Somewhere in the crowd of more than 230 players at the 2nd UTT J&K Ranking Table Tennis Championships, a girl young enough to still be in primary school was collecting her third gold of the weekend. Her name is Syrah Dewan, and over three days in Jammu she won the Under-11, Under-13 and Under-15 girls' titles — beating players years older than her to do it.
That is the real story of this tournament. The senior trophies were decided too, but the weekend belonged to the kids.
The headline results
In the Men's Singles final, Maanay Mansotra edged Akash in a five-game thriller, 3-2. The Women's Singles went to Nitya Arora, who beat Mishthi Aggarwal 3-1. Both are names to file away: these ranking championships feed directly into the selection pipeline that decides who from J&K plays at the National Championships.
Held over three days in Jammu (July 12-14), the event drew 230-plus paddlers from across the union territory — one of the bigger turnouts the state association's ranking circuit has seen, and a sign of how deep the sport has quietly grown in the city's clubs and school halls.
The age-group sweep
If you want to know where J&K table tennis is heading, look at the junior draws:
Syrah Dewan — gold in U-11, U-13 and U-15 girls. Three age groups, one weekend.
Samar Dev Bansal — doubled up with golds in both U-15 and U-17 boys.
Satvik Nischal — took the Hopes (U-11) boys title and finished among the weekend's multi-medallists.
Akshaj Garg — won the Cadet (U-13) boys category.
Players winning across multiple age brackets is exactly what talent scouts look for. It means a child is not just beating their own age group but holding their own two or three years up — the clearest early marker of someone who could go national.
Why a ranking event matters more than a one-off win
A trophy is nice. A ranking is a pathway. These championships are a selection event: results here shape the J&K rankings, which in turn decide who the union territory sends to national-level competition, with the next National Championships cycle looming in early 2027. For a young player in Jammu, that turns a good weekend into a concrete next step rather than a certificate for the wall.
It also answers a question a lot of Jammu parents ask: is there actually a route from a school table tennis club to a national side? On this evidence, yes — and it runs through exactly these ranking weekends, held right here in the city.
The bigger picture
Table tennis rarely gets the headlines that cricket or football pull in Jammu, but it has two things going for it as a youth sport: it needs relatively little space and money to start, and it has a clean, visible ranking ladder that rewards kids who show up and improve. A U-11 player who medals now has a decade of that ladder ahead of her.
Watch these names. Syrah Dewan, Samar Dev Bansal, Satvik Nischal, Akshaj Garg — the paddlers who ran the rankings this July were, in several cases, barely tall enough to see over the table. In J&K table tennis, that is starting to look like the norm.
Source: Daily Excelsior.
