The Ping Pong Posse is training hard, their sneakers squeaking across the floor of a University of Southern California gym. As team members practice chop blocks and killer spins, coach Mikhail Kazantsev, a recent USC grad who has competed internationally in table tennis since age 9, analyzes their moves and strategies. Kazantsev, known to fight off opponents with his trademark paddle grip, the Kazantsev Klaw, has earned several championship titles. He’s hoping Posse players will do the same at the upcoming College Table Tennis National Championships.

Those who get there will have serious competition. Some 250 students from over 40 colleges are expected to make it to the Championships, which run from April 8-11 in Waukesha, Wis. That’s a small percentage of the nearly 2,000 college students in the U.S. who participated in regional tournaments and league play last year. Those events and the national championships are governed by the National Collegiate Table Tennis Association (NCTTA), whose members include 141 college table tennis teams in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico. Ten years ago, only 30 teams belonged to the NCTTA.

“The number of schools has skyrocketed,” says Kazantsev. “Lots of people think it’s a basement game. When they see the tournament side, it opens a whole new world.”

Chance Friend, a Texas Wesleyan University sophomore, competes in collegiate table tennis.

It wasn’t until table tennis became an Olympic sport in 1988 that Americans began to seriously view the game as something more than a recreational pursuit. As interest grew, the game began to move out of the dorm and into the gym. At first, only Ivy League schools and a handful of colleges in the Northeast had organized leagues, says Willy Leparulo, 34. That prompted Leparulo, who was studying sports marketing at Florida State University, to help start the NCTTA in 1999. The group, run entirely by volunteers, coordinates national and regional table tennis competitions for universities and community colleges, according to Leparulo, who is currently the organization’s president and a major promoter of table tennis.

“It’s my drug,” says Leparulo. “I can’t stay away from it.”

A few schools offer scholarship money to top players, and some of the top teams come from smaller schools, like Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth. In this sense, table tennis is an equal opportunity sport: it appeals to budget-conscious colleges, because its startup and overhead costs are relatively low. The price of paddles, for instance, start around $20; a good table sells for about $1,200.

Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Mo., spent roughly $30,000 to get its program off the ground two years ago, says Randy Kendle, who coaches the school’s team with his wife, Kelly. Lindenwood aims to host national tournaments, which explains why it sprung for top-of-the-line equipment, says Kendle, noting that it “can be done much cheaper” if schools want to start on a smaller scale.

Competitive table tennis is particularly popular on other continents, notably Asia and Europe, says Jasna Rather, who has competed in table tennis in the Olympics for both Yugoslavia and the U.S. and is now co-head coach at Texas Wesleyan. As a result, many of the college players are immigrants or children of immigrants. Kazantsev of USC, for instance, moved to the U.S. from Russia when he was 2 years old. His mother, who had played competitively there, introduced him to the sport.

Table tennis also attracts people who may not have the physical attributes demanded by other sports. “I’m only 5 foot 6, 5 7 on a good day,” says Adam Formal, 23, who played competitively at Rutgers University and twice won the New Jersey State Championship in doubles and was named Rutgers Athlete of the Year for Individual Sport in 2006-2007. He now coaches players at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. “You can win at any height. It’s more about designing strategy.”

In that sense, table tennis has something in common with chess. “You’re moving your opponent around and exploiting a weakness,” says Kendle, the coach at Lindenwood. “You put that strategy into place, and you beat them to death with it – something they can’t return.”

Texas Wesleyan has been good at exploiting weaknesses. The school’s team has dominated national competitions, winning 38 out of 52 possible collegiate titles in eight years, according to the NCTTA. Sophomore Chance Friend, 18, a native of Crowley, Texas, chose the school mainly because of its table tennis program — and the partial scholarship he gets for playing. In preparation for the national championship games in April, Friend lifts weights, runs and practices four to five hours almost every day.

For him, the social aspect of the game is one of its appeals. “I like that more and more American students are taking it seriously,” Friend says, adding that “the fun part about the sport is there’s so many people from other cultures.”

Still, Friend hopes that even more students will learn that they can play competitively at the collegiate level. “If we raise the awareness of it,” he says, the number of table tennis players in college will “double or triple easily.”

That’s what Leparulo of the NCTTA is hoping to do. One focus of his efforts is on women. In the last five years, the number of women’s teams rose from five to 35. Still, only 10 percent of the players at last year’s NCTTA tournaments were women.

“I’ll keep recruiting and promoting college table tennis,” Leparulo says. “Table tennis is an underdog in the U.S. and just needs a little bit of a push.”