The tandem of Tyce Mister and Chris Nelson secured the right to represent the CNMI in the 2006 Micronesian Games on the local sand courts after emerging from a fiercesome foursome during the Northern Mariana Islands Volleyball Association\u2019s final qualification tournament on Sunday afternoon at the Pacific Islands Club. <\/p>\n
Mister-Nelson defeated Dan Westphal and Nick Castro in the final round of the invitation-only affair with a resounding 21-15 victory on the San Antonio sand to complete their sudden return to the CNMI spotlight.<\/p>\n
The champs made their first advance at the finals with a win over 21-12 win over Kaycee Rengaelur and Quincy Johnson, and followed with a convincing 21-11 win over the favored combo of Marino Pungilug and Jess Palacios to earn a seat in the finals. <\/p>\n
Many involved with the local beachside scene thought that Pungilug-Palacios was the team to beat through the first three rounds of the open qualifying. After they posted a less than impressive showing two weeks ago in the fourth tournament, some began to wonder if the duo had fell out of their rhythm by playing with a number of other partners. <\/p>\n
Westphal-Castro remained under the radar throughout the qualifying process\u2014advancing through the ranks with a mark of consistency. On Sunday, the pair was knocked to the losers\u2019 bracket in the first round when Pungilug-Palacios escaped with a narrow 22-20 win.<\/p>\n
Facing elimination with the next loss, Westphal-Castro regained focus to send Rengaelur-Johnson packing with a 21-19 victory. From there, the duo got revenge over Pungilug-Palacios in a 23-21 thriller that went deep into extra points to advance to the final.<\/p>\n
While Mister-Nelson will take the sand this summer for the CNMI, Castro will be waiting in the wings after he was named the alternate.<\/p>\n
Now that the men\u2019s team has been decided, all that remains is NMIVA\u2019s final best-of-three competition between Peterka-Kennedy and Halaby-Guzman to ultimately decide who will march behind the latte stone, star, and mwarmwar this summer for the women. The action returns to the PIC tonight at 5:30pm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The tandem of Tyce Mister and Chris Nelson secured the right to represent the CNMI in the 2006 Micronesian Games on the local sand courts after emerging from a fiercesome foursome during the Northern Mariana Islands Volleyball Association\u2019s final qualification tournament on Sunday afternoon at the Pacific Islands Club. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97851\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}