Although some students play recreational ping-pong at Jesse Owens South, four members of the Ohio State table tennis club will travel to Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, Texas, to compete in the National Collegiate Table Tennis Team Championships this weekend.
Frank Charvet, the club president, Jacob Mathew, an MBA student, Ender Cigeroglu, a master's student in mechanical engineering, and Michael Yao, a freshman in electrical engineering, will represent OSU in the team competition.
Charvet and Mathew will also compete in the singles competition.
Singles competition will open up Friday morning while the team will begin competition Saturday.
Charvet said he wants the team to reach the semi-finals.
"That will be a tough target, but we can do it," he said.
The team is currently seeded tenth, but Charvet said the team should be ranked higher because it has not played that much. He said he hopes the team will finish sixth or seventh.
Highly ranked teams include Texas Wesleyan University, University of Maryland and University of Southern California. Some of the collegiate competitors are in the national table tennis professional league, Charvet said.
The team qualified for the national championship after winning both regional matches during this year's autumn and winter quarters, Charvet said. During the regional matches, OSU competed against six teams in the Ohio region. The team went 5-0 against all the teams except Shawnee State University, where OSU finished 4-1.
The Ohio region consists of different collegiate teams from Ohio and small sections of Michigan, Indiana and Kentucky. Indiana University could not attend the regional event this year but it is a strong table tennis team, Charvet said. This will be the first time OSU has competed against other regional teams.
Although many of these table tennis clubs have been dominating the tables for a few years, Charvet founded the OSU team this past autumn quarter when he arrived at OSU for his doctorate degree. This is the first table tennis club at OSU.
