Crystal Wise
Texas Wesleyan Table Tennis
Eduardo Tomoike
First Set
A ball should not be able to move like that.
Don’t misunderstand me; I’m well aware of, if unscientifically, the existence of what sports commentators call spin. But this … this is different. This paddled strike of a near-weightless ball made of celluloid seems to have broken one or two laws of physics. It’s as if the thumb and index finger of a ghost keen on hijinks flicked the tiny object as it struck the table, causing it to evade any and all paddles. To put it simply, the shot is a damn miracle.
And yet, despite the amazing play and the gravity of the moment, there are no audible gasps or claps. The only sound that follows is a screaming of the word “Cho” from Lucas Eto, the Texas Wesleyan student responsible for the shot. The lack of a response makes me wonder if my eyes have played a trick on me. Perhaps the speed of the game is causing my internal processor to go into buffer mode. But this isn’t the case. Only later do I realize that, in this sport — and, yes, table tennis is a sport — this shot is nothing out of the ordinary. These things, call them gravity-defying moments, just happen.
Following the point, Lucas, a bespectacled sophomore whose loose-fitting basketball shorts still fit snuggly, has gone up two points in the second set. He’s also up 1-0 on sets, so the opposing player, a medium-statured man with “Cal” written on his chest, is getting visibly frustrated. Makes sense; the stakes are high.
The match, part of the coed semifinals at the College Table Tennis National Championships, is taking place in mid-April in Round Rock, and the magazine’s photographer, Crystal Wise, and I are in attendance. Our presence is the result of curiosity more than anything else. If all goes according to plan, and Texas Wesleyan wins, there’s nothing newsworthy about this particular championship. It’s not a historic match. After all, history was made long ago by the Texas Wesleyan table tennis team.
Though this might be news to the uninitiated, the Ram table tennis team is on one of the greatest, if not the absolute greatest, winning streaks in the history of college sports. Every year since 2004, when Texas Wesleyan first joined the National Collegiate Table Tennis Association, the Rams have won a title in at least one of the championship’s now six events (coed team, women’s team, men’s singles, women’s singles, men’s doubles, women’s doubles). This includes 74 total titles and 14 coed titles — losing college table tennis’ crown jewel event only three times in the past 18 years.
“They’re the Yankees of college table tennis,” Willy Leparulo, president of the NCTTA, says. “They’re who every other program looks up to. They want to be them, and they want to beat them.”
While the Yankees might seem like an apt comparison, their 27 titles over the past 110 years pale in comparison to Texas Wesleyan’s run of 74 trophies in less than two decades. Scouring the internet in an attempt to find a comparable team in all of America’s college and professional sports proved futile. Even the New Zealand national rugby union team, the All Blacks, considered the most dominant team in the history of teams and sports, have “only” won three of nine Rugby World Cups.
The truth is, the Yankees are the Texas Wesleyan of baseball.
And I suddenly realize that only if Texas Wesleyan were to get shut out of all first-place finishes would this championship then become historic. A loss by so dominant a team would be a seismic rumble felt across the table tennis world.
Lucas, who played in the match’s second contest, beats his UC Berkeley opponent in straight sets. It was an important victory given that the first man up, Eduardo Tomoike, lost to Olympian Nikhil Kumar in the first game. So, the overall match, which uses four players per team in a first-to-three format (a doubles match serves as a tiebreaker if the score is 2-2), is now 1-1.
Fortunately, in this semifinal, it wouldn’t have to go to a doubles match. The next two players, Santiago Montes and Nikki Deng, won their matches.
They knock out Cal and move on to the Finals, where they’ll face NYU, the reigning coed champions.
Crystal Wise
Texas Wesleyan Table Tennis
At the 2023 NCTTA National Championships
Second Set
There’s no “the” reason Texas Wesleyan’s table tennis program is so successful. There’s nothing singular about it. It’s a collection of people, circumstances, hard work, and a little luck. But if someone were to point their finger at the program’s biggest catalyst, it would be Jasna Rather, the team’s coach since 2006.
Nearly three months after the college national championships, a different national championship, the USA Table Tennis National Championship, took place in the Fort Worth Convention Center. Having missed a chance to chat with her in Round Rock, this is where Jasna agrees to meet me.
“I had no idea this was going on,” I tell her when I arrive. It’s hard to pin an exact number on it, but my knack for exaggeration wants me to say over 1,000 table-tennis tables had seized the entire square footage of the convention center for the event.
“Really? You had no idea?” she asks. “So, we had this here last year, but the year before it was somewhere else. They messed everything up. And every time, when they mess up somewhere else, the membership complains, and they come back here.”
As a side hustle, Jasna is the para program manager and director for USA Table Tennis. This means she works closely with para-athletes, table tennis players with disabilities, including physical and cognitive. Given that this event includes para-athletes, she’s working. I follow her as she weaves through the maze of table-tennis tables, stopping to chat with every fourth person she crosses, all of whom give her and the Texas Wesleyan program unsolicited praise. In this world, a small world that seems mighty in this convention center, Jasna is royalty.
“Texas Wesleyan is the gold standard,” former Texas Wesleyan assistant coach Keith Evans said after Jasna introduced us. “I mean, in terms of collegiate table tennis, it’s the starting point. It has the blueprint that other schools can follow. We just need other colleges and Ivy Leagues to accept [table tennis] as a recreational sport.”
In her own words, Jasna is from a place that no longer exists. Born in what is today Bosnia and Herzegovina, she mostly grew up in the city of Zagreb in what is now Croatia. But ask her whether she considers herself a Croat, Bosniak, or Serb, and she’ll tell you she considers herself Yugoslavian, the union of six republics that would become six separate countries in the early ’90s. Even when referring to home, she’ll call it “former Yugoslavia.”
“It’s like if you represent the U.S. and then somebody just says, ‘You know, now there’s a Texas nation.’ But you’re, like, ‘No, I’m American.’ And especially if you lived in a couple different states, like I did, it feels weird.”
In hopes that this doesn’t suggest any of her political sympathies (because she did not make any known to me), she clearly looks back on her time in communist Yugoslavia with fondness. When she’s looking at things in retrospect, it’s with a certain wide-eyed naivety.
Despite having a father who was a gymnast, Jasna was forced into table tennis at a young age, thanks to her uncle who was a coach and her older sister who already played.
“I never thought I was doing something important,” Jasna says. “It was more something to do.”
But she was a natural. She was gifted. And she hated practice, something for which she’s known in the table tennis community.
“I knew her since she was 6 years old,” Matjaž Sercer, current coach of the Great Britain para table tennis team, says. “She was amazing. Everybody trained much more, but she had the feeling, and those who have the feeling can train a bit less.”
It was eventually a tournament that piqued her interest in the sport. The thrill of competition suddenly supplanted the monotony of practice that she associated with table tennis. She made the national team at 12 and was playing in adult international competitions at 13. At 16, Jasna, along with her playing partner, Gordana Perkučin, won the tournament for Olympic qualifications and eventually earned a bronze medal at the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul. In what is perhaps the antithesis of a good example of grit and grind, Jasna is an Olympic medalist who unabashedly hates practice and is naturally gifted at the sport.
Crystal Wise
Jasna Rather
Jasna Rather
And then the war came. Just two years removed from her medaling performance in Seoul, Yugoslavia, her country, began the gradual process of fracturing into nonexistence. “When you grow up in some country, play for that country, and then suddenly, someone tells you, ‘There’s no more country. This country doesn’t exist.’ That was really difficult.”
At the time, Jasna had fallen in love with and married a fellow table tennis player, Ilija Lupulesku, who was avoiding conscription. The mandatory military service would have put him in the thick of the war and taking up arms with a side that was seemingly indefinable. So, the pair managed to stay out of the country, dodging the conscription while hoping for the Olympic committee to step in. One of the places they spent time was in the U.S., where some Americans she’d met convinced the two to apply for green cards.
With her husband unwilling to tag along — the two had been playing tennis table professionally in Japan — combined with some other incompatibilities, Jasna filed for divorce and eventually ended up in Michigan, where she took up residence at an Olympic training center and started going to school. In 1999, she received her citizenship just two days before the deadline to sign up for the Olympic trials. Again, admitting to barely training, Jasna made the 2000 United States Olympic team. Throw in stints in Japan, Chicago, Belgium, and Germany; another name change; perhaps a couple no-good-for-her boyfriends; another trip to the Olympics in 2004; and you have Jasna’s story before becoming the Texas Wesleyan table tennis coach.
Jasna first came to Fort Worth in 2002 as a player when the program’s first coach, Christian Lillieroos, recruited Jasna after promising the school he’d recruit an Olympian. She would resurface in Fort Worth a second time in 2006, this time serving as a player/coach before eventually dropping everything preceding the coach part of her title.
The program was the brainchild of then-assistant golf coach and Texas Wesleyan alum Bobby Cornett, who had lobbied for the creation of a table tennis team since 1982 when he first started working for the university. But, with table tennis not sanctioned by either the NAIA, the college sports association in which the Rams currently belong, or the NCAA, the college sports association in which the Rams once belonged, it was a difficult pitch. Table tennis, to the college sports world, was and largely still is a club sport. The table tennis governing body is the aforementioned NCTTA, which has over 200 members (including many NCAA Division I schools one would recognize). But, after a short stint in the NCAA, then- college president Dr. Harold Jeffcoat saw the potential for a table tennis program to set the school apart from other small-college athletic programs.
“TWU needed something different, something unique for the sporting public in Fort Worth,” Jeffcoat told the Fort Worth Weekly in a 2008 interview. “We needed something new and exciting, fast-paced, and where for a modest investment we could be very competitive.”
What set the university apart from other NCTTA programs was its willingness to award scholarships to players. No other NCTTA school was, and only one other currently is, doing this. This, naturally, causes some irritation among other member schools, who might feel the playing field isn’t entirely level. There’s likely a reason Jasna, on more than a few occasions, referenced other programs’ dislike for Texas Wesleyan. But Jasna and those associated with the school are also not shy about the scholarships being a positive differentiator. After all, they’re bringing in good kids from around the world, giving them a great education, and opening a pathway to American citizenship. What about this should make them bashful?
“I am American now,” Zhe Feng, a member of the 2017 Texas Wesleyan team, told me quickly after saying he was originally from China.
In that same Fort Worth Weekly story, Jasna explained her hope that more schools would follow Texas Wesleyan’s lead in offering scholarship money. Yet, since that interview’s publication in 2008, only one additional school, nearby Dallas Baptist University, is offering scholarships to table tennis players.
Another question concerns whether or not the sport will one day become NCAA sanctioned, an upgrade in collegiate athletic clout that the NCTTA remains hopeful could come. Such a promotion in athletic associations would bring more, bigger, better programs offering scholarship money to players. Great for the sport. Not so great for Texas Wesleyan’s dynasty. However, according to NCAA associate director Gail Dent, table tennis remains on the outside looking in.
“We have not seen the minimum numbers yet with table tennis,” Dent says via email. In other words, after Title 9, the NCAA requires all new and emerging sports to be geared toward and offer substantial opportunities for women — this due to men having a disproportionate number of athletic opportunities when compared to women. Thus, table tennis must not only recruit new players (a hard enough task), but female players. And they must do so in a sport that, according to Jasna, is male dominated. Sports currently in the NCAA’s emerging sports for women program include rugby, wrestling, equestrian, and triathlon.
Another wrinkle is the fact Texas Wesleyan is not an NCAA school; they compete in the NAIA. And, unfortunately, the two don’t play nice with one another; you can’t be a full-time member in one and a part-time member in the other. This means the gold standard for table tennis teams, the Rams, could end up on the outside looking in.
“But surely, they’d make an exception,” Leparulo says. “I can’t imagine they’d leave a program like Texas Wesleyan out.”
Jasna, for her part, is neither convinced a jump to the NCAA is plausible nor that the school could easily take a sip from the NCAA well. But regardless of what happens to the team, she’s not going anywhere and feels right at home in Fort Worth. She’s remarried, has a kid, can take off to the former Yugoslavia (Croatia) to visit her sister whenever she pleases, and loves her job.
“I used to, in the beginning, no matter which country I was in, it was my country [whether Croatia or U.S.],” Jasna says. “Now, this is my home. I feel Fort Worth is my home; when I go [to Croatia], I miss Fort Worth.”
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Third Set
On March 28, 2020, when COVID became more than the next tinhorn pandemic scare — it became very, very real — Zhen Deng and Jiaqi Lin, two new Texas Wesleyan recruits, came to Fort Worth via a flight from China. Jasna didn’t know this at the time, but this would be the final flight from China to the U.S. before China shut its borders. They wouldn’t reopen until January of this year, and the frequency of flights to and from China are only 6% what they were pre-pandemic.
“I picked them up and drove them from the airport to the school,” Jasna says. “All of my friends said I was crazy.”
No one got COVID, and none of the three were patient one in Tarrant County. However, this meant that Zhen and Jiaqi wouldn’t be able to return home. And to this day, neither has. They now had to become accustomed to life across the Pacific without any reprieves of going home. If one got homesick, an airline flight to catch a respite was not an option.
“I think, in the beginning, it’s very hard because in China, we always only do one thing,” Jiaqi says. “You only study or you only play. So, this was my first time practicing and studying all at the same time. And then it was the beginning of COVID. So, for me it was hard because I cannot see my family.
“But after a half or one year, it’s much better because I know a lot of international friends, and my teammates, they’re not only my friends; it’s like my family because we’re all taking care of each other.”
I asked a number of people who attended Texas Wesleyan and played for the table tennis team about their experiences. Without fail, even with Jasna walking away due to bashfulness, every person once under Jasna’s coaching stewardship mentioned the word “family.” It stood out.
The majority of Texas Wesleyan’s table tennis team is international. The men’s side, at least those competing in Round Rock, is currently dominated by Latin Americans, including two who hail from Brazil (Lucas and Eduardo) and one Colombian (Santiago). On the women’s side is Zhen and Jiaqi from China and Sofija Scepanovic from Serbia. With few opportunities to go home to visit family, and, in the case of Zhen and Jiaqi, no opportunity, it becomes a necessity to build their own family — their own support system — at Texas Wesleyan. Despite, in some cases, being from separate continents tens of thousands of miles apart, the student athletes relate to one another in the most fundamental of ways: They need someone.
And it’s damn near impossible not to root for them — scholarship money, no scholarship money. I don’t care if their program has a leg up or if they contradict my typical love for underdogs. As I sit watching the final between NYU and Texas Wesleyan, my competitive spirit begins manifesting into some negative opinions toward the NYU guys. And guys they are, unkempt and kinda brutish, all four of them. Texas Wesleyan’s coed team, on the other hand, is a true coed team, with Zhen serving as the anchor.
After the Rams had lost earlier in the women’s team final to UCLA — an expected loss given UCLA’s team — combined with another runner-up finish at the women’s doubles, all of the proverbial eggs are now in this basket. The No. 1-ranked Texas Wesleyan, if they want to keep their monumental streak of titles alive, have to win the coed team tournament.
But whatever confidence I may have had was deflated when Eduardo, the team’s star and unequivocal best player of the bunch, loses in straight sets. After, Lucas, hyped and hitter of the greatest shot I’ve seen, loses 3-1. Texas Wesleyan was now in the hole 0-2. While I kept pumping my fist out of enthusiasm and clinching my jaw out of nervousness, it became obvious early on that this wasn’t Texas Wesleyan’s year. It wasn’t in the cards. They were, for the first time in 18 years, going to lose in every event.
Santiago and Zhen kept it interesting, winning their respective matches to force a doubles tie-break. But Eduardo and Zhen would have to face the same two guys who earlier won the men’s doubles championship.
They lost in straight sets, and NYU, in a large arena filled with empty seats and a few dozen people sitting on two rows of mobile bleachers, celebrated like anyone would — like they won the damn World Series ’cause, well, they did.
The following day, Eduardo would lose in the quarterfinals of the men’s singles tournament, and Zhen would lose in the finals to UCLA’s No. 1-ranked Amy Wang, finishing, for the second year in a row, second place.
While they wouldn’t add to their massive win tally, Texas Wesleyan, when it was all said and done, would finish runners-up in four of the six events.
When I asked Jasna about the streak coming to an end — going home empty-handed for the first time since she became coach — she didn’t give any soliloquies or meditations on losing because, even though she doesn’t like losing, it’s not worthy of such contemplation.
“When I was younger, I didn’t like to lose. And the next day, you need to read the newspaper, and the newspaper is going to have something about how this person beat you. I just don’t buy the newspaper that day.
“There’s always a next tournament. It’s not a big deal. At the end of the day, you can’t take losses heavily because you’re gonna quit.”
Most of this year’s team will be returning next year, so the good guys will have another crack at it. And, based on my conversations with them, they aren’t letting a string of runner-up finishes eat at them, either.
Besides, what more is there to prove?
