Three years ago, Washington and Lee students started a ping pong club. Now, the club travels to compete, beating large Virginia universities.
On Nov. 9, the ping pong club traveled to James Madison University to compete in the National Collegiate Table Tennis Association tournament. The event was the first of two intercollegiate events this year.
The tournament field included nine Virginia schools including the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Virginia Commonwealth University and Christopher Newport University. Each school brought A, B and C teams.
Members of the team said they represented the smallest school with likely the largest budget. But Washington and Lee’s A-team beat JMU and CNU. The team was competitive in most of its matches and was only swept in matches against VCU and a UVA program that recruits.
“I am incredibly proud of how our team performed,” said Albert Zhu, ’25, the ping pong club president.
Zhu’s pride reflected the club’s improvement since its last-place finish one year ago.
“Washington and Lee originally didn’t have a ping pong club when I was a first-year, but there were a lot of people interested in playing ping pong. This motivated my friend, Zhengyi Ke, to start the ping pong club along with other people who wanted to play,” he said.
After improving on last year’s campaign, Zhu said he hopes the club will be able to continue trending upward.
“I hope the ping pong club will continue to grow and provide a fun activity for people,” Zhu said.
“We have already grown so much going from having one team participating in the tournament last year to having three teams participating this year,” he said. “Club attendance has also steadily gone up every year as more people are aware that we have a ping pong club.”
Zhu hopes more people join so the club can see a boost in funding.
“The ping pong club is really fortunate to be funded by the university, but there are still opportunities that we would like to pursue that are limited by funding,” he said. “One of the biggest things additional funding would allow us to have are more tables.”
Besides allowing more people to play at one time, Zhu said, with more tables, the club could better use equipment such as the ping pong machine and the serving net.
Additionally, Zhu believes that ping pong as a sport has the potential to be a very popular club sport, in part because of its accessibility.
“Ping pong doesn’t have as many physical requirements compared to other sports and has a variety of different skill levels. I feel like beginners and advanced players both get the same amount of joy and competitiveness from playing the sport,” he said.
Although Zhu doesn’t fully know what next year’s budget will allow, the ping pong club has some fun events planned for the remainder of the 2024-25 school year, he said.
At the end of this semester, the club will have a Polish Pong Tournament which is “a fun version of ping pong that can be played by a group of people and is played without a net.”
“This event should be fun and we will be offering snacks and a potential prize for the winner,” Zhu said.