Table tennis club third in division after Penn tournament – ​​The Lafayette

The Lafayette Table Tennis Club opened its spring season last weekend with the University of Pennsylvania Tournament. Lafayette won three games, lost four and had no chance to play two of them.

Junior club president Sam Anthony and freshman treasurer Ben Rudikoff said the level of excitement and competition was so high that teams exceeded the tournament’s time limit, preventing them from finishing all the matches.

Participating teams took their four best players to represent their school in the team tournament. There was also a singles tournament where the top four Lafayette players, plus a fifth Lafayette player, played to represent themselves personally.

The Leopards’ performance this weekend moved them into third place out of the nine teams in their division.

“You could tell which schools were there for competition and which schools were there for fun, and we were kind of in between the two,” Anthony said.

The leopards struck Drexel 3-1, Penn State Scranton 3-1 and Rowan 3-2 in the semifinals.

They lost to the host team 4-0. “[U Penn] is the best team out there, so we didn’t pull any games,” Anthony said. “Despite [them] Because they are so much better than us, everyone was able to get a decent amount of points even in matches where we were clearly not favored at all.

The Leopards also lost to Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh 4-0, but each game was close. Anthony and Rudikoff said the U Pitt team was much larger, but similar in skill level to theirs.

“The fact that we were so close to beating them and they’re 10 times bigger than us is absurd,” Anthony said. “Their top guy is this one, like a 26-year-old former champion, and he’s a PhD student.”

In the end, Lafayette lost to Lehigh 3-1.

“It’s kind of a competition, but it was a lot of fun. We’ve been practicing [together] before, and we all like each other,” Rudikoff said of the Mountain Hawks. – The president of the Lehigh club insisted they play Lafayette [before time ran out].”

They didn’t play Bryn Mawr because they only have a women’s team. Time passed before they were able to play at Shippensburg University.

It turned out to be a busy weekend for the Leopards. Each participant played more than 30 matches, as each match was best-of-five, plus there were breaks.

In the future, the team plans to practice and make friends with students from neighboring schools like Drexel and Lehigh who love the game.