Mark Hazinski: The Table Tennis Olympian

born 1985 · South Bend by birth, formed at the South Bend Table Tennis Club

Mark Hazinski was born April 20, 1985, in South Bend — the Tribune's Athens photograph caption calls him "Mishawaka's Mark Hazinski," and both addresses stand, birth here and the neighboring city's claim beside it. He was formed at the South Bend Table Tennis Club under Danny Seemiller — five-time United States men's singles champion, the U.S. Olympic head coach of 2000 and 2004, who had moved to this area in 1996 to coach the club and built it into a national-team pipeline. Hazinski was the youngest player in the national association's history to make the United States men's national team, at fifteen in 2000, and he held men's and junior team places at once from 2000 to 2003. At the Athens Olympics of 2004 he played men's doubles with Ilija Lupulesku; the pair's seven-game loss to Chiang Peng-lung and Chuang Chih-yuan stands in the event record. The club's own journal carries the fuller itinerary: world team championships at Doha in 2004, Bremen in 2006, Guangzhou in 2008 and Moscow in 2010; individual world championships at Osaka in 2001, Paris in 2003 and Zagreb in 2007; three Pan American team selections; professional seasons in Germany with Oberalster of Hamburg in 2004–05 and in Sweden with Ängby of Stockholm in 2005–06; and, in 2009, a United States national men's doubles title won alongside Seemiller himself, the coach's twelfth. He graduated from Texas Wesleyan in 2012. A singles-and-doubles Olympian out of a club program in this city: table tennis is the smallest room in this record and one of its most complete.

Sources

1. The Olympic event record, Athens 2004 — the men's doubles appearance with Lupulesku and the seven-game loss.
2. South Bend Table Tennis Club, the South Bend Table Tennis Express (2010) — the world championship itinerary, the national-team years and the 2009 national doubles title with Seemiller.
3. South Bend Tribune, 2004, and the national association's record — the "Mishawaka's" caption, the youngest-national-team-member mark at fifteen, the German and Swedish professional seasons and the Pan American selections.