Major League Table Tennis rolls into Portland

Portland will host Major League Table Tennis events this weekend at the Oregon Convention Center. On Friday, the Portland Paddlers will face off against the Los Angeles Spinners at 7:30 p.m. Hampus Nordberg is a Portland Paddler player, and Christian Lillieroos coaches the team. They join us with more about what table tennis looks like in Portland and what to expect this weekend.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Portland has some household name professional sports teams. There are the Blazers, the Thorns, the Timbers and the Pickles. The WNBA Fire will begin play in the spring. But another professional team has flown a little bit more under the radar over the last few years. The Portland Paddlers are one of 10 teams in Major League Table Tennis, which was founded in 2023.

Christian Lillieroos is the coach of the Portland Paddlers. Hampus Nordberg is one of the players. They both join us now, before this weekend’s matches at the Oregon Convention Center. Welcome to you both.

Christian Lillieroos: Thank you very much.

Hampus Nordberg: Thank you.

Miller: Christian, first – how did you get involved in table tennis?

Lillieroos: Well, I want to add on to the previous segment. My first coaching assignment was actually a player in a wheelchair in Sweden that I coached at the World Championships. But I started to play table tennis because of my father, but I started to coach because of a player who played in a wheelchair. I’ve had a lot of experience in my life with coaching athletes with a disability also. So I was, at one time, the director of sport for the International Paralympic Committee. I did a lot of accessibility checks and everything around the world. So that’s kind of how it started and now I’m in Portland here, coaching professional table tennis.

Miller: Hampus, what does table tennis look like in Sweden? How popular is it?

Nordberg: Since the Olympics in Paris, it’s been growing a lot. So it’s very big now because we have one superstar now called Truls Möregårdh. Since he had a very successful Olympics, it’s been growing a lot. So it’s a very big and famous sport now in Sweden.

Miller: Christian, I should say it’s a Portland team, but you have players from all over the world. And you took Hampus as your number one pick in the draft last year. Why?

Lillieroos: Because he’s good.

Miller: It’s that simple. [Laughter]

Lillieroos: No, of course he’s good, but the thing with the draft in the major league is that we don’t have enough money to get the very best players in the world. So Hampus is a perfect player. He’s right below the national team in Sweden and he is one of the best players in a very strong country that’s not on a national team. And that’s a perfect fit for me. If they play on the national team, many times they have too much conflict without a commitment, so they can’t come to play in the United States that much. But Hampus played in a league in France also last year, but it’s only one conflict, so I was very happy to have him be able to play on our team.

Miller: Hampus, am I right? You’re playing professionally for this Portland team. There was the French one last year, but you’re also a fireman?

Nordberg: Yeah, that’s true. I’ve been working as a firefighter since 2016.

Miller: How do you make time for everything?

Nordberg: That’s a very good question. Actually, I don’t know and if you ask my wife, I don’t know if she knows either. But right now, I only work 35%, but from 2016 until last year, I was working full time. So yeah, it’s been busy.

Miller: How would you describe your time in Portland so far?

Nordberg: Oh, very fun. I would say it has been very funny. It’s a very special league to play here in the U.S., and I’ve been enjoying it a lot. So yeah, fun and a new, crazy experience.

Miller: Christian, can you explain how the league works and how matches work? There’s a little bit of an unusual setup compared to other professional leagues that I’m familiar with, certainly the ones I mentioned earlier, in terms of what a weekend of play looks like.

Lillieroos: Yeah, so you mentioned before that this is a Portland Paddlers team. I’m the only one who locally lives in Portland on the teams. I have two players from Sweden, two players from Korea, one player from Japan and two U.S. players – they happen to be in the San Francisco area. So, a team consists of eight players. I go to one weekend and I have to select six players. I have to have one female on the team. And it’s a team event. So I have six players coming into one week and playing Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We play one match per day. There’s four teams that fly to one location in the United States and then we play kind of a Round Robin, everybody plays everybody over three days. So there’s two team matches getting played every day in the location.

And a team match has some very interesting procedures. The final showdown is what we call the Golden Game and that’s a crowd favorite. A Golden Game means that there’s five players who play 4 points each and they rotate. The Golden Game finishes at 21 points. And if it happens to be 20-all, then you play one point and that’s the golden point or the ultimate golden point we call it.

Miller: Oh, it’s not win by two, like I used to do in people’s basements.

Lillieroos: Absolutely. Winning by two is what most of the time all table tennis leagues or tournaments do in the United States. What we do is win by one. So when there’s 10-all, the announcer screams, “golden point!” You have to win by one point and it’s always like a massive drama, to make it very entertaining.

So, this league has been formed not based on what table tennis has done in the rest of the world, but they have been formed as a base of what professional sports are doing in the United States. And sports in the United States are very different than the rest of the world because you don’t have tax benefits. It’s all about showcases, sponsors and everything else. So there’s been a lot of specials that we do in this league that make it a lot of fun and very entertaining.

Miller: Is there a difference between ping pong and table tennis?

Lillieroos: It sure is. I would say it’s the biggest confusion in the United States, that ping pong and table tennis are not the same thing. It’s two different sports. There’s ping pong world championships and there’s table tennis world championships.

The biggest difference between the sports is basically the equipment. So I would say ping pong plays with a very, very slow blade. The blade has to be made of 100% wood, whereas a table tennis racket, many times, have carbon, air light, different material that makes it really, really fast. And you have to play with only one layer of rubber sheets in ping pong, and a table tennis rubber sheet is very thick, and it creates a lot of speed and spin. I would say there’s a great price range. A good table tennis racket can easily go for $500, whereas a ping pong paddle, you can get a good one for maybe $10 to $20. There’s a huge benefit in price. So the table tennis manufacturers and businesses love table tennis because it’s very expensive.

Miller: OK, so I was playing ping pong in my friend’s basement. You’re playing table tennis and also hitting the ball 100 miles an hour and hitting it from 15 feet away from the table.

Lillieroos: That’s what I mean. Hampus is playing 15 feet from the table all the time and it’s 100 miles an hour. He breaks the ball, puts a dent in a table and a hole in a barrier behind him. [Laughter] A little bit exaggerated, but he hits it hard.

Miller: Hampus, how is the season going so far?

Nordberg: So far, it’s been quite good. We only played for one weekend so far, but we won two matches out of three, so it was a quite good start.

Miller: What do you do to prepare for a match?

Nordberg: Oh, that’s a lot. When I’m at home, now that I’m getting older, so I only practice six or seven times a week. And then follow it …

Miller: Wait, what were you doing? You were doing two-a-days before?

Nordberg: Sorry, what?

Miller: Only six or seven times a week. I mean, there are seven days in a week. How much were you practicing before?

Nordberg: Yeah, before it was a normal week, I made 10 or 11 sessions of table tennis.

Miller: Wow.

Nordberg: So yeah, and then running and weight training on top of that. Yeah, that’s only the table tennis. So you have to put a lot of energy to become a good table tennis player.

Miller: What does weight training look like for table tennis?

Nordberg: It’s a lot of core and a lot of practice for the legs.

Lillieroos: So I can say, in terms of the physical requirement for table tennis is very similar to power lifting, in terms of weight training, and then you have to have a good aerobic capacity on top of that. So my joke is always that the only thing you need to be good at in table tennis is you have to be a professional bodybuilder, a marathon runner and a chess player, and then you become a good table tennis player. [Laughter]

Miller: I don’t think anyone’s ever said all those sentences together on this show, in 18 years. [Laughter] So Christian, what are you expecting this weekend?

Lillieroos: Well, I believe that we have a very good home court crowd, and I think that’s gonna help us. And I hope that listeners here also would like to see what really professional table tennis is all about. We’re gonna be at the Oregon Convention Center. And a good crowd in table tennis is very loud. They scream and yell, and the players when they win a point, they scream loud and it’s a very entertaining thing. So I hope that’s going to be a help for us.

We have very strong teams coming here. It’s going to be a team from Chicago, Los Angeles and Charlotte, North Carolina. So it’ll be a tough weekend for us, but I’m optimistic. We’re playing with our best team. And that’s a challenge sometimes. People coming from all over the world, so we don’t know if we’re gonna have the best players be able to play. But this weekend, we have our best players and it’s gonna be an exciting time. I’m optimistic that the home court advantage is gonna be in our favor.

Miller: Christian Lillieroos and Hampus Nordberg, good luck and maybe I’ll see you there.

Lillieroos: I hope so. You’re very welcome. I gave you a free ticket.

Miller: OK, I would pay. Christian Lillieroos is a coach of the Portland Paddlers. Hampus Nordberg is one of the players.

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