🏓🇩🇪 TTD COMMUNITY WEEKEND AT BORUSSIA DÜSSELDORF 🇩🇪🏓
Well… that was quite a weekend.
What started as a slightly mad idea between myself and TTD somehow turned into 30 players from 10 different countries spending a full weekend playing table tennis at Borussia Düsseldorf — arguably the premier table tennis facility in Europe and home of the German National Team.
Not bad for a bunch of people who mostly know each other from the internet. 😂
The weekend kicked off on Friday evening and ran right through to Sunday, with a ridiculous amount packed in:
🏟️ A full tour of Borussia Düsseldorf with Managing Director Andreas Preuss
🏓 A huge round-robin tournament, including some genuinely brutal Golden Point finishes
🏆 A Top Table competition
🎯 A serving challenge
🔥 An absolutely chaotic One Point Challenge — video definitely coming!
🍻 A Saturday night meal together in the heart of Düsseldorf
…and, obviously, an awful lot of table tennis in between.
But as good as the venue and the table tennis were, the best part was finally putting real faces to usernames and spending a proper weekend together.
A very special mention has to go to Mr and Mrs
@golden_son, who came all the way from Atlanta to join us. 🇺🇸👏
And it was particularly brilliant to finally meet
@NextLevel in person after all these years on the forum — and, even better, actually get on the table and play him! He made the journey all the way from Texas, which is a fairly serious commitment for a few games of ping pong. 😂🇺🇸🏓
But an enormous shout-out also has to go to
@latej (Jan). 🇨🇿
Last year, Jan was the man who welcomed us to his home country of Czechia and showed us incredible hospitality throughout the trip.
Without that weekend, and without the way Jan hosted us, I genuinely don’t think we’d have come away thinking, “We absolutely have to do something like this again.”
So in many ways, Düsseldorf started in Czechia.
And apparently Jan decided that simply inspiring the event wasn’t enough… because the Czech Assassin only went and won the whole round-robin. 😂🏆
It genuinely couldn’t have been much closer.
Jan finished level with
@50hz, meaning the overall winner came down to their head-to-head result.
And, because apparently the table tennis gods have a sense of humour, that match itself was decided on a Golden Point. 😳🔥
So one single point ultimately separated first and second place across the entire weekend.
You couldn’t really script it.
That, for me, sums up what made the weekend so good.
We had people travelling from all over Europe and the US, different ages, different standards and plenty of people who had never met before — yet within about half an hour it just felt like one big table tennis club.
There were competitive matches, questionable serves, outrageous nets and edges, Golden Point drama and significantly more trash talk than elite athletes would probably consider acceptable. 😂
Huge thanks to everyone who made the journey, helped organise things, got involved in the challenges and generally threw themselves into the weekend.
And a massive thank you to Borussia Düsseldorf for having us and giving us such incredible access to the facility.
When you stand back and think about it, 30 players, 10 countries and a weekend at Borussia Düsseldorf is pretty special.
Finally, to
@Dan, Tom and Chair, thanks for giving up your time and efforts to make this work - You’ve built an amazing community!
The TTD forum has always been a slightly unusual corner of the internet, but weekends like this show what an incredible community has grown out of it.
And from Jan hosting us in Czechia last year, to 30 of us descending on Düsseldorf this year… I’m slightly concerned about where this ends up next. 😂🌍🏓
Same again next year? 👀
I especially liked your backspin serves with it.
