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MLTT founder Flint Lane reveals one of his inspirations behind the league

Luke Scotchie
Journalist
Updated
Oct 14, 2025 8:00 PM
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Flint Lane founded Major League Table Tennis (MLTT) in 2023 (Major League Table Tennis).

Major League Table Tennis (MLTT) began its third season on Sept. 5. It’s made many innovations throughout those three seasons, including the Golden Game and, most recently, open serve doubles. These changes, as well as its status as the first professional table tennis league in the United States, have convinced many superstars to join MLTT, including Lily Zhang (SPINDEX: 2557), Amy Wang (2569) and Koki Niwa (2815).

What, or who, inspired all of this? American table tennis superstar Kanak Jha.

Jha appeared on the latest episode of “Around the Net,” a show hosted by MLTT CEO Flint Lane. At the beginning of the episode, Lane revealed that Jha was one of his inspirations to start Major League Table Tennis, which caught the star by complete surprise.

“Am I really?” was all Jha could say.

Lane noticed that if many of the top table tennis players in the United States wanted to compete professionally, they would leave their homes and live in a brand new country to do so. Jha was no exception. After qualifying for his first Olympics in 2016 and becoming the youngest American athlete in that year’s event, Jha moved to Germany for his opportunity to make a career out of table tennis.

For those American stars like Jha, they didn’t have much of a choice other than to move away. Lane created MLTT so they could have one.

“It was shocking to me that the best player in [the United States] had to move overseas to play the game that he loved so much,” Lane said.

Jha is the highest-ranked American table tennis singles player worldwide at No. 24, as of Oct. 14. The three-time Olympian and five-time national champion became the first American born after the year 2000 to ever qualify for the Olympics in 2016.

On the global stage, Jha recently made history at WTT Champions Yokohama 2025 by becoming the first American to reach the semifinals of a WTT Champions event. In the quarterfinals of that event, Jha defeated Dang Qiu (Men’s Singles No. 14), his current teammate on Borussia Düsseldorf, his Table Tennis Bundesliga (TTBL) club.

Since MLTT played its first matches in 2023, several prominent American stars such as Zhang, Wang, Jinbao Ma (2708), Sid (2673) and Nandan Naresh (2673) and Jishan Liang (2683) call this league home.

Two years later, the league now draws plenty of foreign talent, too. That list includes Niwa and Yuya Oshima (2806) from Japan, Kang Dong-Soo (2788) from Korea, Aditya Sareen (2636) from Australia, Ľubomír Pištej (2782) from Slovakia and Mo Zhang (2608) from Canada.

And much of that can be credited to Kanak Jha.

Watch the rest of Lane’s exclusive interview with Jha on Episode 3 of “Around the Net,” only on Table Tennis TV. Subscribe today on tabletennis.tv for two free weeks.