Juniors of the Month: The Maryland Cadets

By Larry Hodges

Okay, we’re “cheating” a little bit, since half of the six “Maryland Cadets” just left the cadet field, which roughly means under 15, but more specifically means “born on or after Jan. 1, 1992.” Two of the non-cadets (Amaresh Sahu, 15, 2230, and Joseph Wang, 16, 2166) were on the 2006 USA Cadet Team; a third (Reza Ghiasi, 15, 2237) might have been except he’s not a USA citizen; and the other three are all on the 2007 USA Cadet Team (Peter Li, 14, 2280; Marcus Jackson, 15, 2227; and Janice Lan, 1949, 15). Joseph, Marcus, Peter and Janice all just had birthdays in January.

All six started out and practice regularly at the Maryland Table Tennis Center. Most also play at the Baltimore TTC or the Potomac TTC. All started with coaches Cheng Yinghua and/or Jack Huang, and several now also receive coaching from Huang Bang Chao (new MDTTC coach) and Coach Boris Shafir at the Baltimore club.

In recent years, several have spent their summers training in China, and so didn’t go to the Junior Olympics and Junior Nationals. This meant great improvement in their games, but fewer titles.

MDTTC has a large junior program. In addition to these six, there are a total of 39 junior players with USATT ratings over 1500 (out of a total of 204 in the entire country). Some of the others over 1800 include Barbara Wei (17, 2122, was 2171, formerly on USA Cadet and Junior Girls’ Team), Charlie Sun (13, 2078, recently 2132), Chi Zhang (16, 2084), Kevin Ma (14, 2007), Devin Zhang (14, 2003), Kian Mokhtari (16, 1968), Toby Kutler (15, 1956), Max Li (16, 1891), Justin Kung (11, 1879) and Keahan Mokhtari (13, 1824). Since 1992, MDTTC juniors have won more gold medals and more total medals at the Junior Olympics/Junior Nationals than any other state all but three years, winning over half the gold medals during that time.

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