs in North America to each receive a $500 scholarship. In the Lee's Summit area, 16 tables participated. Holy Spirit Catholic Church provided the space and John Knox Village Duplicate Club and W-S Duplicate Club provided bidding boxes. Tom Lyons from JKV Duplicate Club helped out as director. Additionally, three members of Unit 131 were on hand to provide assistance. In 3 previous years, our area has always placed one or more pairs in the top 10. This year was no different. We placed 2nd and 4th in North America East-West! The top three pairs for each direction in Lee's Summit are listed below.
North-South:
Becky McKinney (5th grade) & Bret Hamilton (6th grade) from Greenwood Elementary 802 points
Austin Williams (6th grade) & Brody Burgdorf (4th grade) from Greenwood Elementary 758 points
Will Doering (5th grade) Greenwood Elementary & Greg Phipps (6th grade) Cedar Creek Elementary 738 points
East-West:
Jared (6th grade) & Thomas Gardner (6th grade, shown here) Cedar Creek Elementary 827 points 2nd Place in North America!
Dominic (6th grade) Trail Ridge Elementary & his brother Mike (9th grade) Lee's Summit West High School 732 points 4th place in North America!
Jonathan Snowden (6th grade) & Tyler Koepsel (5th grade) Meadow Lane Elementary 625 points
Cedar Creek Elementary ASPIRE students finished their classes with a mini-tournament on April 19, 2005. Each student played 8 of 11 boards from last year's Matchpoint Competition. First place went to Jacob with 550 matchpoints and 2nd place went to Jared with 528 matchpoints.
Meadow Lane Elementary's 4th through 6th grade ASPIRE class had their mini-tournament on April 18, 2005. Each student played 7 boards from last year's Matchpoint Competition. The winner of the match was Alli Bearly with 409 instant matchpoints.
Trailridge Elementary students finished their classes on April 5, 2005 with a mini-tournament. Josh finished in 1st place with 603 instant matchpoints and Aaron finished second with 395 matchpoints. Two tables of bridge were in play with 7 boards from last spring's National Instant Matchpoint Competition. The students changed partners after each hand so that individual scores could be tracked.
