Congrats to NCTTA Class of 2011
An NCTTA Feature - June 2011

By Andy Kanengiser and Willy Leparulo
NCTTA Media Relations Committee

All the hard work playing table tennis and the long hours hitting the books are paying dividends. Now it’s off to graduate school or joining the workforce for many members of the Class of 2011.

At NCTTA headquarters we want to say congrats for getting those college degrees, while playing your favorite sport on the planet.
Some of the newly minted college graduates are really going places. Starting with the June newsletter, we want to profile a few of the new grads and NCTTA alumni who are taking a different road. One of them is Florida State University graduate Jon Valdez a.k.a. Jon the Penholder.

A native of Lutz, Florida near Tampa, Lutz is now living in China. It’s the huge country in Asia where table tennis is the national sport, a land where table tennis training camps are common and where great players are practically born with paddles in their tiny hands. For four years, Jon played on the FSU Seminoles table tennis team. In 2009-2010, the FSU team was recognized as the most improved team in NCTTA ranks, and he was a part of that superb squad in Tallahassee.

As an FSU freshman, Jon switched from the shakehand grip to the penhold version. As the Chinese, who invented the grip, were abandoning it in droves, Jon decided to embrace it. Guess you could say he’s not afraid to buck the trends. After all he is a Florida guy who loves Asian culture, society and sports.

In recent summers, Valdez traveled from the Sunshine State to China to teach English to Chinese students. During his teaching days in the motherland of table tennis, he also discovered the love of his life. His girlfriend is a former Tianjing table tennis player. These days, the couple is happily living in Shenzhen where Jon is looking for work in the area of business and finance. He’s also playing in a table tennis club over in China this summer.

Shenzhen also happens to be very close to the home turf of Ken Qiu, captain of the Mississippi College table tennis team. Ken says it is less than 100 miles away from where he grew up and his parents live. Jon and Ken were table tennis rivals at the ACUI table tennis tournament in Tallahassee in the Spring of 2011. Qiu won the match that day in Florida. A Mississippi College graduate student and international programs staffer on the Clinton campus, Ken wishes much success ahead to Jon Valdez. Qiu predicts that if Jon the Penholder or JTP, as many call him, keeps training in China, the outcome of their next match will likely go the other way.

Got a story about another member of the Class of 2011, please contact us at the NCTTA. We will try to do more profiles of the new NCTTA graduates in future newsletters. We also hope many of the newest college alums will continue to stay involved with table tennis and the NCTTA!

Drop us a line at publicrelations@nctta.org