Table tennis: Queen puts top spin on men's title

REDEFINING BOUNDARIES: Natalie Paterson is in a position to question the constitution of the Hawke's Bay Table Tennis Association if she wins the men's crown today. PHOTO/Paul Taylor

HER bespectacled face lights up when contemplating what-ifs but no interpretation is required from Natalie Paterson's grin at the thought of becoming the Hawke's Bay Open men's title winner in table tennis tonight.

"I don't if he [top seed Matthew Ball] knows I'm playing in the men's ... but I don't know what happens if I end up winning so I don't think that [a female becoming a champion] can happen because I'm not a man," says Paterson who has been granted dispensation to compete in the men's Open division for the second consecutive year.

"If I come second it's okay but if I win it'll probably ruin their system so I don't know the answer to that but I'm already testing the system," says the 23-year-old Taradale Intermediate School teacher.

Enter co-ordinator Russell Winkley who accepts if Paterson prevails it'll send the code back to the drawing board.

"She'll have to have a sex change. I don't know what'll happen," says a jovial Winkley who hopes the more than 50 players at the event will be done and dusted at the Rodney Green Events Centre in Napier before the All Blacks kick off tonight at 7.35pm following a 9am start.

He considers Paterson good value for the code but reckons she'll face a stiff challenge even in the women's grade from Wendy Zheng, of China, who has been living in Napier for the past four years and is among the top 10 in the country.

"In China, she played every day in school and was ranked highly as a junior," he says of Zheng who lost 4-2 to Paterson on club night on Tuesday.

It's easy to detect a steely resolve in Paterson's quest to excel as she sits in her classroom among the remnants of her stage production with her pupils.

"I want to go to the final. It is really hard and I have found that in the last two years just because I'm exhausted and I've had a hard day at work," says Paterson who has put her teaching career on the front burner since starting work here last year.

The Palmerston North-born player, who Winkley reckons can make playoffs if she's seeded in section play, has lost a couple of games at interclub competition to men.

"Every time I come against a top player in Hawke's Bay I've beaten him easily but it's when I come up against a lower player ... so the only thing that'll stop me getting to the finals will be if things are not working in my head," says the effervescent one who will play singles, women's doubles and mixed doubles.

Ball is the only player she hasn't beaten in Palmy.

"He's really good and his whole life is table tennis," he says of the NZ men's team member who coaches and trains.

Shane Wilson, of Whanganui, is the second seed with teenager Jae Lee, of Palmerston North, No 3.

Two 50-year-olds follow in Dipak Patel, of Wellington, and Paul Whitehead, of Waikato, while Kejls Tosland, an over-50s national rep from Ireland is No 6.

"He comes from there every year to play at the Manawatu Open but he used to live here," he says of Tosland.

Another player who could upset top seeds is William Colenso College exchange student Toshiaki Yasuda, 15, of Tokyo, who is Winkley's doubles partner and also trained with a Japanese Olympian.

"I've never seen anyone who started playing for a year play at that level so quick," he says.

Paterson's played in the Bay event since she was at high school, bar the odd year she missed.

"In every women's event that I can remember I've won here but last year I got to enter the men's for the first time," she says, suspecting she bowed out in the quarterfinals.

She can't remember the name of her assailant who quashed her semifinal hopes but she believes she lost to someone she shouldn't have.

Paterson has always trained with males from the time she was at school and prefers their interaction.

"Growing up in Palmy I was the only girl that was any good - as a junior and then a senior so I always trained with boys.

"Females are very fast and hit the ball very flat but males add more spin and sometimes step away from the table more so that gives you time to control the ball whereas girls tend to attack at the table."

She is a table hugger so that enables her to counter, block or top spin with some authority.

Conversely, Paterson finds some males tend to struggle against that tactic because females don't often back off.

"They [men] don't like losing. Hey, no blokes like losing to a girl, right?"

Ironically her initiation into the code was a love-hate one almost by default because her elder brother, Blair, now 28, played religiously and coached.

"He started coaching so I had to go with him because mum didn't want to take me anywhere else," she says of Blair who represented New Zealand for a year before focusing on his tertiary education.

In fact, she hated table tennis because she didn't think she was very good at it at the age of 9.

"I just kept losing," Paterson says with a laugh. "I was really bad but luckily I'm a determined person."

That gritty demeanour came to the fore as the social garage-variety player for three years metamorphosed into one who dared to believe.

"At high school I started getting better and I started training a lot," reveals the former Freyberg High School pupil. "It started becoming enjoyable. I don't know, maybe because I started beating the boys or what."

Coach Tim Seaholm, of England, moved to Palmy where he mentored Paterson and her peers to the first junior nationals (U18s) and from it a long-term sporting alliance ensued.

Seaholm saw potential in her to the extent that he took her back to the drawing board to redevelop the essence of her game.

"I had a very unco-ordinated technique but if I put effort into anything I'll put 150 per cent into it and I think he could see that."

Paterson had good hand-eye co-ordination but she tended to return the ball very flat.

Shadow play without a ball was the norm for almost 18 months where he played one ball in 10.

"It was a very slow process and at the start I was losing a lot of matches against people I was winning against before."

But Seaholm was unrepentant and, luckily, Paterson bit her bottom lip to take it on board to add more depth to her game.

In her last year as an under-18 player she set a goal of making the junior worlds and did by overwhelming her peers.

Since arriving in the Bay, she has worked on her serve but her consistency has boosted her forehand including top-spin opener and counter attacking.

"I'm quite consistent so I can place the ball, I can take the speed off and I can take the spin off," she says, emphasising she doesn't have any one aspect of play that is overly dominant.

Her family saw her drive as she adopted the have-bat-will-travel stance that took her to play and coach (ITTF level 1-2) in China, South Korea, Malaysia, Russia, Slovakia, Germany, Australia and the South Pacific Island nations, including three World University Games.

But she agonisingly missed out on the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in 2014 because of a tight culling process.

"A lot of minor codes have the same problems," says Paterson who also had met the criteria for making the cut to the Rio Olympics after her performance at the Oceania Championship in Bendigo, Australia, but there was no guarantee the Olympic selection committee was going to endorse her for the qualifiers so Table Tennis NZ, she suspects, didn't come to the party that allows two players from each nation to enter from the Oceania region.

She hasn't given up her dreams of representing New Zealand at the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games in 2018.

"The only thing that's going to get in my way is politics, really, because the last time they selected the team from the previous Commonwealth Games but none of them had been playing," says Paterson who is been a senior women's rep for six years.

"If that happens again and they choose players who haven't been playing then it'll be really hard for me to play against them or prove yourself."

She intends to put her coaching prowess to better use with the children at her school after starting a pool of eight.

"I'd really like to start pushing that core group that has three girls, which is awesome because it's something I feel more passionate about because there aren't definitely not as many good female players around as males."

Since it's her first employment as a teacher, she has put all her energy into that after weighing the option of going fulltime as a table tennis player on graduating from Massey University.

The training structure in the Bay isn't as well established compared with Palmy but she enjoys playing the game which acts as a release valve.

"There's a mental side to things and a physical one. People think it isn't physical but when you play at a higher level I get a bigger sweat up playing table tennis than I would going for a 10k run."

Paterson's boyfriend, Conor Wadsworth, a Massey student, is someone she knew as a youngster.

"We started playing when we were 11 or 12 and just good friends and then a couple of years ago we thought let's give this a go, whatever," she says, of the former Manawatu representative.

In her final year at high school, she almost threw it all away after the Junior Worlds (U18).

"I thought, nah, this is too hard. They're too good and I'm not good enough for this.

"I thought I don't like it this much to push myself," she reflects but after four months she went cold turkey and couldn't handle herself not asking questions across the table.

Like most sport, she says table tennis is addictive.

Besides, she had invested too much time and energy into it to just flush it out of her system.

Paterson intends to find a balance between work and play that will enable her to do justice to both.

"I don't think I'm still in that happy place yet. Last year I put everything into teaching and this year I'm slowly trying to do that but I'm not playing as much table tennis as I'd like to because that's what makes your life rich.

"I want to be doing this [teaching] but I don't want to be here [classroom] all the time," says Paterson with that infectious smile.