Tip of the Week
Playing the Crafty Veteran.

End-of-Season Talent Development Program Tournament and Party
We had these last night at MDTTC. The program is made up of our strongest players up to about age 13, though most are 8-11. Because several of the preliminary groups had five players, there would be one player sitting out, and so they were assigned to practice serves, and I was in charge of coaching that section. I worked with one girl on developing her forehand pendulum side-top serve (she only could serve side-backspin and sidespin); with another on his backhand serve; with a lefty who was working on breaking his serves outside the forehand corner (against a righty), with two of them on reverse pendulum serves; and so on. I also worked with some of the younger players on more basic serves.

At the end of the session, visiting coach Chen Longcan gave a speech outlining his thoughts on what he'd observed in the tournament, with John Hsu translating. (Who is Chen? Chen won the gold medal in Men’s Doubles at the 1988 Olympics; Men’s...

Coaching on Wednesday and Other Musings

• Celluloid Balls. When I went in to coach yesterday I found all the baskets of plastic balls were being used by other coaches – we had eight of them coaching already. There was one filled with the old celluloid balls – we still have them – but I didn't think my first student (Todd) would want to use them, and was about to go to the back room to get some new ones, along with a box to hold them in. But Todd said he didn't mind, he'd been using them in some of his matches anyway. So we started the session with the old Butterfly celluloid training balls, which were pretty much identical to what I'd been using since I started back in 1976 until they went to plastic a few years ago (other than the change from 38 to 40 mm in the early 2000's). Wow, were they strange!!! The lack of sound, compared to the "ping" of the plastic balls, was weird. I remember hating that sound when we first went to plastic, but after coaching almost exclusively with plastic balls for about a year, I'd grown used to that plastic sound. However, about ten minutes into the...

Weekend Coaching
It was a busy coaching weekend for me. On Saturday I coached nearly eight hours straight - from 11AM to 7:30 PM, with only a break from 5-5:30PM. To prepare, I had a big spaghetti brunch at 10:15AM. I ate a granola bar halfway through. I brought some food to eat at 5PM, but after all that exertion, I didn't feel hungry, and so didn't eat then, deciding to wait and have a real dinner later.

The coaching began with two "beginners," a mom and her 15-year-old son, 30 minutes each. I put that in quotes because while neither had ever had coaching or been to a club, they were avid tennis players and played table tennis regularly. The son had picked up playing penhold (saw it on youtube I think), and had a natural topspinning forehand, and will get into looping very easily - his forehand is already basically a loop. He had a bit more trouble on the backhand, which he took too much from the side. He could do both conventional and reverse penhold backhand, so we went with reverse. The mom was a hardbat player who hit everything - and she did it surprisingly well, obviously from her tennis. She switched to a sponge racket,...

Istvan Jonyer, Others at 2018 World Veterans Championships in Las Vegas
If you started playing in the 1970s, like me, then Istvan Jonyer of Hungary was a God. There's no other way of describing the 1975 World Men's Singles Champion, the big two-winged looper from a time when two-winged looping was still relatively new. He had these long, acrobatic forehand loops, like a discus thrower, looping forehands from the shoulder, and tricky sidespin backhand loops. Everybody all over the world copied these shots. In 1979 he led the Hungarian team (along with Tibor Klampár and Gábor Gergely) when they upset the Chinese team to win the World Men's Team Championships.

Jonyer's playing in the 2018 World Veterans Championships!!! Right here in Las Vegas, USA!!! You can get in line for his autograph right behind me. (Here's a picture of Jonyer ripping a ball at his peak – yeah, he went prematurely bald. That's Gergely on the left. Here's a ...