Trip to Table Tennis World Junior Championship

More than 100 countries enter qualifications every year. This year 20 boy’s and 20 girl’s best teams will represent their countries and battle for team and individual titles in Shanghai, China.

New Zealand will be represented in the girls’ event by four 15-16 years old players who have been training with big determinations for number of years. They are not only the best New Zealand Junior players, but each of them has recorded wins against players from New Zealand woman’s squad.

16 years old Ola Ratka is the only player from South Island, travelling to Shanghai. She started serious training just before she turned 10 years old. She is very dedicated and hard working. She works on her game 6 days a week on average 16 hours every week with no breaks for holidays. Ola even went to train full time in South Korea twice. She joined there a high school table tennis squads first time for 6 weeks, and then, for 6 months. Every year Ola participates in 8-10 provincial and national tournaments all over New Zealand. Most of them are weekend long; the two national tournaments are 5 days long.

The hard work is starting to bring some good results. Recently Ola become the youngest since 1967, winner of South Island Woman’s Open Title. On the national level it is extremely hard to win titles. There are few junior and senior players who arrived to New Zealand recently after training and competing for many years in table tennis strong holds of Asia or Europe. This year Ola teamed up with Chinese girls and won under 18 and under 21 doubles national titles.

Most people in New Zealand were playing ping-pong at some stage of their life. Not many of them realise that is it one of the most popular sports in the world played professionally in every continent. It takes at least 10 years of hard training to become player competitive on international level. Most successful countries in Europe and Asia have very good, government founded system of developing young players. Recently more good young players are emerging from other continents like Africa, both Americas.

According to my knowledge, New Zealand is the only developed country that does not provides funding to employ national coaches and elite players has to cover the costs of high performance training. When they achieve high level and honour of representing the country on international stage – they have to cover almost all the costs of travel, accommodation, entry fees. On top of this they have to pay their share coaches costs.

When Ola was younger; she was already representing New Zealand on international stage. Due to high costs and limited budget, she had to withdraw from all international tournaments over last 2 years as she concentrated on high performance training.

This year she is ready to match her skills against same age players on international stage. As the next stage of development Ola needs to gain experience and world ranking points. This part is the most expensive and well beyond limited family budget.