Table Tennis Club Boasts Diverse Membership

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PUBLISHED MARCH 27, 2008
The Dodge Fitness Center might be the only place on campus where ping-pong balls are put to their intended use on a Thursday night.

It is there in the Blue Gymnasium that the Columbia Table Tennis Club holds two weekly practices—the other is on Sunday—where the staccato clatter of hollow celluloid on Masonite and rubber creates a strangely calming drone for four uninterrupted hours.

“That’s the great thing about this club,” Richard Wagner, the club’s volunteer coach and a graduate of Teachers College, said. “It’s nearly impossible to think about midterms, or final exams, or getting a job, or all the other crazy stuff that comes with being a Columbia student when we’re watching this ball spinning through the air at 90 miles an hour.”

The club fields a team composed of its top players and competes in the New York City division of the National Collegiate Table Tennis Association (NCTTA). The team placed third at the National Championships last year in Ohio and qualified for this year’s tournament—to be played April 11 in Rochester, Minn.—after the men placed second and the women tied for first in their regional tournaments.

At a Thursday night practice earlier this month, the diverse group of undergraduates, graduate students, and visiting scholars who make up the club congregated for practice matches around eight tables aligned parallel on the basketball court.

“We have people who don’t have their own paddles, who have never hit a ball before, who don’t know the rules—complete novices,” Wagner said. “And then we have some really highly advanced players, who are counter-looping, doing 20 different kinds of serves—several players, particularly Victor [Leung], who are better than I am.”

Leung, a sophomore from Hong Kong majoring in engineering management systems, is the club’s president and is regarded as the top men’s player. That night, at the far end of the room, he played a spirited match against another club member, the two maneuvering in a quick, contrapuntal dance around the navy blue table.

This is not the lazy, basement brand of table tennis you played growing up.

In blue basketball shorts and white Adidas, Leung resembled a predatory cat as he pounced front, back, and side to side from one corner of the table to the other. At times, the abrupt quickness of his movements gave the impression that he was operating in a time-lapse, and in the match’s fiercest points, the two players looked to be engaged in a game different from the others in the room.

But for all of Leung’s dexterity with the racket, many members eagerly point more toward his contribution to the growing vitality of the group as a whole. The club, for instance, has 50 registered members this year, up from 30 members last year.

“The club has improved since Victor became the president,” Vivian Wang, a sophomore engineer from Vancouver, said. “We have been trying a lot harder to reach out to more and more people.”

Leung reiterated as much. “This year we made a greater effort to recruit,” he said. “We went to the activity fair during orientation to invite people to join the club, which wasn’t really done in past years. We have a good number of people now, considering we only have eight tables.”

Some of those tables were purchased at a reduced rate from Killerspin, the table tennis company that signed on to sponsor the team after its strong performance at last year’s national tournament. The company further assists the club with free apparel, balls, and racket glue.

The club also receives important support from Wang Chen, 34, who manages a club on West 100th Street that is named after her. Chen has invited Columbia players down for free coaching since she arrived in New York from China, where she started her professional career and once played herself to a number four ranking in the world. After a long hiatus from the game, Chen has revived her career and is set to play for the United States team at this year’s Olympic Games in Beijing.

“She coached us a few hours every month and before tournaments we’d go more often—but she’s been busy this year preparing for the Olympics,” Leung said of Wang. “She gives us a lot of advice about how to play each game differently, how to play each individual point in a match, how to play selectively and play smart.”

Along with Wang, the squad has also missed the presence of two elite players who graduated last year, Michelle Yang and Cedric Wong, former members of the Taiwanese and Canadian national teams, respectively. Their absence has forced the team to temper their expectations for this year’s national tournament—but not by much.

“We’re expecting at least a top ten finish,” Leung said of the team’s prospects at the tournament, which will feature the nation’s 24 best teams. “Of course, we hope to do better than that.”

But no matter how the team ultimately performs, its members’ primary goal will still be to spread their love for table tennis in a country and city that has yet to really embrace it.

Justin Sarma, a Columbia alumnus who has continued to play with the club after graduating with a master’s degree in computer science in 2006, noted the dismissive view Americans tend to have of the game and its players.

“People do make stereotypes,” he said, lightheartedly citing the 2007 comedy “Balls of Fury” as evidence. “I don’t go into bars and say, ‘Hey, I play ping-pong,’”

But that has not stopped Sarma or any of his fellow players from coming back to the Blue Gymnasium each week to pursue the sport they love, either.

“I’m here about as frequently as when I actually went to school here,” he said, laughing.







TAGS: Table Tennis

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