1644 Main Street · Columbia, S.C.
Main StLiving Room
Columbia’s ping pong club, in the basement of the old Tapp’s department store. Ten dollars. Two people. Every table in the room.
By day it’s a ping pong club.Then the lights go down.
Escape the surface
Same room.Completely different night.
Tables until ten. Then the lasers come on and Main Street’s living room turns into somewhere else entirely.
The room runs itself — no host, no queue. Come in, sign in, play. Booking just means a table is definitely waiting for you.
Thursday, 6–8pm
This is Open Play.No booking. Just turn up.
Twelve seconds of the room on a normal Thursday. Nobody is performing for the camera — that’s just what it looks like down there when four tables are going and somebody’s ball is loose on the floor again.
Filmed by the club, on a phone. It’s their room and their footage.
Open Play · every Thursday · 6–8pm
What this is
It isn’t just a ping pong club.It’s Main Street’s living room.
Tables under the old Tapp’s department store. A bar. Booths you can sit in for an hour and never play a point. Whether you’ve got a state ranking or you’ve never held a paddle — same room, same ten dollars, same welcome.
0–72
The ages that turn up
0+
Members in the club behind it
$0
For two people, all day
Downstairs
Teal walls. Blue tables.Nobody watching the clock.
Fifteen to seventy-two. Same room, same table.
The booths. You don't have to play.
The ball machine. Train on your own.
A full house on a Thursday.
And the same room, after ten.
Alex Cazacu came to Columbia and ran a clinic. In the basement.
Play the house
Everyone’s touched a racketat least once.
That’s Tripp’s whole argument for the sport, and he’s right — you already know how to do this. So beat us before you book. Move your cursor, or use the arrow keys.Drag your thumb up and down the table. First to eleven, win by two, exactly as it’s scored downstairs.
Or skip ahead — book a tableThe house
0
You
0
MOVEDRAG TO PLAY · FIRST TO 11
Under the old Tapp's department store★Built 1940 · On the National Register★Soda City Market is directly above us, Saturdays 9–1★First Thursday on Main, every month★Powered by Carolina Pong★The largest table tennis club in South Carolina★Ages 15 to 72 have played here★Escape the surface★
Getting in
Ten dollars for two.Or twenty a month.
A day pass gets you and a friend the run of the room until six. Membership keeps it until ten, every night, and the table time stops costing anything at all.
After the tables
The lights go downand it stops being a club.
Open Play on Thursdays. DJs on Saturdays. Same stairs.
The person who built it
“I want to be kind of a figurehead to show people you can be a young person and thrive here. Like that’s doable, it’s not impossible.”
He learned upstairs at Villa Tronco — his family’s restaurant on Blanding Street, the oldest in Columbia, where his grandfather kept a table on the second floor and invited customers up to play.
He didn’t get into the University of South Carolina, so he couldn’t play for their team. He started his own club instead. Two years on, Carolina Pong is the largest table tennis club in South Carolina, it brought the state championships back after thirty years, and the S.C. House passed a resolution naming it.
Then he took the room under Main Street.
Written about in
All 15 stories →
Come down
The door isa staircase.
1644 Main Street. The old Tapp’s building, under the clock. If you’re at Soda City on a Saturday morning, you are standing directly on top of us.
Free street parking after 7pm, and all weekend.