August 28, 2015

MDTTC Camps – Eleven Weeks Comes to an End Today

Today our eleven weeks of camps come to an end. We're finishing with a good-sized group, with about 40 players in all. Here's a camp photo from the Wednesday morning session, which is missing a few players who join us in the afternoon.

40+ Butterflies and JOOLAs and Nittakus and Double Fish and Xu Shaofao, Oh My!!!

We're still in the ongoing "Silly Season" (going on 1.5 years now), where training centers and clubs have deal with players training with multiple of the new plastic 40+ balls, which all play differently, and keep them all separate. Last night at MDTTC was illustrative. 

We're sponsored by Butterfly, and we're supposed to get plastic training balls in a month or so. Until then, we're still stuck using celluloid balls for much of our training. But as tournaments come up, things get complicated. We use Butterfly 40+ balls for our local tournaments, and since we had a tournament last weekend, guess what participants were training with the week before? But when the Teams in DC come up in November players will have to adjust to the JOOLA 40+ ball, and they play differently. And when the Open and Nationals come up, players will train with Nittaku Premium 40+ balls, which also play differently. 

But it gets worse. This Sunday there's a tournament as SmashTT in Virginia, where they'll be using Xu Shaofao seamless 40+ balls. Since my student Sameer is playing there, we had to buy 24 to use to train just for that tournament. But while we were using those last night, and others were using celluloid, Derek, who's playing in the North American Championships in a week, is training with the single Double Fish 40+ ball he has. So we're spending much of our time trying to keep the various balls separate, despite playing on adjacent tables (barriered off, but balls regularly go over the barriers). 

Training with one ball may seem "normal" for many, but not at a training center. Using one ball may be old school, but it means you spend most of your time chasing after and picking up the ball; you get probably three times as much practice time per session when you have a box of balls. 

The Hidden Serve Solution for Table Tennis

Here's the article by Coach Jon. He makes his own proposal, but also refers to my proposal, where you cannot hide the ball from the opponent or any part of the net assembly and its upward extension (not just the net posts, as he wrote). I of course agree with him about my proposal, that "it would be a great change and would be much easier to enforce" (compared to the current rule). 

However, I disagree on the point about whether it could be enforced without an umpire. It's no different than the six-inch toss rule, which parallels my proposal very closely, and is generally enforced without an umpire. Many forget that the reason for the six-inch toss rule was because players were serving out of their hands – it was becoming a big problem. (Back then the rule was the ball must be contacted on the drop, but it was hard to tell if that happened when players used a 0.0000001" toss.) Originally it was going to be a 3" inch toss, but the problem there was that players might then get away with a lower toss, making it hard for the receiver to pick up. So they went with six inches.

Result? Few players these days serve out of their hand. Some might get away with 5" tosses, and if opponents put up with it, some might still be serving out of their hands in practice matches or even tournaments. (If it happens in a tournament, you call for an umpire.) But the widespread serving out of the hand ended. That's similar to the purpose of my proposal – not to make it illegal to hide the ball from the net, but to stop the widespread hiding of serves. If a player gets away with tossing the ball 5" or hiding it from one net post, he may or may not be called, but the rules will have worked – he won't be serving out of his hand or hiding contact from the receiver.

His proposal was that players would basically need to face the table in a backhand stance: "An enforceable rule could be that players must have their bodies facing the table at any angle that does not involve either leg crossing in front of the other." (There have been periodic proposals in the past to require backhand serves only, but none had any chance of ever passing.) I see three problems:

1. It needs to be worded more specifically. When a player illegally hides his serve with a forehand serve, his legs normally are not crossing in front of each other. I'm not sure I'm understanding what he's requiring here.
2. I can face the table in a backhand stance, with legs parallel to the table (and so not crossing, as he requires), and still rotate sideways from the waist enough to easily hide the serve with my head or shoulder.  
3. It'll mean taking away essentially every forehand serve, by far the most popular serves, unless players simply rotate sideways from the waist, as described in #2 above – which would defeat the purpose of the proposal. Putting that aside and assuming it did make forehand serves illegal, it would be a very drastic change, probably more drastic than any rule change we've ever had. From a simple reality standpoint, no rule change will pass the ITTF without the approval of the players, and it'll never pass. I believe my proposal has a far better chance of passing as it doesn't take away forehand serves, only the illegal ones – and the players I've spoken to are fine with that, as long as opponents also can't hide their serves.

"Sick" Yesterday?

When I got up yesterday morning I planned on doing a blog. But I also woke up with a stomachache. At first I thought it was nothing, but I was so tired and had so much work to do I decided I'd have to skip the blog. As the morning went on it got worse, and started getting chills. (I think that means I had at least a slight fever.) I have no idea what it was – some sort of minor food poisoning? - but I ended up spending much of the day in bed. And here I was planning on getting a lot done. Hopefully today will be better. 

Brain Games: How Ping Pong Can Make You Smarter

Here's the video (2:08) on Neuroplasticity.

USATT Insider

Here's the new issue, which came out Wednesday morning.

Interview with Samson Dubina

Here's the podcast (42:57) from Expert Table Tennis, where he discusses a horde of stuff – see bulleted list.

Table Tennis – Our Story

Here's the new motivational video (5:12).

Pink Pong for Cancer

Here's the new video (4:15).

Timo Boll vs. Fan Zhendong in the Chinese Super League

Here's the highlights video (5:55).

International Table Tennis

Here's my periodic note (usually every Friday) that you can great international coverage at TableTennista (which especially covers the elite players well) and at the ITTF home page (which does great regional coverage). Butterfly also has a great news page.

Roller Skate Pong

Here's the video (1:43) of Jim Butler and others playing on roller skates – it's hilarious as starting about 10 seconds in Jim lobs, does footwork drills, and spins and strokes! (Correction: As Doug Harley emailed, those are hovertrax they are using, not roller skates.) 

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