Ellen Lee re-elected table tennis president after defeating former youth player Toh
Ellen Lee (photo, sixth from left) with the STTA's management committee after the biennial general meeting on Saturday (Sept 15).
SINGAPORE — The election battle for table tennis’ top post on Saturday (Sept 15) saw incumbent Ellen Lee elected president of the Singapore Table Tennis Association (STTA) for a third term, as the 61-year-old lawyer defeated former national youth player Toh Kian Lam at the biennial general meeting.
This was the first time in over a decade that there has been a contest for leadership positions at the STTA, with Ms Lee elected unopposed in her last two terms in 2014 — when she took over the reins from veteran chief Lee Bee Wah — and 2016.
Nineteen members were elected to STTA’s management committee for 2018 to 2020.
STTA declined to reveal the vote count for the elections.
Lee said in a statement after the meeting: “This has been an exciting election…I strongly believe that my newly elected management committee is a credible team which has a lot of passion for table tennis and strive to do nothing but the best for Singapore table tennis.
“I look forward to this opportunity to continue serving the sport, and to continue to make table tennis one of the popular games in Singapore.”
Ahead of the polls, Dr Toh and his Team 3H had vowed to “regain glory and restore pride” to the sport with its athletic-centric plan for the association, athletes, and the fraternity.
The team pointed to a number of key issues to resolve, including the declining performances of the national team, which returned home empty handed from the Rio Olympic Games for the first time since 2008. The 2018 Commonwealth Games also saw India overtaking Singapore to claim top spot in the table tennis medal tally for the first time after its paddlers won a total of eight medals.
At the recent Asian Games in Indonesia, Team Singapore’s paddlers won just one out of the 20 medals on offer, as compared with three bronze medals from the 2014 edition in South Korea.
Dr Toh also noted the attrition rate among junior players, stating that the loss of talents had resulted in a “major vacuum” in the current national men’s team. He also raised issues about the clubs that vote in the elections, as he said that the majority of them were not actively involved in the sport’s activities.
Dr Toh, who is the executive director of Nanyang Technological University’s Local Community Engagement Office said in a statement on Saturday that “we have given our best”.
He added: “We hope that STTA will address the key problems which the sport faces today, including declining performance, succession problem and the inability to further groom our naturalised players.
“We also hope that STTA will review their Constitution and benchmark their policy on voting members based on similar policies like other leading national sports associations.”
Unveiling its plans for the future, the STTA said that it would continue to work closely with stakeholders and partners such as the Singapore Sports School and Sport Singapore to “nurture a generation of table tennis athletes”.
Its high performance and development plans include: increasing the number of players and trainees in its youth development programmes, providing a conducive training environment for its athletes to become world class players, and promoting more local talents into the Intermediate squad and eventually the national team.
The national sports association will also introduce other initiatives such as a national grading system for local players, and a new secondary school league in 2019.
Ms Lee said: “My newly elected team and I are committed to fulfil the STTA’s mission to support and develop world class table tennis players by identifying, nurturing and motivating aspiring table-tennis talents to become the best that they can be.
“Nonetheless, more time is needed to narrow the gap left by our senior players, but the gap has actually narrowed. We have seen promising results from our youths and these achievements serve as a testament that our youth development programmes are bearing fruit and we are on the right path of grooming our high potential talents into world-class athletes.”
