National table tennis coach, Segun Toriola, has set the target of discovering more players as a way of giving back to the country, according to latest reports.
Toriola took over from former national coach Nosiru Sule and has been in charge of the country’s team, beginning with the 2024 ITTF World Team Table Tennis Championships in Busan, South Korea and currently at the 2024 ITTF African Cup in Kigali, Rwanda.
While few players like Toriola himself and the new African Cup champion Quadri Aruna have enjoyed relative success, many other players are yet to come close to them with the seven-time Olympian now looking to explore ways to develop more champions from Nigeria.
“Before I retired, I thought about doing what other ex-players haven’t done and that is why I decided to be around, even if not as the national team coach. This is what I want, I want to give back to table tennis,” Torila told ITTF Africa.
“The game is not improving because a lot of us have moved away from the game. The most important thing for me is the development of the game. It’s going to start from the youths so they can become African and world champions.
According to the Nigeria Table Tennis Federation, Toriola was handed the job based on his wealth of experience and his cordial relationship with most of the top players in the national team.
Toriola, who holds the record as the only player to have won four consecutive African Games men’s singles title (1995, 1999, 2003 and 2007), led the team to a third-place finish in the table tennis rankings at the last African Games in Ghana.
Olaitan Ibrahim