Melissa Tapper
2016 Australian Paralympic Team portrait of Tapper
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| Personal information | ||||||||||
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| Nationality | Australia | |||||||||
| Born |
1 March 1990 Hamilton, Victoria |
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| Height | 166 cm (5 ft 5 in) | |||||||||
| Weight | 65 kg (143 lb) | |||||||||
| Sport | ||||||||||
| Country | Australia | |||||||||
| Sport | Table Tennis | |||||||||
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Medal record
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Melissa Tapper (born 1 March 1990) is an Australian table tennis player. After competing at the 2012 Summer Paralympics, she represented Australia at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in elite non-Paralympic competition. In March 2016, she became the first Australian athlete to qualify for both the Summer Olympics and Summer Paralympics.
Tapper was born on 1 March 1990 in Hamilton, Victoria, and resides in the Melbourne suburb of South Melbourne. She has a brachial plexus injury resulting in Erb's palsy. In 2004, she was attending Monivae College. That year, she won the South West Sports Assembly's junior female of the year award. In 2011, she was working on a bachelor's degree in exercise science.
Tapper is a class 10 table tennis player which means she competes while standing as opposed to competing while in a wheelchair. As of 2012[update], she has a scholarship with the Victorian Institute of Sport.
When Tapper started playing in 2002 while still in primary school, she competed against able-bodied athletes, and her first appearance on an Australian national team was at a competition in Jordan in 2004 in an able-bodied competition. In 2004, she participated in the National Table Tennis Championships in the under-14s doubles and mixed doubles, under-16s doubles and mixed doubles, under-14s singles, under-16s singles and under-18s singles, earning medals in seven of these events, with three total first-place finishes.
That year, Tapper also competed at an event in the Czech Republic, and another in Portugal, where she played in the World Junior Cadets under-15s. Her college helped fund part of her travel competition costs. She started to take the sport more seriously, with the idea of going to the Olympic Games and representing Australia. At the 2008 Under 18 Oceania Championship and the 2008 Under 21 Australian Championships, she came in first place. By 2008, she was the Australian U21 and the Oceania U18 champion, and won the Michael Szabados Award for the Australian Junior Player of the Year. She competed in the Commonwealth Youth Games in Pune, India, in October 2008.
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