Table tennis players leave tonight

The CNMI National Table Tennis Team will embark for Palau tonight, where they will join the rest of the Commonwealt’s delegation competing in the ongoing 2005 South Pacific Mini Games.

“We’re leaving on Tuesday evening and go to Manila first. It will be a 16-hour layover. The following day at noon, we fly to Palau. We would arrive in Palau at approximately 4pm. That gives us time to settle in. Competition, based on the last information I got, was to begin on July 29, this gives us an entire day to acclimate ourselves and get ready for our games,” said table tennis head coach Steve Lim.

The rest of the Commonwealth’s national ping-pong team is made up of Sablan Topline Cleaning Agency’s Budhi Gurung, Millennium Restaurant’s Su Yong Dong, and Fu Ye Construction’s Chen Lin Ying.

Lim readily admits that the CNMI’s medal hopes in the sport lies on the hands of a relatively old team.

“A trade-off was done between athletic condition and experience. Budhi, Chen and Su are all over 35 years old, which puts them among the older competitors in both table tennis and the CNMI contingent,” he said. “But they have been the top finishers in the past years’ annual tournaments, so they have to some extent earned their selection to the team.”

The general manager of Transamerica Corp., however, said that what the team gives up in youthful exuberance and athleticism, it more than makes up for in experience.

“Table tennis is as much a mental game as it is a physical one, and the years of playing experience hopefully gives these guys an advantage over their competitors, many of whom I believe would be much younger and thus much more inexperienced, despite of the coaching and training they’ve had,” said Lim. “Unlike basketball or other sports, table tennis coaches also cannot signal to his or her players verbally or using physical gestures, except for time-outs or in between games. During the course of an 11-point game, the players are more or less on their own, tactics-wise.”

He went on to say that generally more experienced players should be able to quickly adapt to the different styles of their opponents, and on their own be vigilant about mistakes they are making during the game, which gives the CNMI team an edge over the competition in Palau.

Experience and craftiness aside, Lim also said that all three members of the team have sacrificed and worked hard the previous three to four months to prepare for the expected grind in the host island’s Kalau Gymnasium.

“They’ve played and trained hard four times a week, compared to just once or twice a week in the past. It’s been tiring, having this increased rate of exertion in a week, but this ‘suffering’ will pay off during the competition as matches will be played on consecutive days, and multiple matches played within a day. We will be ready,” he said.