As I walk into Ancillary Hall in mid-November, the Dublin University Table Tennis Club (DUTTC) have just finished lugging out the table tennis tables and a few people are casually hitting the ball back and forth with each other. I walk over to Captain Conor Beades and we go into the hallway for a chat about the club. He launches straight into all the new things DUTTC are getting up to.
The training sessions on Tuesday tend to be more informal, with Wednesdays dedicated to skills-based coaching from national coach Sam Logue. A more casual (and perhaps better known) event held by the club is the Paddle at the Pav tournament, when 32 players get together to drink a couple of beers and have a table tennis competition in the Pavillion Bar. Although the series of competitions is now over, Beades tells me it has been successful in getting people involved: “The first time we had 32 people, we had to turn people away.”
Now the club has turned their sights to Wigwam (a bar and music venue) and their friends in Dublin University DJ Society (DUDJ). “DUDJ got on to us and they’re running a night in Wigwam. They have three tables in the basement and they’re going to run a biweekly night there, they’re going to DJ themselves. That’s going to be starting in two weeks so we’re going to join with them and try and run a competition.” Paddle at the Pav will also likely return at the beginning of next year for a few weeks. For those who can’t wait until then, Beades is considering running another before Christmas.
The club has a long history, dating back to at least the 1940
DUTTC isn’t just for social players, however. The club is hosting intervarsities this year, at which Trinity have finished third for the past two years. As well as this, the club has entered into a Leinster League competition for newcomers and the College League, which it has won for the past three years. The team intends on making it four in a row at this year’s varsities, which take place on December 3rd.
The club has a long history, dating back to at least the 1940s. During our meeting, Beades shows me a newspaper clipping from Trinity News recently sent to him by an intrepid student. It depicts an advert posted by the table tennis club in the Freshers’ Week of 1983, calling first-year students down to the club’s annual freshers’ competition (the ad included a sketch of Dracula trying to hire a bat from a scared looking DUTTC member). Not much has changed since then regarding their desire to get first years to join.
This Freshers’ Week, they managed to get 170 new members to sign up, and every week they usually get 12 to 15 regular players down to the training sessions. Signing up was free during Freshers’ Week: “You could just come along and try it out for the first week and if you wanted to play again, [you] just [had to] pay the sub.” Similarly, Paddle at the Pav was free, which was a major incentive for new people or people who happened to be at the Pav on the night.
Dealing with the more bureaucratic side of sport in Trinity can be a pain for smaller clubs in particular and this is no different for DUTTC. “You have to fight for every part of your budget”, Beades asserts. The dream for DUTTC is to get a table and room dedicated to table tennis. “If we had access to a table everyday, every hour, the progress we could make… You can’t beat having that kind of access to training facilities.”
If we had access to a table everyday, every hour, the progress we could make
However, getting a room is easier said than done. Such an aspiration is an uphill battle, particularly if your club isn’t one of the College’s four main focus sports. Beades is well aware of this fact, and admits that “for new clubs and smaller clubs, there’s no pathway to [getting a room]”. The club also wants to install some concrete table tennis tables, one of which would be in Oisín House. Emphasising the club’s long history, growing its membership and making lots of noise is the best way to get Dublin University Central Athletic Club (DUCAC) and Trinity Sport to take notice and this is something Beades and DUTTC are taking steps to do.
Storage is a big issue for the club. The Ancillary Hall storage space isn’t big enough for all of the tables, so some of them have to go up to the fourth-floor stairwell, which Beades describes as a “fire hazard”. There is space outside in the hallway but the club isn’t allowed to store them there, something that clearly rankles with Beades.
When Beades and I walk back into Ancillary Hall, we are met with the ceaseless sound of a hundred ping-pong balls being knocked back and forth. Those present have been paired off and are playing practice matches against each other, each player immersed in the game and trying hard to return every shot. I tear my eyes away from the action and get ready to head to my next lecture.
Before I leave the training session, however, Beades asks me if I want to play a bit. We rally for a while and I hold my own (although I suspect he is going very easy on me). I leave promising I’ll make it down to a Paddle at the Pav event sometime in the future. Table tennis is incredibly hard to be good at (check out the Chinese team playing in the last Olympics and you’ll see what I mean), but it’s actually quite easy to play socially. Having a few drinks and playing some table tennis matches with your friends is an attractive image for anyone with a passing interest. Beades has been in charge of DUTTC for the past four years. Now a postgraduate in engineering, he is ready to hand the reins over to a committee of committed table tennis players. If Beades’s successors, whoever they may be, can carry on the work he has done, DUTTC’s future looks promising.
