Youngest national TT champ in 44 years finding the balance

While a diminishing ideology, sports has often been cited as a distraction for students seeking to achieve scholastic excellence, with the Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA) setting stringent guidelines for student-athletes to be allowed to perform for their schools.

Wolmerian Joel Lamm is continuing to erode the notion that both can’t be managed successfully.

When then-17-year-old Lamm became the 2025 national senior male table tennis champion in September, he became the youngest national champion in 44 years.

By then, he had already grabbed every title on offer at the high-school level, and helped Wolmer’s Boys’ to back-to-back ISSA titles.

Some athletes follow their parents into sports but it was not family pressure that pointed the 18-year-old to table tennis.

In fact, Lamm told The Gleaner he had an active interest in sports generally and was on his way to football at school when the table tennis coach at Wolmer’s intercepted him, inviting him to play.

Ironically, it was the global shutdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic that helped to improve his game, resulting in helping Wolmer’s to the back-to-back titles.

“I didn’t play very seriously for a while. It was only during COVID that I started training regularly and doing fitness and all the other more rigorous aspects of the game, to go further in it.”

Lamm, who is an upper sixth form student and is also enrolled at the Skills Unlimited Table Tennis Academy (SUTTA), defeated the highly rated Roberto ‘Magic Dino’ Byles to lift the national title in a very competitive tournament.

Before that, he had defeated his Wolmer’s and SUTTA teammate Azizi Johnson in a thrilling semi-final to face the veteran Byles, where he won 4-2.

He credits his coach at SUTTA, Dale Parham, who is also the national table tennis coach, as well as Sean Wallace and former national representative Simon Tomlinson, who both coached him during national competitions when Parham had to recuse himself.

He looks back at 2023, when he won his first singles tournament and also received a scholarship from the Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce Foundation, as his breakout season:

“That confidence that it gave me played a pretty big role, not only in my abilities to develop as a player, but also helped bring me the confidence now to go into a game and know that yes, I can do it because I have done it before. So my thoughts going into the final (national 2025 table tennis championship) were fairly straight forward. I had just come out of, I would argue, my most difficult match probably ever in the semi-final before. So I knew that I could, you know, similarly to how I described the first tournament that I won, I knew going into that final that I could. I just played a tough semi-final and I had played really, really well.”

Lamm knows among his superpowers are his parents and older brother, but admits balancing academics and sports is not easy.

“That got a little tricky, something I credit very heavily to my mom, because she is always keen on making sure that I am able to manage my time very well. So, as soon as I finish school, I head straight to training. When I get home, I rest a little bit and then I study and I have to get up early again because I do fitness training in the morning before I head out to school. But, essentially, she showed me a way to structure and plan out all my different days, so that I am still making enough time for both training and schoolwork.”

Aerospace engineering

The future of spacecraft, aircraft and satellite design and production could have a Jamaican flavour, as the young math and science buff has his sights set on a career in aerospace engineering.

“I am immersed in university applications and such, now, to see what universities I can get into in the US or in Europe or elsewhere, because we don’t offer aerospace engineering out here. I could do a mechanical engineering degree and then transfer but, for the sake of simplicity, and also because I think I have a strong enough profile to get scholarships, I’d like to just go straight overseas.”

Designing future spaceships, notwithstanding, Lamm intends to be among the best table tennis players and he is already very strategic on how to achieve this.

“There are a few universities who have programmes like that (strong table tennis programmes) but most of them don’t offer aerospace engineering. The few that do, of course they are on my short list, but what I am looking for is a good university with a very strong aerospace engineering programme, with table tennis clubs nearby where I can train and continue to play. So Cornell University (New York), because they do have a very good table tennis programme and, of course, their engineering programme is very, very strong. There is also Georgia Tech (Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia). They also have a very strong engineering programme, several very good clubs nearby, and Stanford (California) in a similar position. They have a strong school programme and very good clubs nearby as well.”