The Vice President, Nigeria Table Tennis Federation, Tayo Adesoji has disclosed that the West African Table Tennis Challenge Championship holding in Lagos is meant to help discover new talents that will take the place of aging players.
Adesoji on a radio program that countries like Cote d’ Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon among others have arrived in Lagos for the tournament scheduled to end on Thursday.
“We already have the current champion from Cote d’ Ivoire who is already on the ground. We have Ghana, Cameroon, Benin, and everybody is ready for the male and female teams,” Oladejo disclosed.
“It is a team event. We are looking at the opportunity of discovering young players to start replacing our aging players. So, we have six male players and six female players are relatively new players in the circuit except for Esther Oribamise that has always been playing but they are all junior players.
“We are looking at junior players that are ready to put in their best. Adesola Ake went for the African Championship, Boboye that is playing in the Under 15 are those representing us in the championship. It holds from November 1st to 4th.”
Oladejo added that the new board of the NTTF is working assiduously to ensure that table tennis returns to its enviable heights when the sport dominated the African continent and the Commonwealth Games.
“I am passionately about the growth of Table Tennis in Nigeria and we must do it right. We have been working hard since the election we had to put up a structure and then get sponsors.
“We also want to create the enabling environment that will help us to discover young talents so that we can have many more of Aruna Quadri. We need to return to where we were in Africa where we had a clean sweep of medals.”