Team Kits Capture the Fun and Community of NCTTA

By Emily Zhao
NCTTA Press Committee Member

Sport and fashion have a long-established marriage. Athlete sponsorships, Olympic uniform reveals, athleisure, the deep encoding of “lifestyle” in pursuits like skiing, golf, and tennis. Unfortunately, table tennis gear is not always runway material. This correspondent recalls a childhood of eye-watering polos in erratic geometric patterns and harsh performance fabrics, all from other, table tennis-loving countries like Japan, Germany, and China.

At this year’s NCTTA Championships, a couple North American fashion endeavors showed out. University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) rocks color-blocked raglan shirts and flowing shorts made by Little Tokyo Table Tennis (LTTT), a Los Angeles brand that opened shop in 2021 and has worked with players like Olympian and NCTTA alum Rachel Sung. This is LTTT’s third year sponsoring UCLA. Founder Jiro Maestu said that at first it was a privilege:

[J]ust getting to sponsor them…because they don’t get sponsors. And then we built this relationship where they would come and train the kids at our club… So every year we wanted to make something new and something cute for them to wear. Any high-level, almost professional-level team should have something like this.

Maestu redesigned the logo, marrying UCLA’s cursive with LTTT’s three-star signature, and converted the sleeves to a raglan cut, more “organic” than sportswear’s traditional straight seams.

If LTTT and UCLA’s partnership captures the material support table tennis desperately needs as it grows in the States, University of Toronto’s kit brought a touch of pure whimsy. Yellow rhinestones stripe the shoulders of their black-and-purple Loki shirts, which caught my bleary eyes as I roved the floor spectating Men’s Doubles. (Toronto’s duo lost 2-3 to NYU.) The team comprises just four players, two from Canada and two from China, who walked the tournament procession in Balenciaga sneakers, giggling and vlogging for a white camcorder. “It’s just a way to express yourself, to feel confident,” said Max Ji, with an “isn’t-it-obvious” shrug to teammate Meech Dullaert. But competitive table tennis is not always a self-evident place to express yourself.

As Harvard player Marianne Wang said (wearing a plain black shirt with an H crest), “NCTTA is a nice sense of reshaping and redeveloping your relationship to table tennis...enjoying it, it’s a part of life, it’s about a lot more than winning.”

A little glitter represents the breathing space and fun NCTTA provides so many intense, dedicated student athletes.

Pictured in photos are members of Toronto's team (photo credit to Trinity Sung) and UCLA's team (photo credit to Yukong Zhang)

About 2026 NCTTA College Table Tennis Championships

The championships are hosted by the National Collegiate Table Tennis Association and GoRockford (Rockford Convention and Visitors Bureau). The event crowns national champions in Men’s and Women’s Singles and Doubles, Men’s/Coed Teams, and Women’s Teams and Collegiate Peakapong Singles.
PongSpace, Peaka Pong, Major League Table Tennis, Nittaku and Paddle Palace will sponsor the event.
Watch the event on live stream starting Friday, April 10th on https://www.nctta.org/champs/2026/video.html

About NCTTA

The National Collegiate Table Tennis Association (NCTTA) is a non-profit organization established exclusively to promote 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 competitions throughout North America. www.nctta.org