November 4, 2016

A Hodgepodge of Topics

  • Team Selections vs. Trials. Probably only a few people are aware of the latest controversy regarding the U.S. Junior Team, specifically about who goes to the World Junior Championships. USATT has not yet officially announced the eight players (four boys and four girls) they will select, so I won't comment on it. However, I'm tired of the constant controversies regarding these youth team selections. The key word here is Selections. We used to have Team Trials to decide the teams. Now only four of the ten members of each team make it by Trials, and for each major international tournament, rather than go by the order of finish at the Trials, the players are selected. This means, for example, you can finish #1 in the U.S. Junior Team Trials, be National Junior Champion, be #2 rated among juniors available to go, and be #2 among juniors available to go in USATT's own complicated point system – and still not get selected as one of the four players to go.
         I believe we need to go back to the Team Trials system, where perhaps 8 of the 10 players are selected by Trials, with the last two on each ten-person team selected by the High Performance Committee. For international tournaments, they should go in order of finish at the Trials (unless a player does something to disqualify himself), with perhaps only the final spot on each team selected. (The reason for allowing a small number of selections is in case a truly standout player is sick, injured, or just has a bad day at the Trials. It happens, but selections shouldn't be the primary way of making a youth team.)
         I'm going to get a lot of flak from USATT people who strongly disagree with me here. I welcome them to write a guest column here arguing for Selections over Trials. The basic argument is that they are competing against other USA players, not international players, and it's a one-shot event - but a Trials, IMHO, is still a better and fairer indicator of who should be on the team then selecting them. There's a reason we have Olympic Trials, not Olympic Selections. And I do argue for leaving open a few spots to be selected. I will likely write a more at-length blog on this later on.
         I'm pretty sure that if I made a motion at a USATT Board meeting to change to Trials over Selections – I'm a Board member - it would lose badly. (The USATT High Performance Committee, High Performance Director, and other USATT people support Selections, and the Board would support them.) If we had a vote among the membership, players, coaches, or parents, it would pass overwhelmingly. Very different perspectives.
  • USATT League. I'm aware of the software problems, and USATT has people working on this. Alas, there's nothing I can do on this. I actually chair the USATT League Committee, but that's primarily in charge of team leagues – the singles league stuff is handled by USATT headquarters. One other reason I'm frustrated by these software problems is that I co-founded the USATT Singles League system many years ago with Robert Mayer, and it worked smoothly for all those years. Now there are all sorts of database problems that need to be fixed, not all of which are USATT's fault. (It's complicated.) I do not plan to continue as League chair when my term ends on Dec. 31 – I'm more into the coaching side of things – so if you are interested in this, let me know.
  • U.S. Open. It's fun watching the entries come in – here's where they are listed. As of this writing, there are exactly 300 entries. We'll probably end up with 700 or so. I'm leaning against playing this year, will just coach, attend meetings, sign copies of my table tennis books, and walk around looking important. Here's the U.S. Open home page.
  • Talent. There are two types of people who argue against the value of talent in sports. There are those who simply deny it exists, and there are those who realize it exists, but consider it less important in the long run. I lean toward the latter, but there definitely is such a thing as talent. There's a huge example I'm dealing with right now in my beginning table tennis classes. Exhibit A: a 9-year-old boy who literally cannot learn the proper strokes. I've tried and tried, and so has he, but he simply isn't able to even mimic a good stroke. Despite many hours of coaching, he still slashes at the ball, and rarely gets it on the table. Exhibit B: a 7-year-old girl who started well after the previous example, but after two sessions already has textbook strokes, and in multiball can keep the ball going really well. She picks things up like a sponge.
  • 2017 MDTTC Tournaments. We're going to two-day tournaments in 2017, and I'm now working with Wen Hsu to redo the entry form and scheduling for next year. When that's done, we also have to finalize the entry form for the 2017 Maryland State Closed.

Call for Nominations - Annual USATT Coaches of the Year!
Here's info from USATT. There are five categories:

  • Volunteer
  • Developmental
  • National
  • Paralympic
  • Doc Counsilman (Technology) Award

Zhang Jike and Li Xiaoxia Talk About Future
Here's the article.

AITTA Had Another Celebration Party
Here's the article.

Ma Long vs Fan Zhendong China Trials for WTTC
Here's the video (10:45).

1961 Beijing and 1963 Prague World Table Tennis Championships featuring Zhuang Ze Dong
Here's the video (7:48). Back in those days color was not allowed.

Paddle on My Mind
Here's the new table tennis artwork from Mike Mezyan. (Here's the non-Facebook version.)

Some Hearty Table Tennis
Here's the picture! (Here's the non-Facebook version.)

Chilling Dog Pong?
Here's the picture. (Here's the non-Facebook version.)

Non-Table Tennis: First Cat
My story "First Cat" just went up at World Weaver Press! It's a humorous SF story about the president's temporarily super-intelligent cat saving the world from inter-dimensional invaders in the Oval Office. (It's actually a reprint - the story appeared a few years ago in another anthology.) How did the cat become so smart? Read the story - but it involves his sticking his head through a portal into a four-dimensional universe. 

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