TRINIDAD and Tobago's players Arun Roopnarine and Aaron Wilson exited at the quarterfinal stage of the cadet (under-15) team event in the Scotiabank Canada Junior Open Table Tennis Tournament on Wednesday.

After advancing to the knockout stage of the competition by finishing second in Group C, this country's players were eliminated by the United States in the battle for a place in the semifinals.

Wilson gave T&T the lead when the winner of the recent Tobago Open defeated Theodore Tran 9-11, 11-7, 11-9, 11-9, but the North Americans battled back to win the next three matches.

Later Wilson had a golden opportunity to force a deciding fifth match when he led Kunol Chodri by two games to love. But the American roared back and eventually prevailed 12-14, 9-11, 12-10, 11-9, 11-6.

Chodri had earlier tied the fixture at 1-1 when he halted national under-21 champion Roopnarine 11-7, 12-10, 11-9 and then he combined with Tran to beat the two T&T players 12-10, 11-9, 12-10 in doubles.

Earlier in the day, T&T had been whipped 3-0 by the ITTF (International Table Tennis Federation) North American team in their final group fixture. But they had already been assured of a quarter-final place after trouncing both Canada 4 and Barbados 3-0 the day before.

In singles both Wilson and Roopnarine, a member of the team which was crowned Caribbean champions in August, finished third in their groups and failed to advance to the knockout phase as only the top two players moved forward.

It was a heart-breaking elimination for Wilson as the national under-15 and 18 champ tied with two others players with two wins each, but had the worse points-ratio of the three.

Action in the junior (under-18) event was contested yesterday with both T&T players seeded second in their respective groups. However no results had been obtained by press time.