MILPITAS, Calif.—Young people who were serious about table tennis used to have to make the trip to Beijing, Stockholm or Moscow to train with world-class coaches.

Now they go no farther than this Silicon Valley suburb.

“;I'm trying to become one of the greatest players in the nation,”; Srivatsav Tangirala, 14, said matter-of-factly between drills at the huge new table tennis facility here. He and three dozen players, some as young as 5, sprinted sideways along the edge of the tables, 45 times in a row, perfecting their footwork.

“;Lean forward, lean, lean, lean, lean!”; their coach implored.

This is the largest training program for youths in the country, run by the India Community Center in a region that is 60 percent Asian. Here, pingpong parents who grew up with the sport in Sichuan province or Hyderabad are the new soccer moms and Little League dads.

One of 12 table tennis clubs in the area, up from five clubs in 1990, the India Community Center's pingpong facility was started last year with seed money from two Indian entrepreneurs and has already become an influential hatchery for Olympic hopefuls, most of whom banter in Hindi or Mandarin at home.

Ariel Hsing, 14, the top-ranked U.S. junior from San Jose, and Lily Zhang, 13 and ranked No. 2, from Palo Alto, are a fearsome twosome, with matching teal braces, bulging calf muscles and a dream of playing in the 2012 Olympics. Ariel cradles the ball in her palm like a baby chick—before she lets go and smashes it.

They and over 100 other teenagers, many the daughters and sons of technology professionals, are being coached by talent from around the world: Gaolin Tang from Sichuan province, Stellan Bengtsson, the Swedish champion, and Rajul Sheth, the center's executive director, a veteran of the Indian national team.

In the past, top players grew up in China and became citizens in order to play for the U.S. Olympic team. Today, 80 percent of players age 14 and younger are Asian-Americans, according to USA Table Tennis, the sport's national governing body.

“;Hyphenated kids who are born and raised here and have a foot in both worlds are the ones taking the lead,”; said David Del Vecchio, a board member of the National Collegiate Table Tennis Association.

In Milpitas, the hollow knocking sounds of pingpong balls reverberate off walls lined with triumphal newspaper clippings in the Sing Tao Daily and the India Express featuring India Community Center offspring.

Ariel's mother, Xian Hua Jiang, a 46-year-old hardware engineer, was weaned on two-volley games on concrete tables in the schoolyard in Henan province. Growing up poor, she had to borrow white shoes to participate in a tournament. “;Rain or shine, during school breaks everyone rushes to the tables,”; she recalled.

Today, she and her husband, Michael Hsing, a software engineer from Taiwan, spend at least $40,000 a year fostering their daughter's talent, and have added an indoor table tennis practice room to their house. Their plastic Home Depot window shades are pocked with holes from the velocity of Ariel's balls.

Named for Disney's “;Little Mermaid,”; Ariel juggles school and international tournaments in Tokyo, Chile and elsewhere. Her ferocious close-to-the-table backhand, honed from age 6, has generated so much buzz that two years ago she was invited to play with “;Mr. Bill”;—as in Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft—and “;Mr. Warren”;—Warren E. Buffet, the investor. She decimated the billionaire pingpongers at Buffet's 75th birthday party in San Francisco. “;They're very humble and down to earth,”; she said.

Although the sport's visibility is growing nationally—thanks in part to celebrities like Susan Sarandon, who recently opened SPiN New York, a table tennis social club in Manhattan—it does not yet have Little League-style cultural clout in the United States, which parents say makes it difficult to compete. In Germany, table tennis engenders a Los Angeles Lakers-like fever, with televised games and some professionals earning $1 million a year in endorsements.

In this country, the sport is still considered a hobby; only three colleges—Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, Lindenwood in St. Louis and the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan—offer table tennis scholarships.

Randy Capps, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, said the Silicon Valley's burgeoning pingpong scene reflected the state's demographics, in which half its school-age children are the offspring of immigrants. “;The parents have competed hard to get where they are,”; he said. “;They expect their children to do the same.”;

Min Zhou, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that within the Asian-American community, there was a perception that the children would not excel at football or basketball, and that table tennis “;is a sport where they have an advantage because of cultural affinity.”;

“;Being too academically oriented has become a stereotype of the Asian-American kid,”; she said. “;Parents are grounding them in sports so the kid does not appear as nerdy.”;

Now junior teams from India and Hungary come to Milpitas to work with coaches like Sean O'Neill, an Olympian from McLean, Va. “;I had to go to Sweden”; to train, he said. “;But they've brought the world's borders inside”; the India Community Center.

It is a global game, with the Chinese coaches specializing in a fast “;flat game”; in which the ball is hit hard close to the table, while their European and Indian counterparts are “;topspinners”; who move away from the table to put more spin on the ball.

The sprawling new complex is a satellite of the India Community Center, an ambitious, one-stop-shopping center for Indian culture modeled on Jewish community centers. It includes a free medical clinic, a program for retirees and Bollywood aerobics classes.

“;In India you walk out of the house and there is a community all around you,”; said Anil Godhwani, a co-founder of the center. “;In the U.S., we felt we were missing something.”;

The program started small in 2005 with five Indian players. “;The Chinese people didn't want to learn table tennis from some Indian,”; as Sheth put it. Winning 16 medals the following year at the Junior Olympics helped persuade the Chinese of India Community Center's serious intentions. Today parents have nicknamed it “;the India-China center.”;

Last week, at the U.S. table tennis national championships in Las Vegas, 21 players from Milpitas competed against 653 athletes from around the country, garnering 15 awards—the most of any club.

Sheth's team included Krish Avvari, a bespectacled fourth grader known for his mean loop forehand, and Ariel Hsing, known as a powerful “;two-winged attacker,”; comfortable with backhand or forehand.

“;I want to control who wins and who loses,”; Ariel said of her style—an exercise perhaps in the most subtle art of spin.