Arcot Naresh, Pillar of Upper Midwest Table Tennis
By Emily Zhao
NCTTA Press Committee Member
Everyone in American table tennis knows the Naresh brothers, Nandan and Sid. Hailing from the Greater Chicago Area, the Nareshes are fixtures on U.S. National Teams and represent America at a huge number of international events. Sid was a member of the Berkeley squad that won Co-ed teams last year. What not as many people may know is their family legacy in NCTTA.
Nandan and Sid’s father, Arcot Naresh, has served as NCTTA’s Upper Midwest Division Director since 2015. In India, where he grew up, Naresh played table tennis in high school and college. He took a twenty-year break after immigrating to the States, but returned to the sport in 2010 when some work colleagues asked him to play. This led to competing at a local club and inducting Sid and Nandan into the sport. The rest is history.
“I wish I’d known about [NCTTA] when I was in [school at Iowa],” Naresh said. “I would’ve gotten involved.” In India, he said, many schools have tables and teams. Even if people don’t play seriously, they take the sport seriously. There was no equivalent to NCTTA, however, “nothing as well-organized as this.” And Naresh knows what it takes: for ten years he has run his division of six to seven schools with just one additional volunteer. “I’ve worked twenty-five years in my life,” he said, “and the day of Divisionals is probably the hardest I’ve ever worked.”
When he’s not playing, spectating, or organizing table tennis, Naresh works as a software architect. Over the last two years, he’s begun doing start-ups, including video analysis software for coaching. It’s pickleball for now, but he hopes to add table tennis next. He doesn’t have thoughts on World Table Tennis’s TTR technology yet, but maybe someday we’ll see his version in a WTT stadium alongside his sons.
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