Tim Tigges

Tim Tigges (*10.061980) is a German table hockey player and organiser respectively official. Although he currently lives in Hamburg, Germany, he's playing for Satyrion Berlin.

Tigges played more than 150 tournaments listed in the worldranking.

Achievements
As a player Tigges' best result is the German Championship 2008. Though it was just a small tournament, his victory in the Bembel-Cup 2008, then Germany's stop in the European Challenge Tour, was of a higher sportive value. This victory remains as Germany's only in an international tournament.

German Champion: 2008 (2010: 2nd, 2006: 3rd)

German Team Champion: 2008 (2010: 2nd)

Berlin Champion: 2005, 2007

WCh: 2005, 2007, 2009

ECh: 2006, 2008

Carreer
Tim Tigges began to play table hockey on a somewhat ambicious level in 2002, when he was on an internship as a German teacher in the small town of Bryne, Norway. Bryne turned out as one of Norway's table hockey hotspots. So Tigges enjoyed the fabulous conditions of the Jaeren Bordshockey-Liga with players such as Frode Horvath in his first months of playing. Jaeren Open 2002 was his first major tournament ever. Tigges was also one of the amateur players taking part of the legendary Oslo Open 2002, where he met other German players for the first time.

Back in Germany in 2003 he played his first German tournament, German Championship 2003, and began to arrange weekly home tournaments in Berlin. Out of this bunch, Satyrion Berlin emerged. After one year Tigges and his mates organised their first national tournament in Berlin, German Championship 2004, and founded a propper Berlin Championship series with them. This new born "Berliner Tischeishockey-Liga" was played monthly and publicly at a pub. Until he left Berlin in 2007, Tigges won 10 BTL-tournaments and twice the Berlin title (2005, 2007).

In 2005 Tigges improved in playing by training with Swedish Berlin resident Björn Söderström and traveling to foreign tournaments such as Czech Open 2005. Due to this and a generation shift in German table hockey, he got his debut on the German national squad at WCh 2005 in Riga, Latvia. Though ranked internly as No. 8 he was part of the five players beating Hungary to go to the quarter final against Sweden.

In the upcoming years, Tigges was the only player from Germany travelling frequently abroad - e.g. he was the only German at ECh 2007 in Skalica, Slovakia, in which Tigges achieved his best result internationally with a 51st place. This activity made him the best German player in both the ITHF worldranking and the WTHT for a couple of years. But from 2006 on, Tigges established as one of the best German players also on the national level. He became best German (8th totally) at the Berlin Open 2006 and reached his first medal, when he came 3rd in German Champs 2006. Since then Tigges happened just twice out of 14 German national tournaments not to remain as one of the German Top-4.

In 2007 Tigges moved to Copenhagen, where he was an active part of the Öresund table hockey community. Travelling to his homecountry from the far north brought him his two greatest achievements ever, the victories at Bembel-Cup and German Championship 2008. After that he moved to two of the old and deceasing German table hockey strongholds: first the Rhineland - where he together with Edgar Seelbach arranged the biggest German tournament in recent history, German Champs 2009 - and then Hamburg.

Table hockey organiser and official
As described, Tigges was part to establish and organise several tournaments and series, such as "Berliner Tischeishockey-Liga", Berlin Open and German Championships 2004, 2008 and 2009. In the community-lead German association (DTEV) he has functioned as a kind of inofficial manager since around 2005.

Tigges was one of the of the officials signing the certificate of ITHF's incorporation in Riga in 2005. Since then he has been member of ITHF committees, namely the Legal Committee, and has been declared as a referee in ITHF tournaments.

Tigges invented the ITHF twitter account and established - together with Krystof Herold - the Table Hockey wiki.

Other

 * There's a quite incredible story about Tigges and his table hockey debut. When he began to study scandinavian languages in 2000, he found - wondrous enough - norwegian table hockey crime novels on the internet. Those books were about a copywriter from a small norwegian village solving murder mysteries in the Norwegian table hockey community. When he two years later was sent to some school in an unknown Norwegian town by a student exchange program, he found out that the author's daughter was in his German class. And Tigges recognised that he had been reading about this place two years ago - as it had been his destiny. Because Svein F. Hestvaag, the author, clearly describes his own surroundings, just by other names.