2001 USA Table Tennis 
National Team Trials
San Diego, California
February 7-11, 2001

Day One: Wednesday, February 7

Men’s Preliminaries & Van Accident

Except for a traffic accident of the van transporting a number of players (no one was seriously hurt), things went pretty much as expected in the Men’s Preliminaries. (There are no Women’s Preliminaries.) There were nine players playing a compete round robin, with six to advance to the Final Twelve. The top six seeds all advanced. In fact, for the first few rounds there wasn’t a single upset, and it wasn’t until the top six were pretty much decided that upsets began to take place. Most of the upsets were at the expense of top-seeded Ashu (who prefers that spelling to his often-used Ashoo version) Jain, who won his first four matches, then lost the next four to (in order) Loc Ngo, Tahl Leibovitz, Nison Aronov and Mark Hazinski.

The dominant player for the day was 15-year-old Mark Hazinski at 8-0. He only lost one game, to Nison Aronov (16,-16,15). Aronov won the rest of his matches to finish second (7-1), with Ashu the only other player to get a game from him.

Finishing tied for third at 5-3 were Tahl Leibovitz and Loc Ngo. Since Tahl won their head-to-head match (-6,17,13), he finished third, Ngo fourth. Tied for fifth were Jain and 18-year-old Lee McCool, with Ashu defeating McCool (18,13) and so coming in fifth, McCool sixth.

Since the order of finish didn’t really matter (there were no carry-overs – for one thing, the Preliminaries were best of three, while the Final Twelve would be best of five), all that mattered was finishing in the top six, and so the advancees were Mark Hazinski, Nison Aronov, Tahl Leibovitz, Loc Ngo, Ashu Jain and Lee McCool.

Not advancing (and not winning any matches against the six advancees) were 12-year-old Misha Kazantsev (7^th at 2-6), 17-year-old Jared Lynch (8^th at 1-7) and 17-year-old David Umel Jr. (9^th at 0-8). These players didn’t challenge the top six players very strongly this time around, but they may have gained the experience needed to battle with them next time. (To be eligible for these trials, men had to be rated over 2300, but boys under 18 and over 2000 were eligible; similarly, women had to be over 2000, but girls under 18 and over 1800 were eligible.)

There was a scary moment this afternoon when the van transporting a number of players to lunch was in an accident – one that came very close to being a very serious one. USATT Vice President Barney D. Reed was driving the van along an 8-lane highway (4 lanes going in each direction), with passengers Chang Jun Gao, Tawny Banh, Jackie Lee, Whitney Ping, Allison Seibel and Jack Wu.

Suddenly, a car two lanes to the left (the far left lane) had a tire blow-out, and spun out of control. It hit a car to the left of the van, and that car hit the van. The van spun sideways, and traveled a distance sideways before hitting another car. This knocked it across the two lanes to the left, and against the cement center wall, where the van came to a halt pointing backwards. Incredibly, no one was hurt seriously, although Gao mentioned that her shoulder was slightly wrenched from it. Several others complained of minor whiplash and headaches.

The players and staff are staying at the San Diego Olympic Training Center dorms (with free meals at their cafeteria). The competition is at the San Diego Table Tennis Club.

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