118 Events, Six Days, and One Membership Card: How America Runs Its Table Tennis

I sat in front of my screen at 11 p.m. in Hanoi, reading the announcement for the 2026 U.S. Open Table Tennis Championships, and laughed to myself.

Among the 118 competition events, there is one called "sandpaper" — a racket surface made of sandpaper. Not a metaphor. Actual sandpaper, glued to a blade, so people can play table tennis with the roughest possible surface. Next to it is "hardbat" — pips-out hard rubber with no sponge, the racket of the 1950s, when spin was not yet a weapon. Then "Parkinson's" — an event for people with Parkinson's disease. And "Family Generational Doubles" — doubles played across generations within the same family.

A national championship in which, in the same hall, in the same week, people compete in open singles, age-group women's singles, events for para athletes, events for people with Parkinson's, and a parent-child pair wielding rackets together.

I have followed women's table tennis for more than four decades. I have sat in studios, cried over mispronounced names, and taught myself to say the names of 64 female athletes correctly. But this list of 118 events taught me something three decades of commentary never did: a tournament can be designed to exclude no one.

Six Days, 118 Events, and a Philosophy of Organization

The 2026 U.S. Open Table Tennis Championships runs from December 16 to 21, 2026, at Mandalay Bay on the Las Vegas Strip. Six days. 118 competition events. The playing hall opens from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. each day.

The number 118 is not the number of an elite tournament. It is the number of a festival.

For comparison: a WTT Champions event or a World Championships final typically has five to seven main events, plus a few doubles. There, every match is a life-or-death battle for world ranking points, for Olympic quotas, for prize money. The 118 events in Las Vegas represent a completely different structure in nature: classified by skill rating (rating events), by age (age-group singles), by youth (junior events), by gender, by racket surface (hardbat, sandpaper), and by health condition (para, Parkinson's).

A tournament organized into 118 events does not measure who is the best. It measures how many people are permitted to step onto the court.

This is what women's football, women's basketball, and women's volleyball are all struggling to find: how to open the door wider without diluting competitive value. American table tennis appears to have found an answer — not by lowering championship standards, but by expanding the definition of who gets to be called a champion.

Americans call this week "one of the biggest weeks on the U.S. table tennis calendar." I believe them. Not because it has many stars. But because it has many people.

The Trap of the Membership Card

But here is where the story gets interesting in the way I like best — the way data betrays the advertising.

The participation requirement: you must be a current Gold or Lifetime USATT member. Your membership must be valid through December 21, 2026. You need a Player Credential to enter the playing area. Spectators without credentials must buy a Day Pass or Full Tournament Pass. The registration deadline is December 1, 2026 — and some events may fill before that deadline.

Reading this, I paused.

A tournament designed to exclude no one — for sandpaper players, for people with Parkinson's, for parent-child pairs — places a barrier at the entrance: you must be a high-tier paying member. Not an ordinary member. Gold or Lifetime.

This is the biggest blind spot of the American inclusion model: you open the door to every kind of player, but you still let a membership card decide who actually gets in.

I am not saying this to criticize. I understand the operating logic: a sports association needs membership revenue to survive, and a major tournament is a perfect lever to drive membership conversion. At 60, I have seen enough sports organizations to know that behind every dry administrative rule usually lies a very moist financial equation.

But at the same time, I also know this: newcomers often do not know which membership tier they need until it is too late. They plan the trip, book flights to Las Vegas, reserve a room at Mandalay Bay, and only then discover they must be a Lifetime member to compete. That is a shock no championship in Asia inflicts on its participants, because Asian events typically require registration through national federations, not personal membership tiers.

In Vietnam, where I live and work, a young female player who wants to enter a national event only needs to register through her locality. No Gold card stands between her and the table. In America — the country with the strongest school sports system in the world — there is.

This difference is not good or bad. It is simply a difference in philosophy: the American model turns a tournament into a tool for building an organization. The Asian model turns a tournament into a tool for selecting talent.

Vegas, LA 2028, and an Unanswered Question

The second notable point: 2026 sits exactly two years before the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics.

I have followed enough Olympic cycles to recognize a pattern: when a country prepares to host the Games, its domestic national championships tend to be organized at a larger scale, promoted more widely, and — most importantly — positioned as a stepping stone for developing its talent pool. The U.S. will host LA 2028. American table tennis will have the chance to host an Olympics on home soil, something it has not had since Los Angeles 2026.

But the USATT announcement does not mention LA 2028 a single time.

That is a telling silence. Either they do not want to place performance pressure on an event that is inherently community-oriented, or they do not yet have a strategy for converting mass participation into elite results for the 2026–2028 cycle. With the experience of someone who has sat in studios for three decades, I lean toward the second.

And this is what troubles me most about women's table tennis specifically, and women's sports in general.

I spent 90 full days and watched 156 matches during the pandemic to write a 12-part series about female athletes no one bothered to measure. I know the value of opening doors. But I also know that an open door with no path to the summit behind it is just a playground, not an ecosystem.

118 events is an achievement in inclusion. But inclusion does not automatically become development. And that is the gap no line of announcement can fill.

At 51, I opened a YouTube channel about women's football. The first video got 212 views in three days. I once thought I had started too late. But I did not give up, and the third video reached 47,000 views. The lesson I drew from that was not about views. It was about how a small community needs the right structure to grow — if there is only enthusiasm with no pathway, the enthusiasm extinguishes itself.

The 2026 U.S. Open has enthusiasm. It has 118 events to prove it. The remaining question is: does it have a pathway forward?

No Need to Be Rescued, Only Seen Correctly

I will not be in Las Vegas in December. I will sit in Hanoi, follow results online, and take notes on what I see. I will watch the para events, the Parkinson's events, and the family pairs walking onto the court with two generations holding rackets together. I will watch whether some young girl, entering a national event for the first time, discovers that she needs a Gold card she did not know she had to buy.

Vietnam's women's table tennis once had 212 views on an analysis video. The world's women's table tennis was once deemed unworthy of measurement. I cried over mispronouncing Rapinoe three times, and I taught myself to say the correct names of 64 athletes. Those tears were not from shame. They are proof that I am still learning.

In sum, the lesson of a country daring to organize a championship for people with disabilities, for people with Parkinson's, for sandpaper players, for every age and every level, is a lesson that global women's sports can learn. But attached to it is a second lesson, no less important: do not let administrative barriers ruin the message of inclusion you are trying to send.

Women's sports do not need to be rescued. They need to be seen with eyes that know how to see. And sometimes, they need an organizing committee that understands an open door only matters when people know the door is open — before they board the plane.