July 16, 2013

MDTTC Camp

Yesterday's focus (Day One of Week Five of our ten weeks of summer training camps) was on the grip, stance, and forehand. I gave a short lecture on each. Later I gave a lecture on serving, focusing on creating spin and on serving technique. Today I'll talk about deception and fast serves. Tomorrow I'll talk about receive. (This is in addition to short lectures on rallying shots.)

This week's camp is a somewhat older group. Usually we have lots of kids in the 8-13 age group, but this one has a number of high school students. Since they are a bit older, I'm lecturing a bit longer. They are more into the intricacies of serving, for example. I even spent a bunch of time during break working with some of them on serves.

There were two players in my group yesterday morning that, well, let's just say they had hopeless strokes. There was no chance they would ever have a decent forehand stroke. I did my best, but what can a coach do with such hopeless strokes? But what the heck, I gave it the old college try. It took an hour, but they proved me wrong. (I think I lost five pounds in sweat in the process.) So my coaching skills were proved greater than my prognostication skills.

Non-Table Tennis - I Sold a Novel!!!

Holy Pingpongeroly! I just sold my humorous fantasy novel "The Giant Face in the Sky" to Class Act Books!!! I got the acceptance email last night. I'll probably write more on this later. I'm already planning out a sequel!!! (I've written two novels; the other one making the rounds is a political SF.) The novel, about 90,000 words, is a humorous retelling of the U.S.-Soviet race to the moon in the '60s, but with sorcerers instead of astronauts - sort of Hitchhiker's Guide meets the Space Race.

I already have published an anthology of the best short stories I've sold - "Pings and Pongs."

Hidden Serves

Last night there was some discussion on the about.com table tennis forum about hidden serves. Dan Seemiller posted about his frustration with umpires not calling these serves, and Jay Turberville pointed out that it is the responsibility of the player to serve so the umpire can see that he is serving legally. Here is my posting.

I completely agree with Dan Seemiller. I've been complaining about illegal serves for years, to no avail. The rules state, "It is the responsibility of the player to serve so that the umpire or the assistant umpire can be satisfied that he or she complies with the requirements of the Laws." Few umpires follow this rule. When an opponent hides his serve and I complain, over and over umpires will say they can't tell for sure if the serve was hidden. When I point out that they have just described an illegal serve, I usually get a blank look. Many don't seem to get the idea that if they can't tell if the serve is hidden or not, then the player has not served so the umpire can be satisfied that he has complied with the requirements of the law. The umpire should give a warning and then a fault; instead, they regularly allow these illegal serves.

A few years ago I was coaching a kid in the USA Cadet Trials. To make the Cadet Team (top four) he needed to finish in the top two in his group. When we went over the players, he told me not to worry about the top seed, saying he had no chance against him since he couldn't return the player's hidden serves, and the umpires wouldn't enforce it. (They had played previously.) Sure enough, when they played, my player looked like an amateur as he missed serve after serve, all of them hidden. I complained to the umpire, but as expected, he said he couldn't tell if the serve was hidden or not. When I later tried to show the umpire pictures of the serve taken from a video of the match showing they were hidden, he refused to look at them, saying that all that counted was what he saw from his perspective, and if he couldn't tell if the serve was hidden from the position where he umpires, then he couldn't call the serve.

As noted above, it is the responsibility of the player to serve so the umpire can see that the serve is legal, and since the umpire couldn't tell if the serves were hidden or not, they were illegal serves - but they were not called, and so my player was cheated out of a match. Worse, we knew in advance he would be cheated out of the match, and couldn't do anything about it. (Try explaining that to a kid, especially after he trains 20 hours/week for five years for this opportunity.) And so while my player won his other matches in the group and made the team (in the 3-4 position), the other player finished in the top two, and so the other player made several trips that my player might have made - all because he was allowed to cheat on his serve.

What all this means for coaches is that we have to decide whether to teach illegal hidden serves to our players. It's not just teaching it to them; they also have to be able to return them. And so you have to teach hidden serves to multiple players, so they can face these serves regularly as well as being able to do them. Most coaches, including myself, won't go this far, and so our players are at the mercy of players with coaches who will teach these serves, all because umpires will not enforce the rules as written. And there are, alas, coaches who teach these hidden serves to their junior players. The justification is that many or most of the top players are doing it, and to compete their players need to do so as well. There's a certain logic to this, but it's a very bad lesson to teach our juniors, and a horrible situation to put them and their coaches in. Remember what happened when the steroids rule wasn't enforced in baseball? Using steroids was cheating, but players justified it because they (probably correctly) felt they had to cheat to compete since the rules weren't being enforced.

Most coaches probably can't really do these serves effectively anyway - and if they did, it's such a waste of precious practice time teaching them to deal with such cheating. You can't just serve a few; it has to be a regular thing. Note that many players don't just hide their serve; they have mastered the art of letting the receiver see their racket just before and just after contact, while hiding the change of direction at contact. When I see juniors expertly hide their serve in this way, I can only shake my head at the many hours of practice they put into these illegal serves. (Fortunately, for the moment, there are fewer hidden serves among our top juniors then there were a few years ago, possibly because of complaints and peer pressure from others not to cheat, but it's pretty rampant among top players outside the junior ranks - and the top juniors cannot fail to see this.)

I could give a clinic for umpires on how to detect hidden serves. Putting aside that this shouldn't be necessary if umpires truly followed the rules as written, there are two main ways that players get away with hidden serves. One way is to keep the non-playing arm out as long as possible, and then pull it out vigorously at the last second. This attracts the attention of the umpire, and so he doesn't see the shoulder as it thrusts out for a split second, hiding the serve. This is the more common way. The other way is to toss the ball high in the air above and in front of the head. At the last second as the ball comes down, the player thrusts his head out so the ball falls behind the head, where the opponent can't see it. Contact is behind the head, and the receiver doesn't see the ball until afterwards, as the ball comes out under the chin. From the side, the umpires can't tell if contact was made behind the head or in front. This was done expertly by Sharath Kamal in winning Men's Singles at the 2010 U.S. Open. When I pointed this out to the referee, he shrugged his shoulders and said the umpires couldn't tell if the ball was hidden or not. This method is growing in popularity, and I'm told is pretty common in China.

Umpiring is not an easy task, and I fully realize the pressures umpires face in deciding whether to enforce the rules, or to go along with what most umpires do and not fault a serve unless it's so blatantly hidden that they have to call it. I'm also worried that umpires might take my complaints out on my players and fault them for minor or imagined violations, while letting opponents get away with hidden serves. (None of the players I coach hide their serves.) Once the rules are uniformly enforced, all players will be forced to serve so the umpire can see that they are serving legally, and the problem will go away.

-Larry Hodges

ITTF Promo Video: This is Table Tennis!

Here's a new promotional video from the ITTF (1:51).

ITTF Pongcast

Here's the June broadcast (13:07), which reviews the four ITTF events that took place that month.

Keeping Up with the Kardashians

Here's table tennis news from the Kardashians, care of Table Tennis Nation, including a link to a video (1:19) of the Kardashians playing.

Solving a Rubik's Cube While Hitting a Table Tennis Ball

Here's the video (1:34)!

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