Caltech women's table tennis

I should blog about this a bit, since I have a close friend on the team and refer to various ping pong things pretty frequently in general.

Anyway, the Caltech women's table tennis team was in lovely Columbus, Ohio for the past few days competing in Nationals. (Yes, a Caltech team made Nationals. That's pretty much the impetus for this blog entry.) They returned to Pasadena on Monday and because of the tiring weekend, my friend went to only 4 hours of class on Monday instead of her usual 6 (hard core!).

A couple of months ago, both the men's and women's teams went down to San Diego to compete in a regional tournament. They were ranked something like 14th before it started and on the strength of our #1 player, who went undefeated there, the women's team rose all the way to an 8th place ranking at the time and (after some more regional tournaments took place) received the news that they got into Nationals as a wild card team. For Nationals, the team needed to have some sort of uniform, so I helped in some preliminary discussions for part of the design (I basically provided some feedback) and more directly with manpower in helping to make the shirts.

The team had heard about some great players on other teams in Nationals, so it was known that things would be tough. I got some information on Sunday morning and got some more today. Caltech did finish in last, but they almost didn't. So while most schools wouldn't consider this a huge success, getting to Nationals (which is unheard of for teams from Tech) and almost avoiding the cellar is an extremely nice foundation. The #1 player is a freshman, so I'm optimistic about another trip to Nationals next year. The #2 player (the person with whom I hang out) won one of her matches and won a game in an at least one other match.

Almost the entire team (except for the #4 player) experienced injuries or sickness. There were eventually some "ping pong injuries" (a meme that has been going around the Caltech ping pong crowd at least since first term), but there was other stuff, too: The #1 player got sick walking around in the rain (the team is at a hotel not associated with the tournament, so they were walking instead of taking a shuttle), and the #3 player apparently broke out in hives.

I requested to be the unofficial team mascot because I wanted to mention that snippet of infomatin in a bio for a math article of mine (the football-team ranking one) that is coming out this year. My coauthors and I have been mentioning sports-related stuff in our bios, and I already needed to update mine because of recent victories by the Caltech basketball teams. However, I wanted to mention ping pong instead because that's the only Tech sport with which I have any affiliation. Anyway, a vote was taken on Sunday morning, and it was agreed unanimously that I should be the team's mascot. This is one of the proudest moments of my life. I am shedding tears of joy. :)