Regional Team Leagues
By Larry Hodges, USATT League Chair
(NOTE - The following is a USATT news item that went up this morning. Note the links to the new USATT League Page and the USATT Regional Team League Prototype. This league initiative, along with the Regional Associations initiative, the State Championships initiative, and a coaching/training center initiative I hope to do next year, are designed to help jump-start USA Table Tennis to the next level – but it's going to take years, so perhaps "jump-start" isn't the right word.)

Those who study sports association memberships can help but notice a pattern: those with huge membership do so through team leagues. That's the reason why the German Table Tennis Association has 600,000 members, why the U.S. Tennis Association has 700,000 members, and why the U.S. Bowling Congress has over two million members. And the lack of such a league structure is the primary reason USA Table Tennis has only 9000 members.

But you don't play in a team league just so you can boost your association's membership; you do so because it's fun! You're pumped up because your teammates are cheering for you, you win and lose as a team, and when it's all done, you and your opponents go out for pizza.

Tip of the Week
Use Simple No-Spin Serves in Doubles.

Importance of No-Spin Serves
We'll call today the "No Spin Zone," since it's featured in the Tip of the Week, here in the blog, and in a link to another Tip of the Week below.

I've been surprised several times by players, even relatively advanced ones, who don't really know how to do a no-spin serve. Now obviously any player can serve no-spin by just patting the ball over the net, but what surprises me is how many can serve backspin over and over, but cannot execute a no-spin serve with the same motion. By having this combination, receivers can't just mindlessly push every serve back - if they do, the no-spin serves will pop up.

To execute a no-spin serve that looks like backspin, imagine doing a normal backspin serve, where you graze the ball toward the tip of the racket (the part of the racket that's moving fastest as it rotates around the wrist). Now contact the ball closer to the handle without as much grazing motion. Use the same follow-through or even exaggerated it - you have to sell it as a backspin serve. Result? The receiver likely will read it as backspin and pop it up.

Even if they read it correctly and chop down on the ball to keep the push low, it'll come out with less backspin than if they pushed against your backspin serve. When pushing against backspin, the backspin rebounds out as backspin as the ball changes rotation. There doesn't happen against a no-spin serve, and so the ball has less backspin. Also, a short backspin serve is easier to drop short than a short no-spin serve, since the backspin makes the ball die off your racket. 

Christmas Table Tennis Shopping
It's that time of year again, where you have to decide what to get for that table tennis player in your life – which could be yourself! Here are some suggestions. (And here's Santa playing table tennis with a reindeer.)

Table Tennis Instructional Books
I'm a writer so inevitably I'm going to start with this rather long section. There are a lot of good ones out there – including mine! You can read for free the first two chapters of my fantasy table tennis novel "The Spirit of Pong." But my best-selling book is "Table Tennis Tactics for Thinkers." Here are many more. Skip this section if you're not the reader type – videos, equipment, and coaching comes next.

Ma Long's Serve and Other Top Ten Players
In my blog on Nov. 24, I pointed out how blatantly illegal world champion Ma Long's serve was, and in particular how he illegally hid it with his head so the opponent couldn't see contact. (Here's the five-picture sequence.) This is now mostly the norm at the world-class level. However, since that time several questions keep coming up, both in online forums and via email. Specifically, some have argued:

1. This was a fast, down-the-line serve, and so isn't his normal serve, and so doesn't show that he hides his serve normally.
2. That he only occasionally hides his serve.
3. That when he hides his serve, he usually does it with his arm, not his head.

So let's look at the video and see what's really happening. For this, we'll use the video of the Men's Singles Final (12:47, with time between points removed) earlier this year when he became World Champion. We'll only use pictures and video in the three games where he's on the far side (where it can be clearly seen). The video sometimes zooms in from the side when he's serving, and so you can't see clearly if he's hiding the serve on those point, so I've skipped those serves. In the end, there were exactly 21 serves on the far side where you could see whether he was hiding the ball or not. Below are links to all 21, both the video and a still image.

So what do we learn by watching the video? 

JOOLA North American Teams
They were held this past weekend, Fri-Sun, at the Gaylord Convention Center at National Harbor in Washington DC, about 45 minutes south of me and my club, MDTTC. This was my 40^th year at the Teams – first in Detroit (1976-1997), then Baltimore (1998-2012), and now DC (2013-present). I used to play in it every year, but since 2007 I've been there as a coach, other than playing a few matches in 2012.

There were 711 players on 181 teams, with 138 tables. Here are complete results – every single match! The lighting and floors were a level better than the erratic lighting and sometimes slippery floors in Baltimore – a major improvement. Over $20,000 was given out in prize money, including $10,000 to the first-place team, AITTA 1 (Timothy Wang, Feng Yijun, Cai Wei, and Wu Yi), with $4000 going to runner-up Team JOOLA (Quadri Aruna, Li Kewei, and Joerg Rosskopf). It was well-run and on time - another superhuman effort by Richard Lee, John Miller, and the rest of NATT. I only wish I could have attended both this one and the competing Butterfly Teams in Philadelphia, 140 miles away – by all accounts, it too was well-run and on time.

Today's Blog
I've got a huge accumulation of stuff below from over Thanksgiving weekend, as well as loads of work to catch up on. So for today I'll just present the accumulation, and tomorrow I'll blog about my experiences at the JOOLA North American Teams. Basic info, including results, are in a segment below. There's also the Butterfly Teams and the World Junior Championships, so lots of tournament info, plus all sorts of coaching links. So make sure the boss isn't watching, and spend your day browsing over all these links!

Tip of the Week
Use Equipment that Matches the Way You Want to Play. I'm "cheating" and using my Butterfly Tip (slightly reworded) as this week's Tip of the Week. Every three years I compile all of these weekly tips into a book, with Table Tennis Tips compiling all 150 tips, in logical fashion, from 2011-2013, and I wanted this to be part of it. "More Table Tennis Tips" will come out early in 2017, and will include the 150 tips from 2014-2016.

Butterfly Teams
The Butterfly Teams were held this past weekend, Fri-Sun, in Philadelphia, PA. I was originally hoping to drive up for one day, but I was in charge of one of the MDTTC junior teams at the North American Teams in Washington DC, and so was there for all three days. Here are links.

Last Blog Until Tuesday, December 1
I'll be away Fri-Sun for the North American Teams Championships, and have something on Monday morning, so I'll be back next Tuesday. Happy Thanksgiving!

DC and Philly Teams
This weekend is the annual Battle of the Teams, with the JOOLA North American Teams in Washington DC and the Butterfly Teams in Philadelphia. USATT ran news articles on each – one on the JOOLA NA Teams and one on the Butterfly Teams.

Want to play your best at these or other tournaments? Here's my Ten-Point Plan to Tournament Success. But for a tournament like the Teams, where you can play almost all day for three days, it's a combination of mental and physical. Make sure to eat well, sleep well, and above all, keep your mind clear. It's very easy to have an early loss that bothers you for three days, leading to disaster. You are going to have a bad loss; my suggestion is that if you do so early on, be happy you got it out of the way!

Ma Long Serve - the Illegal Elephant in the Room
Yesterday I linked to this video (5:18), "Ma Long - King of Epic Shots," and asked, "Notice anything strange about the serve he does at the start? Watch the slow motion replay starting 12 seconds in. I'll blog about this tomorrow."

The strange thing is that the serve, the standard motion for most top players, is so illegal it's mind-boggling that the world #1 player can get away with serving like this over and over, very publicly where all can see, without it getting called. Most of his opponents do it just as much – it's the norm at the higher levels. It's like the proverbial elephant in the room that everyone pretends isn't there. As I've blogged before, cheating is rampant in our sport at the higher levels, even among cadets under age 15.

The problem, of course, is that the serve is hidden, something I've harped on many times here. Here is a five-picture sequence of the serve. In pictures one and two, using the pole that's just above his head, you can see how he's thrown the ball backwards while thrusting his head forward, and the two meet in picture three, where the ball completely disappears behind his head as he's about to contact the ball. In picture four you can just see the ball reappearing below his head by his throat. His contact is while the ball is behind his head, where the receiver cannot see. (Below I'll go over the serve and show five rules being broken, and then give my solution.)

Tip of the Week
When Playing an Unfamiliar Player, Focus on Serve & Receive.

Crazy Month
It's been a crazy month, and it's only getting crazier. Over the past month or so I've launched the State Championships Initiative and the Regional Associations Initiative, and the Regional Team Leagues Initiative will be out probably in a couple of weeks. (I'll blog about these more later.) MDTTC was named an ITTF Hot Spot. We've spent lots of time preparing players for the upcoming Team Championships (whether in Washington DC or Philadelphia) and for the USA Nationals in Las Vegas in December. I put together the Hall of Fame program booklet and the ad for the Hall of Fame Inductions for the Nationals program. Plus all the usual coaching (private and group), as well as the regular tutoring I'm now doing at the club, mostly in English. (If I listed everything I've crossed off my todo list for this past month, I'd have to use up all existing pixels in the universe as this blog would go from here to the farthest known quasars…) Oh, and four Tips of the Week and these daily blogs!

The following is also a USATT news item that went up last night.

Regional Associations
It's a New Era - and We Need Volunteers!
By Larry Hodges
USATT Board Member, League Chair, and Regional Associations Coordinator

Let's be honest. It's silly to think that an organization with six full-time staff members (plus a few contractors and volunteers), with a budget the size of a 7-11, can organize and run table tennis all over the United States.

Instead, we need to have Regional and State Associations all over the country, with each one primarily in charge of the table tennis activity in their region or state. There are surprisingly few right now and that needs to change. This is how successful table tennis countries are organized, as well as successful sports in the U.S. And that's what we need to do as well.

And that's why we need you. We're looking for volunteers interested in taking charge of developing the sport in their region. These organizations could roughly parallel the regions used in the National College Table Tennis Association, or individual states could have their own regional association. USATT will supply a sample bylaws, but you'd be free to make changes, within reason.