On most days, Columbia’s St. Andrews Park gym is filled with the sounds of bouncing basketballs.
But every Monday and Saturday, it’s the sound of dozens of small plastic balls, pinging across tables — and the floor — that fills the room for hours.
On this Monday night, one by one, father and son pairs, a married couple, step inside the gym, paddles in hand for a bit of competitive table tennis.
"We have this table tennis league every single Monday, from 6 o’clock to about 8:30 p.m. Twenty-five players come in from all over the Midlands, and they play competitive table tennis matches, which is something you can’t really find a whole lot around here," said 20-year-old Midlands Technical College student Tripp Roche, a main player in the force behind the table tennis expansion in South Carolina's capital city.
"Everyone knows what table tennis is, what ping pong is," Roche added. "Everyone’s touched a racket at least one time in their lives."
He says call it table tennis or ping pong, it seems the sport is taking over parts of South Carolina these days.
In downtown Columbia, there’s now a permanent ping pong table outside on Main Street.
There’s also one in the newly redeveloped Finlay Park.
There’s even plans for the club to have a bar.
And it’s all because of Roche.
Roche hails from a tennis family, he said. But he fell in love with the game through his grandfather at the family’s longstanding Italian restaurant, Villa Tronco, which he said has a ping pong table upstairs.
He got more serious about the sport during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"I started a neighborhood league, got really good, beat everyone. Walked into my first club, got beat by everyone, little kids (and) older adults. It was very embarrassing," Roche said. "I have never dreamed of that. I just thought I was like the man because I could win in the neighborhood."
Convinced there were other aspiring players, like him, out there, last summer Roche founded Carolina Pong — a name attached to the goal to hopefully expand the club someday statewide. Maybe even North Carolina, Roche said.
And just like that line, "If you build it, they will come," loosely taken from the 1989 classic movie Field of Dreams, players — young and older, women and men, experienced and amateurs — showed up.
That included 24-old Jeremiah Holland, who doesn’t make it to the gym every Monday. But when he can, he said he gladly makes the trek from Greenville, more than an hour away.
"I started playing it in college, fell in love with it just playing with friends," he said. "Then the deeper I got learning more intricacies of the sport, the community around it. It’s a lesser known sport, so it’s kind of that like niche, you get to be part of a unique community, so I enjoy that as well."
Ping pong is taking over Columbia. 🏓On Mondays and Saturdays, Carolina Pong fills Saint Andrew’s gym with competitive table tennis, bringing players of all ages together — and building a fast-growing community around the game. https://t.co/pj7tpzKl6g pic.twitter.com/Qns24qhbKw
— South Carolina Public Radio (@SCPublicRadio) December 22, 2025
Most players travel from nearby, including 19-year-old Leo Sobel, who said he loves the complexity of the sport, and 72-year-old Bradley Anderson, the city's former fire chief.
There's also 56-year-old Mike Wilhelm, who played the game all his life, mainly for fun.
He decided as a Christmas present one year to buy his son, Joseph, now 15, a table.
Wilhelm said it became clear that just playing dad wasn’t cutting it.
He googled table tennis in Columbia and found Carolina Pong.
The pair are now regulars.
"The bad thing is sometimes we have to play each other, which can make for an awkward drive home, you know, every once in a while," Wilhelm said, laughing.
Roche knows the sport can be male dominated.
He said he'd like for more women to join.
So does 33-year-old Anjali Singh, the only female player in the room that Monday night, who got attached to table tennis through her more experienced ping pong player husband.
"I love it now," Singh said. "Anybody can play this game. It doesn’t matter. You can be a kid, you can be an older person, and it’s interesting and it’s very exciting. I look forward to the days when we go to play table tennis."
Roche said he knew the club would be a success, noting his rather determined personality. He said he hopes to use that to further spread the table tennis gospel.
So for a holiday gift, now or next year, might he suggest a ping pong table?
