Everybody in Who Dat Nation knows Drew Brees, the New Orleans saints quarterback who led New Orleans to win their first ever Super Bowl. In post-Katrina Dixie, Brees is a hero, and now a Super Bowl MVP.

Not every football fan knows that Brees was also a star signal caller for the Purdue Boilermakers and one of the best quarterbacks in Big Ten history. He’s been the talk of the West Lafayette campus for more than a decade. After all, Brees tossed an amazing 90 touchdowns at Purdue. But also getting a little attention lately at the Indiana school is the newly energized Purdue Table Tennis Club.

Led by club president Yutao Yue, the club’s roster has grown to more than 70 members. The club hosted the Purdue Winter Open and it was an enormous success. Students, faculty and alumni showed up to play, while others cheered on the Boilermakers. Among the tournament medal winners was a Purdue math professor.

Purdue is recruiting more players, stepping up practices and will host more tournaments in the future in West Lafayette, an hour’s drive from Indianapolis. The club will now host a monthly Purdue Open League.

In short, the Big Ten school does much more than crank out some of the nation’s best engineers. The school’s table tennis game is getting hotter every day in Boilermaker Country.

As part of its expansion mode, Purdue’s team features the school’s first woman on its NCTTA team. She is freshman Michelle Lee, a native of Guatamala. Michelle was awesome in her first NCTTA tournament in Fall 2009 with a 3-1 record in singles matches, including a come-from-behind win against Yun Bai of Big Ten rival Northwestern.

Yutao Yue is excited about Lee who attended international youth tournaments in Hong Kong last summer and earlier played with national youth teams in Guatamala. "She is totally a table tennis enthusiast, almost as much as I am," says the club president. "She told me she chose Purdue basically because she likes the quiet and peaceful environment here."

Don’t expect Purdue’s table tennis scene to be quiet in 2010 and beyond. The club figures to be making more noise in the years to come thanks to Yutao Yue, a native of China who came to Purdue as a graduate student.

The game excites Yutao because this Olympic sport "requires as much mental challenge, if not more, as physical challenge."

Table tennis at Purdue expects to get more support in terms of space for its operations and more funding once it gains the university’s blessing as a club sport. The game has also grown quite a bit in a short time for Yutao, who first picked up a paddle as a high school senior in China.

Purdue’s table tennis team is truly international in scope. On the West Lafayette campus, there are players from the United States, China, Taiwan, Vietnam and Guatamala.

Since becoming club president, Yutao Yue says he "wanted to make it really good and attractive to all table tennis lovers here." From what NCTTA leaders can see, Yutao is succeeding at Purdue!

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