High school sports often bring to mind basketball, soccer, or volleyball. But 10 years ago, when then-principal Angel Nair encouraged San Gabriel Academy Elementary teachers to bring extracurricular, elective options that would be creative and different, a new option came up.
Junior high teacher Sean Lehnhoff, who teaches grades 5-8, immediately thought of table tennis. “I’ve loved racquet sports through college, high school, and beyond,” Lehnhoff shared. “It was something that I thought would be really easy and accessible for us to do.”
What makes table tennis unique is its low cost and easy logistics, so it didn’t take much to get the idea off the ground. “Pretty early on, we bought some really cheap tables and just started teaching the kids in an elective sense,” Lehnhoff said.
Soon, Lehnhoff was talking with other local schools who were interested in what was happening at SGA, and they began brainstorming. “We built this league called L.A. Ping Pong,” he recalled. “It’s something that technically existed as a general league for collegiate, older [players]. It was inactive for a few years when I proposed this, but it’s shifted now into what is primarily an interscholastic league targeting grades five or six through 12.”
The league officially launched in the fall of 2019, but the pandemic that would soon come delayed them for about a year until they were able to restart in the spring of 2021. “From there, it slowly started to grow, and more and more schools got involved,” Lehnhoff recalled.
The league welcomes all schools in the area, but Lehnhoff carries a specific burden for other Adventist schools: “My thought was, ‘We have a lot of small schools that don’t have any sports, and so why not offer them this opportunity?’” A handful of other Southern California Conference schools have since become involved.
With teams of only three to six students, it’s especially accessible for small schools, and two seasons, fall (September-December) and spring (March-May), work with different school schedules that happen to offer other sports, too.
Student participation also goes beyond L.A.: The SGA team has gone on to the national tournament for the past two years after winning championships in the local league.
Ping pong is an Olympic sport, yet we often think of it more casually. “Some of us have memories of being in a dorm room or in a parents’ or grandparents’ basement playing foosball and table tennis,“ Lehnhoff noted, “but if you look up highlights on YouTube of Olympic players, you see something different.”
And research reveals a positive social emotional impact, from brain health to community and connection. Lehnhoff tells the story of one student who joined the team because she didn’t have many connections in junior high. “[Table tennis] just became her thing,” he recalled. “It just brought her to life, and it affected her in her academics and her social life. And I have multiple stories of that where it just positively influenced them. Once she got to high school, she even said, ‘Hey, Mr. Lenhoff, I’ve got the confidence now to try out for volleyball.’ And she learned that she loved it. So it led to other opportunities where she was like, I would have never tried this if I didn’t gain confidence in [table tennis] first.”
Lehnhoff is passionate about helping other schools get started with the sport because he has seen the difference it can make. Those who would like more information may contact him at slehnhoff@sangabrielacademy.org.