On Saturday the 2nd of March the first audition of the Ken Doherty Lucky Break competition was held in Douglas Snooker Club in Cork. This competition is being filmed for Setanta Sports TV Channel. 56 under 18 players attended to show off their skills. The players were judged by Ken Doherty, Gay Burns and our National Coach PJ Nolan.
All the players were given time on the table with a practice drill to impress the judges with their talent, attitude, commitment and personality during their audition. The judges had a very hard task in trying to narrow the 56 down to the 8 from this Cork audition.
Next week in the Ken Doherty Academy in Dublin there will be the final Audition where 8 more will be selected. The sixteen players will then be officially announced and if Dublin’s talent is anything like in Cork the judges will have a hard task in finding eight.
Ken Doherty thanked all the players and parents for coming to the audition and he was very impressed the amount of young talented players.
PJ Nolan gave a coaching seminar to the players on developing their shot approach of coming in on line and cueing straight while Ken Doherty gave a master class on Break Building positional play. The players also availed of the PJ’s training books which were on hand for all the players to bring home and study to improve their game more.
Karl and Martin Busteed from Douglas snooker club were excellent hosts and their team of club officials did a superb job of making it a great day for everyone on the day.
The judges will then have to reduce the 16 qualifiers from Cork and Dublin to the final four and these four will go to the Crucible and play in an International match against an England and Wales select team. The final prize for one of the four will be a years scholarship to improve his or her game with the help of Ken Doherty and Ireland’s top coaches.
The whole show will appear on Setanta TV later on in the year and it promises to be a great promotion for Junior Snooker in Ireland in trying to get more players playing this beautiful game on the green baize.
