Tip of the Week
Make Up-and-Coming Players Your Rivals - and Stay With Them!

USATT Board Teleconference
The teleconference started at 7PM and went until about 8:20 or so. (I'm on the USATT board of directors.) Ignoring formalities, there were three main segments.

1) USATT High Performance Director Jörg Bitzigeio gave a High Performance Update, which mostly covered recent USATT training camps and ranking tournaments. As I've noted before, the level and depth of play among our up-and-coming juniors is easily the best in modern history, i.e. since the hardbat era. (My club is helping - we had three of the four semifinalists in Under 10 Boys at the recent USA Nationals, and two of them - including the winner - is off today for two weeks training and competing in France, which finishes with the European Mini-Championships, Aug. 24-26. Here's the info page, but alas, it's in French.)

2) A long discussion of our upcoming in-person meeting in Colorado Springs, Sept...

Tip of the Week
Training the Subconscious.

Top Ten Surprising Thing About Top Table Tennis Players
Top table tennis players can often seem a different species than the rest of us. After all, they have powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men! Here are ten things about top players that might surprise you.

1. Away from the table they aren't that much different from other people. Really! It's only when they are training, and how intense they often are during training, that sets them apart. Bother them while they are training and you might get a slightly irritated "What do you want?" look. So wait until they are off the table and you'll find them 100% normal. Or at least close!
2. They get their touch on short balls not by just hitting the ball lightly, but by grazing the ball. The grazing motion not only puts backspin on the ball, but makes the ball bounce off the racket more slowly, making it easy to drop the ball short.
3. Their favorite serve is often no-spin! More specifically, half-...

Table Tennis Coaching Back Up Again - Sort Of
As you probably noticed, the site has been down since Friday morning, July 13. It literally went down minutes before I posted my Friday blog, which I wasn't able to post. My technical person wasn't able to resolve the issue until last night. What had happened was the "Access Log" went over 1 GB, causing an "overload of MySQL resources."

Unfortunately, due to some unforeseen side problem, the site almost immediately went down again. Hopefully it'll be up soon. Below is the Monday blog, where I took the Friday blog and added lots of new stuff. I was planning on blogs on Fri, Mon, Tue, and Wed (mostly covering the Nationals), but couldn't do them since the site was down. 

Last Blog Until August 1
Now the really bad news. I was out of town recently for 3.5 weeks (World Veterans and Nationals), and Thursday I'm going out of town again! I'll be away July 19-29, and so won't be blogging during that time. (I'm off to my annual science fiction writing workshop vacation in Manchester, NH.) After this I hopefully won't be...

I Need One More Day - Really!!!
After being away 3.5 weeks, I returned on Monday to an overwhelming todo list that took half a day just to put together. I need one more day to tackle that list before returning to daily blogging. However, the Tip of the Week is up: Pinpoint Your Weakness and Then Pinpoint a Drill. And here's a video (24 sec) of someone playing with an oven tray. Don't tell me you haven't dreamed of doing that!