National Collegiate Table Tennis Association

May-June 2004

The Nation of College Table Tennis Players

By Tzu-Wei Lin, Public Relations Director, NCTTA

Last year, there was a player from Johns Hopkins University that went undefeated without dropping a single set at the National Collegiate Table Tennis Association (NCTTA) Nationals, held at the University of Pennsylvania.

His name was Sean Michael Lonergan and probably wasn’t your typical college student – he’s rated 2471. Neither would Eric Owens, from Texas Weslyan University and boasting a USATT rating of 2559, be “typical.”

What are college table tennis players then?

Don’t get me wrong though, because Eric Owens is a college table tennis player; he is not typical because he is one of the model college table tennis players. Every league in any sport has their star players, but who are the people that form the backbone of this “nation of college table tennis players?”

An accurate sample of them consists of the field of collegiate teams marching towards this year’s Nationals, held at City Beach facility, Fremont, CA on April 10-11, 2004.   

Now that the snowstorm has settled, this year’s Stiga/Table Tennis Pioneers NCTTA Nationals has begun opening its arms to the respective division champions throughout the NCTTA. The list of schools includes some of the usual suspects like defending champions University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Columbia University, and the University of Florida (UF), but also features new teams like Auburn University from Alabama, University of Southern Mississippi (USF) from the newly formed Dixie Division. Last year’s host, University of Pennsylvania, came through by ending Johns Hopkins University 5-year reign of the Mid-Atlantic Division, thus coming into this with a lot of momentum. These schools and several others will join host Stanford University to contend for the title of national collegiate champions.

College table tennis players have a variety of interests, but a large number of them pursue a degree in an engineering field. UIUC’s team features four engineers of Asian ethnicity, with their MVP Yinyi Yao being a 21-year-old mechanical engineer student. They don’t sound particularly ambitious, however, as “they are just looking for a reason to go to California,” says UIUC member Yu Cheung Moy. But on the other hand, a slew of Stanford players are highly ambitious. They have two economics majors that want to make money by going into investment banking. Stanford’s Chun Kai Wong wants to be a CEO in the future, while fellow teammate Tim Chueh is already making a fortune off playing poker. There are also students on both ends too, like Kwei Cheng Chang from Weslyan University (New England), who is pursuing a studio art and physics major.

And their hobbies? “Hobbies?? What are hobbies?? Ph.D. students don’t have time for that!!” says Virginia Polytech’s Seemant Teotia. That may be the case for his team, where four out of five are Ph.D. candidates. Some do spend their talents in other interests besides table tennis though. Morgan Tang of Auburn is an incredibly talented karaoke singer, and teammate Zhou Yi is nicknamed “Desperado” in the infamous PC first-person shooter of Counterstrike.

While table tennis is an individual sport, NCTTA emphasizes the team competition aspect, and thus team camaraderie is a crucial element for college table tennis players. Jason Liem of UF explains that “several of us have become very good friends from meeting and playing together at the club these past few years.  As a result, the club is really secondary in our relationships since we socialize outside of the club all the time.  Now we’re friends who happen to play TT rather than people who only socialize with each other when we’re at the club.” The college environment also helps promote this type of relationship.

College table tennis players, on average, aren’t those poised to become world-level players as they pursue careers in other fields. However, they do come in the sport extremely talented and the competition does rival national tournaments in the U.S.