I’m excited to have reached the Junior Master status, as it brings me one step closer to eventually becoming a life master.

As a twenty-one year old, I’m confident I’ll be able to reach life master eventually, it’s just a matter of when. My grandfather, Richard Correnti, taught my cousins and I to play bridge about ten years ago when we were 9-12. We grew up playing other card games with the family, such as pitch and hearts, which formed a great basis for learning bridge. For a while, we simply enjoyed playing casually at family gatherings – bridge became the sort of default activity if nothing else was going on.

However, over the last year, my eldest cousin, Noah Bell, became an active player at our local bridge club in Ithaca, NY. Naturally, he needed a partner, so I accompanied him whenever I could and we were able to accumulate a few master points playing in weekly club games.

But, it was this past March that really made the difference. For Noah’s birthday, he told me that he’d love to make a weeklong trip to Memphis for the 2025 Spring Nationals and I happily obliged. Noah and I had a great time playing bridge, exploring a new city, and meeting lots of new people. We happened to play some good bridge too, as I walked away from our first big tournament with about five times as many master points as I had going in (my total went from about 3 to about 15). Among these were my first gold points as well! All in all, it was a great trip and I hope it will be the first of many national tournaments to come.

As I continue my bridge journey, I hope to convince/inspire more young people to play bridge. Within our many conversations that we had with opponents at the Memphis tournament were repeated sentiments such as “it’s so good to see young people”, “are you trying to get your friends to play?”, and “unfortunately, bridge is a dying game”. Bridge has become such an important family tradition, that I would hate to see it fall by the wayside. Hopefully, if we continue playing and teaching, we can keep the game alive for generations to come.