The Lafayette table tennis club opened its spring season this past weekend with a tournament at the University of Pennsylvania. Lafayette won three matchups, lost four and did not have the chance to play two of them.
Junior club president Sam Anthony and freshman treasurer Ben Rudikoff said that the level of excitement and competition was so high that the teams exceeded the time limit for the tournament, preventing them from finishing all of the matchups.
The participating teams took their top four players to represent their school in the team tournament. There was also a singles tournament, where the top four Lafayette players as well as an additional fifth Lafayette player played to represent themselves individually.
The Leopards’ performance this weekend put them in third out of nine teams in their division.
“You could tell which schools were there for the competition and which schools were there for fun, and we were kind of in the middle between the two,” Anthony said.
The Leopards beat Drexel 3-1, Penn State Scranton 3-1 and Rowan 3-2 in tiebreaks.
They lost to the hosting team 4-0. “[U Penn] is the best team there, so we didn’t pull any games,” Anthony said. “Despite [them] being so much better than us, everyone was able to pull out a decent amount of points, even in matchups where we were clearly not favored at all.”
The Leopards also lost to Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh 4-0, however, each individual game was close. Anthony and Rudikoff said that the U Pitt team was much larger yet similar in skill level to their own.
“The fact that we were this close to beating them, and they’re 10 times the size of us, is absurd,” Anthony said. “Their top guy is this, like, twenty-six-year-old former champ, and he’s a Ph.D student.”
Lastly, Lafayette lost to Lehigh 3-1.
“It’s sort of a rivalry, but it was very fun. We’ve practiced [together] before, and we all like each other,” Rudikoff said of the Mountain Hawks. “The president of the Lehigh club demanded that they play Lafayette [before time ran out].”
They did not play Bryn Mawr because they only have a women’s team. Time expired before they could play Shippensburg University.
It proved a busy weekend for the Leopards. Each participant played in over 30 games as each match was best of five and there were additional tiebreakers.
Looking forward, the team plans to practice with and befriend students at neighboring schools like Drexel and Lehigh who share a love for the game.
