What can you do with $400?

Buy three meals for Garfield? Yes. But try to be the best table tennis team in the East with such a limited budget? Not likely.

The Harvard table tennis team, sporting a non-Trump-like budget of $400 this year, captured two first and one third-place finish in the 1989 U.S. Intercollegiate Table Tennis Team Championships last weekend at Princeton.

Graduate students Yoshi Futamura, Eckart Lange, and Tsay-Shing Yuan made up Harvard's first team, undergraduates Michael Levin and Yi Gu and grad student Kefeng Liu were on its second team and the third team included undergraduates Louis Tao and Captain Ken Yoon and grad student Yue lin Zhu.

"[Levin] is the most enthusiastic player on the team," Coach Frank Chaing said. "We're hoping that he can bring more players to the team."

Team one won the Division II title, dropping only four games in six matches. The Crimson swept Harvard II, Columbia II, Princeton II and NJIT II by 5-0 scores and defeated both NJIT I and Augusta II by 5-2 marks.

Harvard's second team, scheduled to compete in Division III, was moved up to Division II because it upset Rutgers II in the preliminaries.

Despite the stiffer competition, the team still had a good showing. It split its six matches, finishing third in Division II.

In Division IV, the Crimson's number-three team recorded six wins to capture the title. Harvard defeated Cooper Union III, Columbia III, Cornell II, Princeton IV, Princeton V and Princeton III.

Tao won the last match to clinch the championship for the Division IV team.

Last year, when there were only three divisions, Harvard sent two teams down, with team one nabbing second place and team two finishing fourth in Division III.

"Before going to the tournament, we worked hard together as a team, and we went there determined to win for Harvard," Chaing said.

"This was not simply the effort of nine individuals playing for themselves," Captain Ken Yoon said. "We had trained together, gave each other advice between games and cheered each other on. [Intramural Director] John Wentzell has been very supportive and encouraging. He put a lot of trust in us."

The Harvard table tennis team currently has about 20 active members, a mixture of undergraduate and graduate students. The team has made great strides since 1978, when Chaing led the team to the Northeast Intercollegiate Table Tennis Championship. Considering the primitive condition of its equipment, the squad's accomplishments are that much more impressive.

The current table tennis team is trying to reestablish itself as the best team in the East.