Tip of the Week
Counterlooping and the Forehand Block.

Why China's Dominance in Table Tennis is Unmatched at the Olympics
Here's the video (10:54). This is fascinating viewing, and I recommend you watch it.

One interesting statement in the video was someone saying, "61% of the worldwide table tennis innovation techniques and tactics are from China." Now this is a rather arbitrary thing as who judges what is an innovation?

Here's discussion on this at the Mytabletennis.net forum, which includes a listing of the innovations by China and others, where they got the 61%. But as noted, it's somewhat arbitrary. It includes many techniques that are no longer common at the high levels, and some are somewhat redundant. If they are going to include those, then they should include many more European hardbat techniques from the 1940s...

Tip of the Week
Top Ten Guidelines for Playing the Unconventional Style.

USATT Board Meeting
This past weekend I attended the USATT board meeting at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Sept. 21-23. (I attended both as a member of the board and as chair of the coaching committee.) Friday was travel day, plus an informal dinner at the OTC dining hall. I flew on the same flight as USATT legal counsel Dennis Taylor. Others attending the meeting included fellow board members Anne Cribbs (chair), Rajul Sheth, Ed Hogshead, Carolyn Savini, and Erica Wu (who just took a job at Facebook), with Gary Schlager and Tara Profitt attending via e-conference. Also attending were USATT CEO Gordon Kaye, COO Mark Thompson, High Performance Director Jörg Bitzigeio, and High Performance Committee Chair Carl Danner. Also attending for a few hours were new...

Tip of the Week
Develop Ball Control by Playing with Different Surfaces.

Shortened Tables
There seems to be an obvious way to develop great players that we're almost all missing. Because of the height of the table - 30 inches - kids can't really play until they are about five or six years old, and even then it's rather awkward. (It's especially hard hitting backhands at that age, until their elbow is over the table.) However, there are many stories about how top players started playing much younger, as young as two or three, on shortened tables. They then move to regular tables around six or seven. 

For example, the Japanese whiz kid, Tomokazu Harimoto, who is world #8 (and #6 last month) at age 15, started when he was two years old. Here's video of him playing on a shortened table, where he's at most three years old. (Video should take you ten seconds in, where you see this for about six seconds.) Is it any wonder...

Today's Labor Day, so I'm off today - I plan to spend the day reading in bed! Blog and Tip of the Week will go up tomorrow by noon or else I don't get to be part of NAFTA, Google gets to continue their biased coverage of me, and I won't get invited to any weddings or funerals. 

On a side note, if you have newly tried to register, there might be a delay. For nearly eight years I've managed spam by requiring all those who register to mention "table tennis" in their registration. I'd get about ten a day and quickly go through them. However, in the last few days I've received over 600 spam emails. There are likely a few legitimate ones mixed in, but it's too many for me to go through one by one. For technical reasons I haven't been able to set up a proper spam filter here yet with Drupal.