Criminology junior Jeremiah Kincaid (center) serves as president of the billiards team, which recently saw members place at a UT Arlington tournament. Photo by Grace Chang | Mercury Staff
After transitioning from club to UREC team, Comet Billiards
took home a first-place win at a recent UT Arlington tournament.
The team was recognized as a club last spring, and was
registered as an official UREC team this semester. On Feb. 22, the team
competed at the Mavsconi Cup VI hosted by UT Arlington, and computer
engineering junior Chi-Quynh Nguyen won first place for C-Class. Criminology
junior Jeremiah Kincaid said he was approached to be president of the former
billiards club last semester since all the officers had graduated, and he
wanted to turn the club into an official team through UREC to make organizing
practices and tournaments easier.
“I can’t remember what the initial push for it was. I
definitely wanted something bigger than just an informal club. I wanted to
actually have an official team. One of the driving things was we weren’t
allowed to reserve tables and have practices unless we were a UREC team. If we
were a club, it would have been a lot more difficult, reserving it for a tournament,
stuff like that,” Kincaid said. “It was just more of a logistic nightmare. It’s
easier being a team somehow. It’s a lot easier to deal with running it through
UREC.”
Kincaid has been playing for 15 years, starting in high
school, but said he’s learned a lot from being part of the club and learning
from other members. The team holds practices every Tuesday and Friday and runs
drills for two hours to train specific techniques such as cuts and ball
control, Kincaid said.
“The tables we have are two feet smaller than the tables we
compete on and they need to be more well-maintained. So right now, just for our
practice, we don’t actually play because playing on these tables isn’t going to
help us compete,” Kincaid said. “There’s all different kinds of drills that we
might run through practice and we’ll just kind of have like a line going, we’ll
have everybody running through it, seeing who can get through it, what they
need to work on.”
Mechanical engineering senior Justin Williams joined the
billiards club with Kincaid last semester and handles most of the technique
training during weekly practices. He said he notices people making fundamental
mistakes when they play involving stance and stroke, and that being a part of
the club was a way to leave behind something positive to the university.
“If we can gather this community and better all of them,
then that only benefits everybody — it’s a positive experience,” Williams said.
The 10-ball double elimination tournament that took place in
February involved billiards teams from universities across Texas, and everyone
on the UTD team competed individually. Players are divided into A, B and C
classes and compete within brackets.
During the championship, Nguyen won all five rounds,
finishing off in the semifinals and finals against Lone Star College’s Andres
4-2. Nguyen said throughout his time he tried not to make mistakes while
playing and, as a strategy to help him focus, would hold his breath until he
felt light-headed and red-faced. He said he got distracted during one of the
matches when his opponent congratulated him before he could make his shot.
“It was on the 10 ball. It was in the corner and I just had
to make the small cut and I guess the guy I was facing was like ‘Good game,
this is over cause it’s an easy cut.’ He walked up to me, shook my hand and it
completely threw me off,” Nguyen said. “I was like, ‘The game’s not over yet.
Please don’t do that.’ So, the guy assumed that it was going to be over and
just that little break in concentration can throw you off completely or you
overthink it so much, you end up missing a really easy shot. The 10 ball is
basically inside the pocket and I completely missed it.”
Although the team has been practicing on the six pool tables
in the Student Union, Kincaid said it was difficult to play on them because
they need repairs such as re-felting, fixing worn bumpers and broken pockets.
When the tables aren’t in good shape, gameplay is heavily affected because the
ball can curve or change angles no matter how straight a player hits the ball.
Once the tables are repaired, he said they hope to host an informal tournament
at UTD with other UT schools next month and bring more awareness to UTD
Billiards as a whole.
“I kind of feel like we have some of the out of the ordinary
sports compared to a traditional university. There’s like no football team or
anything, but we have chess, we have e-sports, stuff like that,” Kincaid said.
“So, we figured why not turn billiards into a big deal here. If chess could be
fourth in the nation, why can’t we?”