Boing. Ping. Whoosh. These are just a few of the sounds that can be heard echoing through the ARC every Tuesday and Wednesday night. This cacophony of sound has one source: the Illini Table Tennis Club.
The club is a space open to all types of table tennis enthusiasts, with both a competitive team as well as the opportunity for casual members to come and play.
“I feel like, even though we have a variety of skill levels within the club, everybody is just driven by passion for the sport,” said Leila Moon, the club’s treasurer and junior in Business. “So to any people who were interested in joining the club, I’d say, as long as you just love to play and want to have fun, feel free to join us.”
According to David Sun, the club’s vice president and graduate student studying computer science, their practices are open-play style, where members of both the competitive team and non-competitive club can practice and play together freely.
In addition to their twice-weekly practices at the ARC, the group heads to a local club on Fridays and Saturdays to get a little extra game play in. Sun says that the group goes with the flow, sometimes participating in scrimmages and usually following practices by getting food after.
The club’s competitive team participates in matches throughout the year, including the National Collegiate Table Tennis Association’s national and regional competitions. According to members, the club has a strong sense of community with a “healthy competitive edge” that helps members push each other to get better.
“Everyone’s really encouraging,” said Cynthia Huang, junior in Business. “Even the best players are willing to help others, no matter what level they’re at. They’ll play games, do drills and give advice, which helps all of us get better.”
Despite the team’s recent displays of widespread involvement, it has taken several years to get here.
Table tennis is a male-dominated sport, and this fact carried over to the Illinois club in its beginnings. According to Sun, the club only had two female members when he first joined four years ago. He says that has been the biggest area of growth in his time with the club.
“The next year, we had four,” Sun said. “This past year, seven or eight joined. That’s been great to see. The level of players coming in has also gone up. We’re attracting stronger athletes every year.”
Sun also said that the team has grown a lot closer over the years. Club members said that they rarely organized social events a few years back, but that has changed recently.
One of the club’s presidents and senior in Business Ariston Liu’s favorite tradition is that, for the past two years, the group has gotten together to celebrate Chinese New Year. Other social events include sports day on the Quad and senior day for senior members of the club.
“The team has become really close in the last few years,” said Liu. “We practice together outside of regular sessions, get meals after practice and hang out socially.”
Today, the team stands as a testament to the power of teamwork and group collaboration. Without their ability to bond and thrive as a collective, it is unclear what the state of the team would be.
Team members consider the social aspect of their club to be the reason they stand out as an organization, as well as the reason many of them joined in the first place.
“I think the fact that we engage a lot socially outside of practices really helps us balance the competitiveness with the social side and getting along with each other,” Moon said. “And then we also know that, at the end of the day, we’re teammates. So even though we lose to each other in practices and stuff during competitions, we’re all trying to just represent one thing.”
