Northeast Regional Table Tennis Championships

by John Chuhran and Warren Rosenberg - MetroSports Magazine March 7, 2022

As has become tradition during the month of March, a group of talented collegiate athletes gathered for what has become a yearly ritual of collegiate athletic competition. No, we’re not talking about the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament but, rather, the Regional Championship tournaments of the National Collegiate Table Tennis Association’s (NCTTA) leading up to the NCTTA’s iSET College Table Tennis National Championships scheduled for April 8-10, 2022, in Round Rock, Texas.

Created more than a century ago, Table Tennis is much more than a Victorian-era parlor game, or a 1950s fad, or a segment of the quirky movie and 1994 Best Picture Academy Award winner, Forrest Gump.

Today, it is a sport that is building upon a growing foothold of interest in the United States and a nearly national obsession in China.

This past weekend, more than 35 collegiate athletes gathered at the Westchester Table Tennis Center in Pleasantville, New York, for the 2022 NCTTA Northeast Regional Championships and MetroSports was there. Here is a brief taste of what happened; a deeper, full report will be part of the next issue of the magazine.

The competition featured both individual and team competitions among athletes from Boston College, Boston University, Brown University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), New York University (N.Y.U), Princeton University, Rutgers University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Yale University.

Bringing home the Women’s Singles Northeast Regional Championship trophy was Tia Hsieh of Yale University with Maria Castillo of M.I.T. finishing a strong second. Capturing the Men’s Singles Championship trophy was Junxiao Wang of N.Y.U. who defeated a talented John McDermott of UMass Amherst in the Men’s Singles Final.

Above: Tia Hsiieh of Yale University. Below: Maria Castillo of M.T.T

The Women’s Team Championship title was claimed by M.I.T with N.Y.U. finishing second. Rutgers University was crowned as the Northeast Regional Coed Team Champions defeating N.Y.U. in the regional finals.

Capturing the Men’s Singles Championship trophy was Junxiao Wang of N.Y.U. who defeated a talented John McDermott of UMASS Amherst in the Men’s Singles Final.

Above: Junxiao Wang of N.Y.U. Below: John McDermott of UMass Amherst

But, as competitive collegiate athletes, academics always comes first and there was plenty of studying and homework to be done bewteen matches (below).

Look for more detailed coverage on the NCTTA and the Northeast Regional Tournament in the upcoming issue of MetroSports Magazine. Photos of the event are viewable at: https://wr-photo.com/p556242202