The University of Vermont's Independent Voice Since 1883

The Vermont Cynic

The University of Vermont's Independent Voice Since 1883

The Vermont Cynic

The University of Vermont's Independent Voice Since 1883

The Vermont Cynic

Club Highlight: The Newest UVM Club, Table Tennis!

Near the beginning of the 2002 Fall Semester I began my quest for some sort of club, organization, or gathering on campus devoted to table tennis. My search would take me from the servers that hold the SGA website, through the campus

to buildings and dorms, and to the single largest sports facility on this campus: Patrick Gymnasium.

What I found included a few scattered ping pong tables over the campus and pairs of students playing here and there. I, along with others, decided

something more concrete was in order. My two devoted officers, Shaun Chu and Rachel Hanish, and I have worked over the last four months at creating a club

from scratch for the student body here at UVM. Our goal is to welcome everyone regardless of skill or experience, and the more interest that’s out there, the more fun we’ll have.

And that’s what it’s all about, you see, having fun. That’s the drive behind all the work we’ve been doing to set up the club. We want you to have fun if you are interested in ping pong as a sport or game, and we want to have fun ourselves.

So what are we doing to accomplish this? There’s a saying in real estate that the three most important things regarding a house are “location, location,

location.” I’ve found that something similar can be said for table tennis: “equipment, equipment, equipment.” This school needs tables–pure and simple. And we are getting them. We are not a club until we get tables, and everyone involved is determined to make us a club. The funding process is underway at this very moment and tables will be bought as soon as possible. When we have them, all tables we acquire will be stored behind the tennis courts in the gym and used on the courts themselves.

And once we have tables in the gym: what next? The answer is anything you want. One of my ideas includes hosting tournaments–both intra- and intercollegiate (one of which may grace our doors within the next two months, in fact). Another is to have clinics led by experienced Vermont players. The world is open to us once we have established a solid base of operations. We could create a competitive team to compete with colleges around the country. We can bus individuals around New England to tournaments.

We want to know what you want to do. So, we invite you to show up and hang out with us on a Wednesday or Friday evening in the Harris/Millis lounge (7:00 pm). It’s always a cozy gathering, and we’d love to meet new people. You can stay for as long or short as you want, and we’ll be sure that you get to play. How easy is it to make a difference in your school’s community, you wonder. Well, this is it folks. And what more fun way to do it than a game of ping pong?

Contact: Dov Pechenick ([email protected])

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Club Highlight: The Newest UVM Club, Table Tennis!