I fell in love with the sport almost immediately, and while i took many years away from TT in my 30's and 40's, my love of the game has never left me.
I first started via a club that started up at my high school back in 1985. The club was initially started by a new maths teacher that had just come to the school who really loved to play (he was actually pretty good).
Our school didn't want to splash out for tables, so the school's Manual Arts (ie: woodwork and welding) department built the tables instead. They made the legs and frames out of out square steel tubing, with with a single piece of painted 12mm MDF forming the top.
We had three tables in total with about 20 to 30 kids being involved in the club all up. We only got to play at lunch times -- there was no inter-school competition in town.
Within the space of 18 months, both the teacher involved, and 28 out of the 30-odd kids had either stopped playing, or left the school. I however was one of the two remaining kids who kept the club going, by showing up each lunch time to play against one of my mates. I had only tried playing on our neighbour's table prior to joining the school's club, but really loved it.
I used to play daily as a kid as I desperately wanted to be a professional, but growing up in the middle of nowhere made this impossible.
I lived deep in the country back then... our nearest neighbour lived about 5km away, the nearest club was located in the nearest town (which was 36km away), while the nearest TT coach lived well over 450km away.
In order to play the game at all, first I had to build myself both a table, and a bat, as I didn't own either at that point. My homemade bat was promptly lost shortly after I made it, so I saved up and bought myself a pre-made butterfly bat, then later on swapped out its crap pre-fitted rubbers for a sriver / super-sriver combo. I taught myself the game from a couple of illustrated library books I borrowed, and first learnt to control the ball and hit a backhand drive by hitting the ball into our kitchen door.
As I never had anyone to play against either before or after school, or on weekends, in order to reach my goal of being a professional player, all I could really do was practive my serve... which I did literally for hours on end, basically untill the ball broke.
There was no multiball practice back then... I could barely afford to buy six balls let alone hundreds of them, and robots were hideously expensive -- not even the town's local TT club could afford to buy one, and that had over 80 active members all up at the time.)
I would practice a serve, go retrieve the ball, then practice another serve, go retrieve the ball.... hour after hour, day after day. This was back in the days when you played to 21, and served 5 times in a row. I had to figure out how to serve largely on my own, as neither of those two library books were terribly useful on the subject.
Even now, my serve is still the backbone of my competitive play, and my return if serve is still my biggest weakness, as returning serve is the one thing you simply cannot ever practice on your own.
I had reached our local town's A2 grade within 3 years of starting playing, and I won 90% of those games purely and solely based on my serve. When I graduated from school and moved to Perth however (WA's capital city) I realised very quickly just how much better TT players were in the big city, as while I was A2 grade in my home town, I was low to middle B grade here in Perth at best.
I stopped playing halfway through university and didn't come back to playing regularly for a couple of decades. In hindsight I never should have stopped playing... still not completely sure why I did frankly, as even when I wasn't playing at all, I still missed the game massively.
Starting Wakkibat and devoting my remaining working years to the sport I love is probably one of the smartest decisions I've ever made. It's let me achieve my childhood dream of becoming a TT professional (though not quite in the manner I originally intended 🤣🤣) and I get to live my life doing what I love most. 🥰🥰🥰
