March 11, 2016
Robot Cleaning, Thursday Class, Potomac Clinic, and Navin's Robot Marathon
In preparation for Navin Kumar's 16-hour robot marathon tomorrow (see segment below), I partly disassembled the robot and cleaned it with wet paper towels and a toothbrush. It's the first time I've done this; took about 45 minutes. I ended up pulling about two handfuls of dust and gunk out of the robot, including half a broken ping-pong ball and part of a crayon! Before, it had been jamming every now and then; afterwards, it ran noticeably smoother and didn't jam during our entire beginning junior training session.
In the Thursday beginning junior class I worked with five kids, ages 11 to 13, mostly with multiball training. Here are some notes on them.
- Player A has a good forehand, but keeps turning sideways for his backhand, tennis style. (He plays tennis.) So we worked on standing a more square to the table. He picked it up pretty quickly, but it wasn't easy – though he was extremely enthusiastic about playing, he was probably the least serious about working to improve, and often had fun smacking balls way off the end on purpose.
- Player B keeps thrusting his elbow forward when hitting forehands, which opens the racket and keeps him from rotating into the shot properly. So we spent a lot of time shadow practicing the shot properly. I had him use his free hand to hold the elbow in place. Once he got the knack of keeping the elbow back, the rest gradually fell into place, and soon he was hitting pretty decent forehands. He also has a tendency to stand up too straight, so I had him put his racket down and pretend to "cover me" in basketball – and sure enough, he immediately went to a wider stance with knees slightly bent. Then we worked on him doing that in table tennis as well.
- Player C is trying to put topspin on the ball with his backhand, but keeps lofting the ball off the end as he swings up to put topspin on the ball. This was a case of all or nothing – I kept trying to get him to close his racket and topspin more on top of the ball, and he kept lifting off the end, over and over . . . and then, suddenly, something clicked, and he began topspinning more on top of the ball, and bingo! He had the most advanced backhand in the class, a nice topspinning backhand.
- Player D is the strongest player in the class, but tends to stand up too straight. I worked with him on this, pointing out my experience once in playing the 6'4" Jim Butler many years ago and realizing I was looking down on him when he went into his ready stance. (I'm 5'10".) We spent much of the session working on forehand looping, and then on forehand loop against backspin followed by a forehand smash against topspin as I fed multiball, alternating backspin and topspin.
- Player E tends to stand a bit too rooted to the ground, reaching for balls, and not rotating the body into shots. So we went the other extreme, and I had her do the 2-1 drill – backhand from backhand side, forehand from backhand side, forehand from forehand side, and repeat. I reminded her of the "circle the rod through the head" idea for her forehands. She picked it up pretty quickly.
Tonight, after doing the afterschool program at MDTTC (leave at 2:15 for pickups, finish at 5:30), I'll be at the Potomac club from 6:30-8:30 PM doing demos and clinics for their Club Friday, where we'll compete with other sports (such as basketball) and activities to attract table tennis players. This will be our third time; we did this two weeks ago and two weeks before that. We got 30-40 kids the last two times. I'm also doing an exhibition with John Hsu on Sunday at 1:30 PM at Hoover Middle School for the Potomac Chinese School.
And then, on Saturday morning, I'll be at MDTTC at 7AM for . . .
Navin Kumar's 16-Hour Marathon for Funding
Navin's marathon is from 7AM-11PM tomorrow (Saturday) at the Maryland Table Tennis Center. To raise $1600 for an upcoming Paralympic trip to Romania he'll be hitting on the robot for 16 hours straight! (Short hourly breaks.) This despite having a mechanical heart and Parkinson's. Want to help out? Here's his funding page, which also explains his situation in more detail. (I'll be there the first and last few hours. I donated $40, and he's going to pay for that in our next session – lots of footwork drills. I'm his coach.)
How to Identify and Exploit an Opponent’s Weakness
Here's the coaching article by Tom Lodziak. I linked to this on Monday as part of his Newsletter, but it deserves a direct link.
Ask the Coach Show
Episode #239 (18:16) - Injuries and the New Plastic Ball (and other segments).
TT Radar
Here's a site devoted to "…list all publicly available Table Tennis / Ping Pong venues. Some are free, some need to be hired. Find a Table Tennis venue, click on its pin for more details, locate and play!"
Setting the Standard in Kuala Lumpur, Liu Shiwen Continues in Top Spot
Here's the article from Butterfly on the world's #1.
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.
Taking on a Pro - Melissa Tapper
Here's the video (58 sec) as aerial skiing athlete David Morris challenges Melissa in her sport.
Highlights Music Video
Here's one (5:47) I don't think I've linked to before.
Cat Compilation
Here's the video!
"Be the Racket!"
Here's video (30 sec) of a Japanese girl playing table tennis, using as a racket . . . her face! (So, real or not real?
Lola by Todd Clark
Here's the TT cartoon from Wednesday. "Score doesn't matter."
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