The Ping Pong club is one of the newer clubs in the school, and is surprisingly competitive. I learned this the hard way, as I tested my talent against them in brutal fashion. Held in the cafeteria after school every Friday, it is a great outlet for those interested in table tennis who want to get better. They know how to have fun, and how to compete, but boy, I didn’t know what I was in for when I saw junior Mohamed Umar roll his ping-pong table down the cafeteria’s ramp.
Umar, who founded the club, began playing the sport two years ago.
“My family got a table in ninth grade, and I played with family,” he said. “It was very fun.”
It sparked his interest, and it paved the way for him to create the club last year .For an hour weekly, Umar brings people together over games of ping pong. As Umar puts it, “I just want to have people to play ping pong.”
In our quick game, Umar went easy on me, but he still gave me the works. I could see how much time and effort he’s put into the sport, as he beat me handily while playing with as casual a stance as you can have.
To be fair, I have very little experience with ping pong. Table tennis requires a lot of skill and restraint. I learned that in my second game, another club member, junior Aaron Kanter, proceeded to give me the butt-kicking of a lifetime.
“In order to be good, you have to be good,” Aaron said, followed directly by the wildest ping pong serve I had ever seen. Holding the paddle face up, he dropped the ball from around his head level and hit it in a way that made the ball spin not on the first time touching the table, but the second. I was completely bewildered; the serve looked like a magic trick. As the ball bounced to the other side of the cafeteria, I looked back to see a “too small” motion from Aaron. Senior James Kregler could only watch from afar and laugh.
From the skill displayed in the short 30 minutes I played with Umar and Aaron, it’s clear that this team had competed before, and they had been successful. Umar later told me that they had competed in local tournaments, and he said, “We finished in the top 5 in both tournaments, which were both three-person team formats.” These are very impressive performances from a group of dedicated teenagers.
The club, while small, was one of the most fun after school activities I’ve participated in. To sum up my performance, I was absolutely annihilated; however, this made every point that I won 10 times more rewarding. Umar told me he “just wanted people to play ping pong.” He definitely achieved his goal because there is now one more fan of table tennis at Lincoln High School.
