If you've got any Canada Winter Games pins, you've probably met him.

At 11, Team Manitoba's William Liu is setting his sights on someday playing table tennis at the Olympics.

For now though, he's enjoying his first experience at the Canada Winter Games. He's trading pins, staying in the athletes' village and competing in the under-15 category for table tennis, where he's taken third spot in his C grouping for individual competitions by winning three of his five individual matches.

Players are grouped into A to D for the individual competition, competing against players in their lettering group for ranking. The individual matches will wrap up today.

During the team competition, the Winnipeg resident helped push his team to fifth of the 11 regions participating in the sport.

This comes after an extremely successful 2006 year of table tennis where he finished first in the under-13 boys category at the Saskatchewan Open, second in the doubles competition at the Canadian Junior National Championships in the under-11 boys category and third in the singles event at the junior national competition in the same category.

'It's fun and it's really fast,' Liu told reporters Thursday afternoon of his love for table tennis.

It was only about three years ago, when he was eight, that Liu started playing table tennis with his dad.

Since then, he's developed his shots, his favourite being the forehand smash, and gone onto many competitions, though he said the Canada Games is the biggest he's been to.

'It's much bigger. It's much funner,' he said.

Among some of the many fun things about the Games is playing pool and video games and trading some of the 60-plus pins he's collected over the past week.

His favourite pin is the gold sports official pin featuring a raven with a coach's whistle on a gold background.

Liu competed this morning against Team Nova Scotia's Tyler Kent, but was defeated 3-0 in the best-of-five match. The scores saw Kent win 11-6, 11-9 and 11-8.

Meanwhile, the Yukon's under-15 male players were also on the court this morning competing in the relegation rounds.

Ben Barrett-Forrest was defeated 3-1 in his match against Alberta's Kevin Lau while Malkolm Boothroyd lost to Saskatchewan's Yuhao Jiang 3-0.

On the female under-15 side for the territory, both Claire Abbott and Anna Smith were defeated in their matches this morning 3-0.

Scores from other Yukon matches later this morning were not available.

Thursday's games saw more success for the territory's players.

Defeated in all of their matches Wednesday, head coach Kevin Murphy said Thursday, the Wednesday matches saw his team face the number one- and number three-ranked players in their categories.

'So they were two very tough matches for every one of our players to play,' he said.

Yesterday saw the Yukoners face players ranked in the number four and number six spots in the categories.

Facing players from Nunavut and Newfoundland through Thursday morning, the Yukon players won five matches.

Barrett-Forrest took down Nunavut's Donovan Nagyougalik in three games, and went on to defeat Newfoundland's Lawrence Downey in four games of the best-of-five.

Boothroyd also won his match against Newfoundland's Brandon Wiseman by three games to two.

Claire Abbott took her matches with a 3-0 win against Nunavut's Vikki Niptanatiak and a 3-1 match win against Newfoundland's Heather Hibbs.

Anna Smith was defeated in both her matches yesterday as were Zara Bachli, Karlie Knight and William Kennedy.

Zara's brother Ryan defeated Adam Drew of Newfoundland 3-2 in his match with another win of 3-1 against James Pitseolak of Nunavut.

'We expected these matches to be close,' Murphy said of Thursday's events.

While the team expected wins against Nunavut, it wasn't sure what to expect from the Newfoundland players.

'It kind of underscores that maybe we have a stronger team than Newfoundland even though, unfortunately, we never got to test that in a team match,' Murphy said prior to Zara's and Karlie's final matches for the day.

Although Kennedy lost his match to Nunavut's Michael King, his coach commented on the closeness of the match, describing it as 'heart-breaking because it was so close between the two.'

All three of the losses came within two points, Murphy said.

Kennedy was defeated in three straight matches with scores of 14-12, 12-10 and 13-11.

The game normally ends at 11, but if there's not a two-point difference, it continues until there is.

'I think I should have beat him,' Kennedy told reporters after the match.

Though he tried his best, he said it was messing up on a couple of moves that lost him the three games.

Although Kennedy may not have prevailed in that match, it was a win by him earlier in the week that saw Dave Stockdale, head of Table Tennis Yukon, shave his beard. That's something that hadn't been done since the 1970s, when the veteran city councillor promised the then-women's team that if they beat Newfoundland in a game, he'd shave his beard.

Kennedy's next game was set for this afternoon against Nunavut's James Pitseolak.