Table Tennis and Schools
I was browsing table tennis forums late last night and found a statement where someone wrote, "I find it funny that some people like Larry Hodges think it's not important to get table tennis in schools in the U.S." (He then went on to briefly argue why we need to get into the schools without explaining how, but I won't get into that here.)
This is NOT what I've argued. I actually blogged about this on January 8, 2013. However, this seems a good topic to blog about again, and timely as well since I'm actually working to develop the sport to the point where we can get into schools.
I'll start by simply reposting my response in the forum to the above statement:
This is NOT what I argue. What I've argued is that schools aren't the first step. The first step is to popularize the sport on our own by developing regional leagues and junior programs (like other sports do and how they do it for table tennis overseas) rather than hoping schools in the U.S. will suddenly get interested in a small sport like us out of the blue. They are only interested in us if we send volunteers for free, and we have no way of doing that except in a few isolated cases. When we grow the sport, that's when the people who run schools will notice us and be interested, and that's when we take that step and spread through schools. I'm not going to get into a debate here [on this forum] about how to popularize the sport U.S. other than to say it's been done all over the world and in other sports in the U.S., and we're not magically different here in the U.S.; we just haven't been going about it the right way. I've blogged about this many times. This might even be a blog topic for tomorrow (or rather, this morning).