Ohlone College Athlete Plays for Table Tennis Glory and the American Dream

By Michael Reff
NCTTA Media Committee

Over the course of NCTTA’s championship history, women’s singles competition has produced two champions from Ohlone College. Alums Ying Wang and Qiao Jiao both clinched the title in Round Rock, TX 2016 and Greensboro, NC 2019 respectively.

After a two year postponement of the Champs due to the pandemic, Ohlone returned in full force in the form of one determined women’s singles player: Xin Li.

Originally from Shan Xi, China, Li is a business major and has her sights set on attaining her US citizenship and transferring to UC Berkeley (interesting to note is that several Ohlone players have become Golden Bears as well).

Li has a unique game using smooth inverted rubber on the forehand side and medium pips on the backhand, the latter creating a sort of knuckleball. She creates spinny forehand loops and excellent serves, blocking more with the backhand to force errors from her opponents.

Seeded 4th in the women’s singles competition, Li plowed through the earlier elimination before ultimately losing in straight sets to eventual women's finalist Zhen Deng of Texas Wesleyan University. Despite not reaching the finals, Li had a strong 3rd place showing, demonstrating her loudnproud nature on the table and determination up to the end.

Due to her high ranking in the women’s competition on Sunday, she arrived early to help volunteer with the setup of the venue. She and her husband Lijun Cheng have been invaluable volunteers, lugging heavy equipment around and also scorekeeping for other matches.

Li says she likes to volunteer, believing that “volunteers are not selfish” and, regarding the setup and volunteerism of NCTTA, “everybody works so hard [to] make the team so strong and the place perfect.”

Unfortunately for this year, Li does not have teammates at her college, but she has been practicing with other elite players such as Olympian/California player Nikhil Kumar and Joanna Sung of the women’s national team to maintain her form.

The pandemic has produced many sacrifices for her, such as having to leave her 3 year-old-son in China since the onset of Covid-19 occurred. However, she says she has several family members taking care of him so she “just need[s] to focus on school and practice a lot, focus on GPA” because “high performance equals hopefully citizenship.”

Li had already been making waves in Divisionals and Regionals competition as a finalist in both tournaments, so she was intent on going the distance.

Despite being only in the single’s competition, the NCTTA can truly attest to her being a team player as a volunteer.

Kudos to Li’s results and best of luck achieving the American Dream!

Photo Credit to Dennis Yanga

About 2022 NCTTA College Table Tennis Championships

The championships are hosted by the National Collegiate Table Tennis Association and the Round Rock CVB. Men’s and Women’s Singles and Doubles, and Men’s/Coed Teams, Women’s Teams. The event is sponsored by Double Happiness, Double Fish and Joola.
Watch the event on live stream starting Friday April 8th on champs.nctta.org

About NCTTA

The National Collegiate Table Tennis Association (NCTTA) is a non-profit organization established exclusively for promoting the sport of table tennis at the college level. As the national governing body for college table tennis in the United States and Canada, NCTTA organizes elite intercollegiate competition throughout North America. www.nctta.org