January 24, 2013

Table Tennis and Weather

We had nearly two inches of snow last night here in Germantown, Maryland, and it's 16 degrees outside. This is is the first snow we've had this winter, and it's by far the coldest. This got me thinking about table tennis and weather - and here's a short list of how weather has affected table tennis!

SNOW - The North American Teams Championships in Baltimore used to be the U.S. Open Team Championships in Detroit. (It moved to Baltimore and was renamed in 1998.) I began playing table tennis in 1976, and started going to the Teams for the first time that November. For the next three years (1976-78) I got a ride up with Jim Mossberg, a ten-hour drive. One of those years we were hit with a snowstorm in Detroit. We planned to drive back starting Sunday night. However, the snowstorm forced us to check into a hotel. The snow kept coming down, and we weren't able to return home until Wednesday. (I did some checking, and there were heavy snows in Detroit in November of 1977 and 1978, so it was one of those years - I think 1977.)

COLD - Players sometimes make the mistake of leaving their racket in the trunk of their car when driving long distances to tournaments. This leaves the sponge cold and dead. At one tournament a player had this problem, but he had a simple solution - he got out a hair dryer and warmed his racket up! (If a cold racket plays dead, wouldn't a very warm on play faster and bouncier? Perhaps players should heat up their rackets before big matches with a hair dryer? I may have just revolutionized the game. Or perhaps umpires and referees will soon be forced to take the temperature of both players' rackets before a match. I've opened a can of worms here.)

HOT - I moved to North Carolina in 1979 for two years to train at the Butterfly Table Tennis Center in Wilson. They had no air conditioning. This was in the South. When I trained there the summers of 1979-1981, the temperature was regularly over 100 degrees and humid. You get used to it.

RAIN - I did an outdoor exhibition once with Scott Preiss in Colorado Springs. It began to rain, along with gusts of wind. Ever tried doing an outdoor exhibition in the rain and wind?

WIND - I did another outdoor exhibition in Baltimore in the late 1990s. It got windy, and so I developed a new shot: the power lob into the wind! If you do it just right, the wind blows the ball back onto the table. If the wind is coming from the side, you hit sideways and let the wind curve it back. If you are hitting into the wind, you hit off the end and let it blow it back. If you are hitting with the wind, just hit straight up (or even backwards), and let the wind carry it over.

THUNDERSTORMS - I ran the 1993 Junior Nationals in Potomac, Maryland. A storm raged outside, and suddenly, on Saturday afternoon, the power went out. It didn't come back on that day, so play stopped. After lots of rescheduling, we managed to run the rest of the tournament on Sunday. Power has actually gone out in a few other tournaments I've been to, but it always came back on relatively quickly.

FOG - Just last month, as a group of us were at BWI airport to fly to the Nationals in Las Vegas, they started to cancel all the flights out due to heavy fog. Ours was one of the last to be cancelled. As a result, we weren't able to fly in the day before. Most of us flew in on Wednesday, arriving after the morning events (with several of our players not arriving in time for Under 21).

SLEET - We have a relatively steep hill outside the Maryland Table Tennis Center. Every now and then we have sleet that makes it so slippery that some cars can't climb it. The good news - there's a parking lot at the top of the hill, so anyone can park there.

HUMIDITY - Ever try looping against a fast incoming ball, or blocking a loop, when it's humid? It's like playing hardbat. The best solution - have two towels, one for you, and one for just your racket and the ball, and keep drying the ball and racket.

EARTHQUAKE - This isn't exactly weather, but close enough. On August 11, 2011, we had the infamous east coast earthquake. At the time I was meeting with a physical therapist, who was working on my back problems. When the ground began shaking, we all ran outside. Later I stopped by the Maryland Table Tennis Center - they had already cleaned things up, but lots of things had been knocked off shelves. The players at the club when the quake hit had stopped play and also run outside. I'm guessing California is used to this sort of thing, but seriously, how often have you had to call a let because of earthquake?

AIR QUALITY - Here are two quick stories. First, way back in 1983, players at the old Northern Virginia Table Tennis Club began to feel woozy, including me. I was one of the first to go outside for air. I woke up in a hospital. Turned out that a neighboring business had left some machinery on, which was spewing out carbon monoxide into the club. Over 20 of us were hospitalized. There were many lawsuits. I received $600 in mine.

And now we jump to the present, where France has invaded England with "Le Pong," as "Households in Kent awoke to the stench of rotten eggs, cabbage and garlic wafting across the channel yesterday after the accidental release of a cloud of mercaptan gas from a factory in Rouen." Here's the article (care of Carl Danner)!

Word Clouds

I made a word cloud of the entire text of Table Tennis Tactics for Thinkers, all 99,534 words. It was created at wordle.net, which does a count of the most popular words and creates a cloud of words based on them, with the most popular words the largest, relative to their popularity. (They don't use all words or "the" would dominate.)

Develop Speed and Power with Plyometric Training

Want to add speed and power to your game? Here's an article on plyometric training for table tennis coach Ben Larcombe. (It's actually part of Table Tennis Master competition for best table tennis articles, with the deadline for voting today. If you like this or any of the other articles, all you have to do to vote is to "like" it.)

Meiklejohn North American Senior Championships

The entry form is online. If you are over age 40 this is your tournament. Besides rating events (where everyone's 40 or over, so no vastly under-rated wildly-attacking juniors), doubles events, and hardbat, there are age events from Over 40 all the way up to Over 90!

Mizutani Boosting Boycott

Here's an article about Jun Mizutani of Japan (world #10, #5 last summer) boycotting international competitions in response to illegal boosting. This is one of those under-the-radar things, where more and more world-class players (nearly all, some say) use these boosters to add to the speed and spin of their racket, just as speed glues used to do before they became illegal.

China to Give Up an Olympic Medal?

At the recent Olympic and Paralympic Commission Meeting, China proposed adding Mixed Doubles to the Olympics. However, since this would add extra time to the schedule, they proposed that countries could only enter 4 out of the 5 Olympic events, meaning that there would be at least one event that China could not compete in. Here's a link to the meeting minutes (PDF format) - see the fifth bullet point in item #5, "Olympic Games 2012."

Put Your Face on a Racket!

Or any other picture. You can do it at Uberpong. (If you create a really interesting one, send me the image and I'll publish it here.)

Ping-Pong Ball Swimming Pool

Table Tennis Nation brings us a ping-pong ball swimming pool, with pictures and video.

Ping-Pong Drinking Games

I'm a non-drinker, simple as that. So I'll never be playing conventional beer pong. However, just reading over these 45 drinking games makes me want to rethink this!!! I want to play Civil War Pong! Battleship! Gretzky Style! Murder Ball! Mr. Teague! Pitcherball! And Spiderweb!

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