By Alison Martin
If you’re looking for excitement, just follow the bouncing ball! That’s the message Table Tennis Canada is sending with the creation of its Canada Cup national ping-pong league.
The league will feature nine teams with three players per squad.
Each team will meet once, in three weekend events. The events will be held in Ottawa, Montreal and either Vancouver or Edmonton.
Teams will be selected from the top 18 players in Canada, male or female, as well as the top nine women in the country. Managers for six teams have already been selected. The remaining three managers are being negotiated.
In mid-February, team managers will choose their players in a formal draft which will ensure that teams are of equal strength.
It is estimated that six athletes from the Ottawa area will participate in the draft.
Local player Petra Cada hopes to be selected in the upcoming draft. The 18 year-old has been competing internationally for seven years and represented Canada at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.
“This will be a good opportunity for everyone involved and we need more competition,” she said. “That (competition) is what we lack as compared to the Europeans and Asians.”
In addition to elite competition, the league will be an important part of qualifying for the National team that competes in international tournaments including the World Championships and the Olympic Games.
Horatio Pintea, a long-time member of the Canadian National team and Canada Cup candidate, is familiar with the biased attitudes towards ping-pong.
“Everybody knows what ping-pong is and everybody has a table in the basement,” Pintea says. “It’s not a serious sport. . .everybody plays at home but they would not register in a club in order to play competitively.”
Unlike other professional leagues, the start-up costs are extremely low. The price of a franchise is $750 and a projected team budget is estimated between $2,000 and $3,000.
Team bases are distributed across the country from British Columbia to Quebec. Ontario will be represented in the league’s inaugural year with two teams. The league hopes to expand as the popularity of table tennis grows.
“There’s been a huge response but the first year we can only accommodate nine teams,” says Anton Kiesenhofer, the association’s executive director. “Then we are looking to build a second tier, where we will be able to accommodate nine teams per province, in most provinces.”
Management and team selections will be finalized in mid-February and league action starts at the end of March.