How TheraPyng Got Started

My great, great Uncle Sol Schiff was the World’s Champion Table Tennis player in doubles in 1936. Along with Jimmy McClure, they won the title.

I was very close to Uncle Sol—we had dinner once a week and we spoke often on the phone. He passed away at the age of 94 in 2012--I was 9. He showed me how to hold a table tennis paddle--since he was almost blind at the time, he couldn’t teach me how to play. We had a table in our basement, and I always enjoyed playing, but that was all it was—“basement playing.”

Then, my dad passed away very suddenly when I was 12. While people came to visit our house during Shiva, I spent a lot of time in the basement playing table tennis. I discovered that I could lose myself in playing—focusing on the ball meant I couldn’t think about anything else. I started getting pretty good. And all I wanted to do was play more. I played almost every day at the table tennis club in my school.

6 months later, I decided to check out the Port Washington Table Tennis Club (PWTTC). It was a Saturday and I joined the group lesson that going on. I was hooked. I started lessons with the club coach and am a club “regular.” The club is like a second home to me and the friends I’ve made there have become like family. My mom calls it our “life line.”

My mom and I want to share the life line. We go to a bereavement peer group called The Center For Hope. I meet in a group with kids ages 12-14. There are other groups with kids as young as 4. I talk a lot about table tennis—sometimes it’s all I talk about. We got the idea of offering the other kids in my group the chance to play. The owner of the PWTTC lets us use the space and we meet every other Wednesday for Pizza and Ping Pong. I keep telling my mom to call it “table tennis,” but she says that she likes the way Ping Pong sounds with Pizza.