Unseeded Ke and Tan upset top seeds, reach U.S. Nationals semis

Unseeded Tiffany Ke and Angie Tan turned the women’s doubles bracket upside down at the U.S. National Table Tennis Championships, edging top seeds Amy Wang and Jessica Reyes-Lai 3-2 in a quarterfinal that finished 11-6, 8-11, 12-10, 7-11, 11-8. The win sent Ke and Tan into the semifinals and left the title path in San Jose far more open than it looked when the draw was announced.

The match swung back and forth from the start. Ke and Tan took the first game, Wang and Reyes-Lai answered, and the third game became the hinge point when the unseeded pair pulled out a 12-10 edge. The top seeds forced a fifth game with a 7-11 response, but Ke and Tan held their nerve again in the decider and closed it 11-8. Tan said the pair did not expect much when they saw the No. 1 seed in their section, but they planned to fight for every point, and that approach carried them through the biggest rallies late in the match.

That result matters because Wang entered the event with one of the deepest doubles résumés in U.S. table tennis. She and Abigail Yu won the 2025 U.S. National women’s doubles title, giving Wang her fifth consecutive women’s doubles championship. Before that, Wang had won with her sister Crystal Wang and three times with Rachel Sung. Ke and Tan did not just survive a tough upset bid; they knocked out the pairing that had defined this event’s recent doubles standard.

Their semifinal will come against Hildy Chen and Lilian Ma, giving Ke and Tan a realistic chance to keep the run going and push all the way into a championship match. The rest of the Nationals draw was still taking shape around them, with Sally Moyland, the reigning U.S. National women’s singles champion, and Wang again among the headline names in women’s singles. Members of the U.S. Women’s National Team moved through round-robin play without a loss, while men’s singles was set to feature six-time champion Kanak Jha and two-time champion Nikhil Kumar in the next round.

The championships are being held July 3-9 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, where USA Table Tennis has billed the event as the largest U.S. National Table Tennis Championships in history, with more than 1,000 athletes entered across more than 100 events. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan and USA Table Tennis CEO Virginia Sung were part of the opening-day festivities, and the scale of the meet was evident across every bracket, from women’s doubles to men’s doubles quarterfinals featuring Jha and Bosman Botha, defending champions Nandan Naresh and Daniel Tran, and top seeds Nikhil Kumar and Sid Naresh.