Junior of the Month: Trevor Runyan

By Wallace Liu

When Jim Runyan spotted a newspaper article about young Bay Area table tennis players performing well at the U.S. National Championships, he brought his son Trevor to Bill Lui’s Concord Table Tennis Club. Though Trevor was only seven at the time, he was already playing in various other sports, leaving only one day a week for table tennis practice. When Trevor was twelve, however, his turning point in table tennis came. He participated in Attila Malek’s summer training camp, which greatly intensified his interest in the sport. Ever since, Trevor has maintained a passion for table tennis and trained hard in it. Five years of rapid progress later, he finds himself one of the best juniors on the continent.

Trevor’s recent run of success has supported this notion. At the 2005 U.S. National Championships, he defeated both Adam Hugh and Misha Kazantsev, the top two ranked USA juniors. These wins allowed him to make the national junior team. Then, at the North American Championships in May, Trevor made an even more impressive showing. In the Junior Boys’ Singles event, Trevor scored his biggest win yet, upsetting Canada’s Shen Qiang, the number one seed and the 41^st ranked junior in the world. In the semifinals, he defeated his teammate John Leach, and then finished runner-up to Hugh in the event. To top it off, Trevor helped the U.S. junior team defeat Canada’s team with a victory over Bryan Michaud, ensuring the U.S. a spot at the World Junior Championships in Egypt.

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