Harvard Ping Pong Players To Form Table Tennis Club

Harvard's ping pong players are organizing. Following the lead of Yale, Columbia. Brown and MIT. Nicky Nichols is setting-up a Table Tennis Club to challenge the already established teams for Ivy League supremacy.

The club met last night at Mather House to set future plans for practice and competition, but hopes to attract the talents of forgotten undergraduate ping pong greats before beginning formal competition.

At this point, Anders Carsson and Charlie Thomas are prospects for the top two Harvard ping pong positions.

Yale's 40-member ping pong team has already been practicing together for four months with a full-time coach. Eli captain David Pardo is leading the organization of a league which he feels Yale can now dominate. Dual competition will consist of nine individual matches of which six will be singles and three doubles. Yale hopes to play its first match against the Crimson within two weeks but no date has been set yet.

Ping pong in the United States has been booming since Nixon's trip to China in February. Affiliates of the U.S. Table Tennis Association (USTTA) have been signing up record numbers of new players for club play and excitement is expected to reach a peak during the current tour of the Chinese team through the United States.

The 28-member Chinese delegation arrived in Detroit, Mich. Wednesday and will meet the U.S. team today in the only internationally sanctioned match of the two-week tour.

Eugene Perry Link '66, a fourth year graduate student who taught introductory Chinese here from 1968 to 1971, will accompany the players as an interpreter. In addition to playing in Detroit, the team will travel through America and play exhibitions in New York and California. According to officials of the USTTA, the Chinese nine-city visit will be low keyed and non-political.