AUC’s Meshref continues family legacy of table tennis champions
Dina Meshref, a freshman majoring in business administration, won the Egyptian Fifth Settlements Universities Table Tennis Competition, qualifying her for the National Egyptian Universities Competition next March.
Meshref plays for the Ahli Club, Egyptian National team, and just this year started playing table tennis for AUC.
This year, she participated in the African championship, held in Algeria and came back with the gold medal.
Last year she traveled to Morocco for the Arab Cup championship and she came back with the gold. She also went to Qatar last year for the All Arab Games and came back with three gold medals for the singles, doubles, and teams.
But 2012 marks a transformative year for the young athlete as it caps a half-century of family gold medal achievements.
Fifty years ago, her great- aunt, Inas El Darwish won three gold and one silver medal in the African Championship. Today, Meshref came close to her aunt’s record, winning three gold and one bronze medals.
Meshref lost in the women singles semi-finals to the Congo. To commemorate the passing of 50 years, Darwish herself presented the gold medal to the winner.
Meshref’s gold medals came in three other types of events in the tournament: the team event, the doubles and the doubles mix, which includes one boy on each team.
Meshref says she was stressed throughout the competition as this was her first seniors’ tournament – she had previously played in the below-18 category. She felt satisfied with winning the bronze, hoping to come home with the gold medal next time.
Meshref started playing table tennis when she was only eight having caught the bug from her parents.
“At first I used to play tennis, but then I found myself automatically interested more in table tennis and so I stuck with it ever since,” she says.
But she insists her parents did not play a role in her choice.
“It was just a coincidence that I shared the same interest, and of course they were of great help and support,” she says.
The 20th African Table Tennis Tournament also honored Darwish as the first Egyptian to win a continental competition.
“My mother was the first to honor Egypt in table tennis, it’s great to see my relative honor us in the same way, 50 years later” said Ahmed Aboul Fotouh, Darwish’s son and AUC alumnus.
As part of the table tennis team that made it to the London 2012 summer Olympics, she managed to improve her ranking from the top 46 to 64 players to a more worthy 32 to 45.
