HOUSTON — A wide range of emotions typically flows through the mind of Chicago Wind head coach Eric Owens whenever his team finishes 3-0. Pride. Relief. Motivation to continue climbing further up the West Division. All things that Owens felt after the Wind left ULH Event Center on Sunday after Week 11.

But as he stepped off the court for the final time in this year’s regular season, Owens felt an additional, new emotion: surprise.

“To be honest with you, I’m very shocked,” Owens told Table Tennis TV on Sunday. “Coming into this weekend without three players, I was worried about a catastrophic weekend that would potentially cost us the entire season.”

Owens’s nightmare scenario could have come true at multiple points this weekend. The Wind ended their Singles 3 set on Friday down 5-7 to the Atlanta Blazers. Saturday’s Golden Game against the Texas Smash was way too close for Chicago’s comfort at multiple points. Any time the Wind would win a set before Singles 4 on Sunday, the Carolina Gold Rush would respond with enough to tie the score back up. And no matter who they played, they’d have to fight for every point without Mo Zhang (SPINDEX: 2593), Jeongwoo Park (2782) or Sean Zhang (2657).

How’d those matches end? 14-7 on Friday. 16-5 on Saturday. 15-6 on Sunday. Three straight victories for the Chicago Wind.

“Never in a million years would I have thought that we would come away with a 3-0 weekend,” Owens said.

These wins may have been surprising to Owens, but not the performance of his players. Especially not Emmanuel Lebesson (2790), who won eight of his nine crucial Singles 4 games this weekend. His sweep of Jeet Chandra (2634) put the Wind ahead of Atlanta for the first time in Friday’s entire match. The two games he won against Joao Monteiro extended Chicago’s lead over Texas heading into Saturday’s competitive Golden Game. His three wins over Mohamed Shouman (2655) broke the tie between Chicago and Carolina heading into Singles 4 on Sunday.

It’s no secret that Lebesson can take over a weekend when he wants to; this was the same song and dance as his immaculate Week 7 in Broward, Fla. Regardless, this weekend was a nice reminder for Owens that it wasn’t a one-hit wonder.

“We put [Lebesson] in difficult situations, and he always delivers,” Owens said.

Lebesson’s impressive weekends are usually only rivaled by those of his teammate, Robert Gardos (2841). Just one week after winning Week 11 Player of the Week, Gardos put together another one of his consistently dominant performances, winning six games against Yuya Oshima (2807), Hiromitsu Kasahara (2769) and Enzo Angles (2763). And when Oshima snapped his 13-set winning streak on Friday, Gardos got his revenge with a 6-0 shutout of the Blazers star in the Golden Game.

Gardos’s weekend capped off a year worthy of consideration for Most Valuable Player of Season 3. He finishes his first MLTT season with a league-leading 39 Singles wins, a number only a few can even dream of passing at this point in the season.

“How can [Gardos] not be MVP of this season?” Lebesson said of Gardos on Sunday.

Gardos and Lebesson have been among the league’s best bookend duo all season, but they received plenty of help from their teammates in the middle. Free agent Tashiya Piyadasa (2400) stepped in for an absent Mo Zhang (2593) in Singles 2 and won three games. Gardos and Houston native Daniel Tran (2577) took two doubles games from Oshima and Jiwei Xia (2607) on Friday, and Kasahara and Guodong Liang (2680) on Saturday. And on Sunday, Lebesson and Isaac Vila (2573) won two of their three doubles games over Enzo Angles and Kai Zhang (2621).

The Wind’s teamwork gives Chicago a final regular-season record of 13-5 and 227 points. If Championship Weekend began today, they’d compete as the second seed in the West Division with more points, matches, Singles games and Golden Games than any of their potential first-round foes. But all four of their division rivals still have at least three games to play. And among those four teams, the Portland Paddlers and Bay Area Blasters are still in playoff contention alongside the Wind. A potential worst-case scenario exists in which the Blasters score enough points to take the second seed in the West and usurp the Wind. And in that scenario, the Wind would have no way to earn that spot back.

Regardless, the Wind’s performance this season has reassured Owens that they’ll be a very tough team to beat if we see them during Championship Weekend.

“We don’t want to lose [our] momentum going into April,” Owens said, “But overall, [I] couldn’t be happier with these guys.”

Atlanta Blazers

This weekend could have been an abject disaster for the already star-crossed Atlanta Blazers.

That’s certainly how it looked on Friday against the Chicago Wind, when Andrea Todorovic (2497) rolled her left ankle with the first few points of that Golden Game. She returned to the court and finished that game, but not without using up nearly all ten minutes of the Blazers’ injury timeout to treat her ankle. Would she be able to play for the rest of the weekend? Would they have to call Rachel Sung (2521) and ask her to fly out to Houston? Would they have to play the remainder of Week 11 without a woman and forfeit their points?

Not if Todorovic could help it. That wasn’t the first time she’s rolled her ankle during her career, and she knew exactly what to do to treat her pain. Immediately following the match, she extended her leg out toward her team’s bench and put a large bag of ice on her ankle. She remained in that position for around 30 minutes before walking out of ULH Event Center on her own power. She told Table Tennis TV that she felt no pain in her ankle at that time, but would wait to see how she felt the next morning before making any firm decisions on her availability.

“After that [Golden Game], my ankle was very bad,” Todorovic said. “I was surprised that this time [my ankle] didn’t get big, despite how much pain I felt yesterday.”

Saturday rolled around, and Todorovic made herself available to play. She felt no pain or swelling in her ankle at that time, but she said it was still a little stiff. It wouldn’t stop her from playing, nor would it keep her out of a Golden Game position against Carolina’s Mohamed Shouman, whom she had never played against in her MLTT career. That’s already a lot of pressure, which was only amplified when the Blazers reached 20 points. That’s when Todorovic and Shouman took the table. 

And Todorovic, on a stiff, uncomfortable ankle, scored a point that gave the Blazers their first and only win of Week 11.

“I’m just happy that I made it, that I brought this victory to my team,” Todorovic said after Saturday’s match. “[I’m] really, so happy.”

Euphoria overwhelmed Todorovic immediately following the Golden Game. Words stumbled out of her mouth as she filmed a video addressing Blazers fans after the victory. But Todorovic herself did not stumble throughout that game. She fought through her injury and gave Shouman all she had. 

And even though her best wasn’t what she had at the time, she still gave enough to take that match for the Blazers.

“It’s something we have to do when we are professional athletes,” Todorovic said. “We have to adapt to the situation, accept the situation, accept that maybe we won’t be able to give our 100%, [but] that 70 or 60 [percent] is also okay.”

Outside of the Golden Game, Todorovic won four Singles games against Chicago’s Tashiya Piyadasa, Carolina’s Chen Sun (2575) and Texas’s Kayla Goodwin (2356). She received plenty of help from her teammates, including Braxton Chang’s (2577) five wins in Singles 3, as well as Jeet Chandra’s (2634) eight Golden Game points in Singles 4.

But Atlanta had a clear MVP this weekend: Yuya Oshima. The No. 1 overall pick in the Season 3 MLTT Draft missed the Blazers’ Week 9 in Portland, Ore., and they’re happy he’s back. They’ve missed watching him hustle for every ball, no matter what the score looks like. That hustle earned him seven wins over Robert Gardos, Siu Hang Lam (2701) and Joao Monteiro (2724) this weekend.

“Oshima is a great, great leader,” Blazers head coach Suzi Battison said. “He gets every point that he can, whether he’s on the floor or he’s flying somewhere [trying] to get the ball back.”

And yet, those performances couldn’t earn the Blazers more than one win in Week 11. The Golden Game has been a weakness of theirs all season, and that’s how they lost 7-14 to the Wind on Friday and 5-16 to the Smash on Sunday. But that one win, especially given the circumstances surrounding it, is still worth celebrating. And it wouldn’t have happened without a strong Golden Game, as the Blazers entered it with only a one-point lead. Those small leads used to vanish once the Golden Game started, but head coach Suzi Battison told Table Tennis TV that she’s learning from her previous Golden Game collapses. She has completely shifted her strategy in terms of lineup construction and how she uses some of her key players, and it’s working. The Blazers’ 87 Golden Game points in the last two weeks make up 39% of their total this season.

The Blazers’ steady growth in the Golden Game has been quite reflective of their overall season. No other team has improved from week to week more noticeably this season than the expansion Blazers, who have graduated from winless weekends and five-game skids to outings that were just a few points shy of multiple victories. That’s why it’s difficult to call their season a failure so far, even though the Blazers sit as the fourth seed in the East Division with a 4-11 record, 127 points and little hope of making the postseason with three matches left to play. Much of their season has been defined by learning how to adapt to MLTT’s format, which should be a priority for a team made up of mostly first-years, including their head coach. They’re setting themselves up to become a true threat heading into Season 4. Any extra wins this season are nice to have along the way.

Carolina Gold Rush

Oct. 5, 2025, was eight match weeks ago. Kang Dong-Soo and Kotomi Omoda were about to share Player of the Week honors. The Atlanta Blazers were still looking for their first win in team history. The Princeton Revolution hadn’t even made their Season 3 debut at the time.

Those were MLTT’s major storylines when the Carolina Gold Rush last played. 

The Gold Rush’s extensive hiatus has prevented them from answering one of the league’s biggest questions: just how good are the Gold Rush? They lost several of their key contributors over the offseason, but they retained a core of Enzo Angles, Kai Zhang and Eugene Wang (2750). They’d have to rely heavily on multiple rookies, but Chen Sun and Mohamed Shouman have performed well in their first few weeks of MLTT action. 

It’s difficult to predict their final standing using the few matches they have played this year. They became the first MLTT team to win three matches in Week 2, only to lose two during Week 3. Victory and defeat have defined the Gold Rush’s short season at an equal level so far, and they haven’t had an opportunity to swing the pendulum in either direction. Until Week 11. 

A week that resembled Week 3 far more than Week 2.

It didn’t start that way, though. The Gold Rush began their week with a 14-7 victory over the Texas Smash on Friday, a near-reprise of the team’s trophy-winning Season 2 Championship Match. And it looked like the Gold Rush would remain competitive on Saturday after heading into the Golden Game behind the Atlanta Blazers by just one point. That was, until the Blazers had the best Golden Game of their season thus far and stormed back to take the match 14-7. The Gold Rush needed a successful Sunday to leave Week 11 with multiple wins, but all they got was a 6-15 loss to the Chicago Wind.

The whiplash between success and failure has defined the Gold Rush all season, so it’s only fitting for its players to experience both this weekend. Angles took two games from Hiromitsu Kasahara and Jeet Chandra before Robert Gardos swept him. Season 3 first-rounder Siu Hang Lam won just three games in his MLTT debut weekend, but contributed 10 points in the Golden Game. Chen Sun won all six of the Singles 2 games she played in, but did not play in Sunday’s match. Maybe this weekend would have looked different for Carolina had Eugene Wang and Edward Ly (2679) made the trip, but those players’ participation in the ITTF Americas Cup 2026 forced the Gold Rush to come empty-handed.

After a weekend that was neither great nor disastrous, during a season that has been neither great nor disastrous, the Gold Rush now possess a pedestrian 5-4 record and 88 points. But they still have nine matches to return to form, more than most of their East Division rivals. And with Wang and Ly set to return for Week 12 in Pleasanton, Calif., Championship Weekend is certainly not out of reach for the defending champions.

Texas Smash

It was do-or-die for the Texas Smash this weekend.

Just one week after suffering a winless Week 9 in Portland, Ore., the Smash left Willowbrook, Ill., after winning two of their three Week 10 matches. That included a victory over the Chicago Wind, their biggest threat to a West Division playoff berth. They could capitalize on their auspicious Week 11 and improve their postseason chances as long as a few things went their way. They needed to win multiple matches. If not, an unfortunate weekend for Chicago would help soften the blow. And if all else failed, defeating Chicago on Saturday would go a long way to keeping this tight race competitive.

None of those things happened. 

They didn’t even get to take revenge on the Gold Rush on Friday, as they lost their Championship Rematch 7-14 in front of their home crowd. Taking down the Wind on Saturday would have made up for it, but they couldn’t get the job done after a final score of 5-16. A 16-5 win over the Blazers on Sunday came too late for them to celebrate. This week might have just been the death knell for a promising Smash team.

This promising Smash team did not play its homestand at full strength, though. The Americas Cup took Amy Wang (2593) and Nandan Naresh (2693) from them, and Anirban Ghosh (2586) suffered a wrist injury right before Week 11 was about to begin. The Smash mainstays that did play couldn’t make much of a difference. Joao Monteiro won just four games. David McBeath (2700) also won only four games. Hiromitsu Kasahara, the Smash’s top candidate for Men’s MVP this season, only managed to take 5 games against Enzo Angles, Robert Gardos and Jeet Chandra.

The Smash went from fighting for second place in the West Division to a very firm bronze medal. The Wind regained any ground they lost to the Smash during Week 11 and now looks like a lock to make Championship Weekend over them. And if the Bay Area Blasters have an impressive end to their regular season, then the Smash could plummet to the division’s fourth seed. 

With that said, their season isn’t over yet. It won’t be until they play their final three matches in Pleasanton, Calif., during Week 12. But for Smash fans looking toward Championship Weekend, the season might as well be. Texas needed a successful weekend to fend off Portland, Chicago and Bay Area. They didn’t get that. Instead, they now face the reality of missing the postseason for the first time in team history.

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