Table tennis serves up international opportunity for Mesa 10th grader

Yash Manek, a Mesa resident and high school sophomore at ASU Prep Digital, is a state champion table tennis player who has the opportunity to train at the Dhanuka Dhunseri Soumyadeep Poulomi Table Tennis Academy in Kolkata, India, this fall to work toward his ultimate goal of competing on a global stage.

About four years ago Yash started playing table tennis for fun in a garage with other kids his age and quickly found he had a talent for the sport. He watched the Olympic competitions a few years later and was inspired. As his excitement for the sport grew, he decided to take it more seriously and joined a table tennis club and began training there, according to a release.

Fast forward a few years later and Yash is the Arizona state champion in the under 19 age category and is ranked No. 3 in men’s singles and No. 2 in men’s doubles for table tennis. Yash practices daily and spends more than 20 hours a week playing table tennis. He loves walking into tournament halls and says it is “a different kind of magic” when he arrives to compete, the release states.

In October, he plans to begin attending the Table Tennis Academy in Kolkata to receive world-class training that will allow him to continue to excel in the sport. He is excited for the fresh start and looking forward to the change. English is commonly spoken in India but growing up in a predominantly Indian household, he is familiar with Gujarati and Hindi, which will surely prove helpful when communicating with his coaches, staff and peers there.

While Yash focuses on improving his game, education is still a priority, since he still has several years of high school to complete. The upcoming move to India led him to enroll at ASU Prep Digital this year. The online college preparatory school provides flexibility with his training schedule and its ties to ASU gave them confidence in the quality of the academics. This week marks Yash’s first week of school where he is taking biology, world history, English, sports marketing and business marketing. Both of his marketing classes are concurrent classes where he will earn both high school and college credit from ASU.

Yash’s next tournament is Friday, Aug. 21 to Sunday, Aug. 23, at Table Tennis & More, 4959 S. Greenfield Road in Gilbert.