Tip of the Week
Did He Really Force You Out of Position?
USATT Introduces New Rating Access Subscription
Here's the USATT article. Here are my thoughts on this. One disclosure - I initiated and co-founded the USATT Singles League with Robert Mayer in 2003. (See the Singles segment, though I also created the Team League segment.) "Winner stay on" dominated club play back in those days, and this was a successful program to convert clubs from that into more league-based play. At the time I was told by most that changing the culture of table tennis in the US was impossible and that table tennis leagues just wasn't part of it. Well, now it is! (I will save writing about the benefits of league play for another time.)
I spoke on the phone with USATT CEO Virginia Sung on this issue for about an hour last week, as well as on future league plans. She was very interested in ideas for creating a membership-based USATT League, so I put together the draft of such a plan. The focus was learning from how it is done in European table tennis leagues and tennis in the US (where memberships are measured in the hundreds of thousands); finding USATT incentives to join (I came up with some); and making it a gradual process. More on this in a later blog. (The membership-based league would be in addition to the free one, not a replacement.) I sent the draft to her and to Robert Mayer.
Here is the pertinent part of the announcement of the Ratings Access Subscription policy, which I've consolidated into one paragraph: