Arpas and Leal headline stacked gold rush at WTT Youth Prishtina

Samuel Arpas and Julia Leal left Prishtina looking less like youth-tour standouts and more like players pressing toward the next tier. Arpas, the U19 boys top seed and world No. 13, survived Ivan Kahn 3-2 in a final that swung 10-12, 11-5, 12-10, 11-10, while Leal added the U19 girls crown to the U17 girls title in a week that underlined how far she has already pushed past the field.

That U19 boys final mattered because the draw was set up as a true ranking test. Arpas entered with 5,770 points, Kahn with 3,545, and the gap did not show on the table once the match reached the deciding phases. Arpas had already handled Jan Skalda 3-0 in the semifinal, but the final was the kind of narrow escape that tells senior-level coaches more than a routine win ever could. Leal’s path was just as revealing. She edged Olha Ponko 3-2 in the semifinal before beating Karolina Holda 3-1 in the title match, then came back through the U17 girls bracket to leave Prishtina with two gold medals.

The wider medal table, though, showed how deep the stop was. Louis Fegerl swept the U15 boys title with a 3-0 win over Spyros Sarigiannidis and then added the U13 boys crown. Ela Yonter matched that kind of dominance by taking the U15 girls title 3-0 over Kinda Mostafa and pairing with Salih Yildirim for the U15 mixed doubles gold. Jan Skalda won U17 boys, Aybige Ustundag claimed U13 girls, Taavi Samaraweera took U11 boys and Zana Bllaca won U11 girls, giving the event a full spread of champions across the age bands.

The mixed doubles also widened the event’s international footprint. Max Radiven and Mariana Santa won the U19 mixed doubles, while Yildirim and Yonter took the U15 mixed title. England’s four-player group in Kosovo, Radiven, Janak Shah, Oscar Nikolli and Nishil Shah, helped deepen the field, and that mattered in a tournament with 11 events and USD 1,000 in prize money. Prishtina came only a month after Sarajevo on the Youth Series calendar, and the back-to-back Balkan stops offered a clear ladder: rack up matches, collect points and see who can survive when the draw tightens. Here, Arpas and Leal looked closest to carrying this momentum into bigger WTT stages.