Tip of the Week
Forehands and Backhands: 1-2-3, not 1-2.

USA Team Selections
On Friday I spent much of the day studying the USATT Team Selection Process. (I blogged about this on Friday morning - somewhat jokingly though it's a serious matter.) There's a lot of nuance to this. For example, I often read complaints about how the teams are selected, but without distinguishing between how players are selected to be on the National Team (now called "TTTeam USA"), as opposed to who is selected to play at specific events, such as (for juniors) the World Junior Championships, Pan Am Junior Championships, or various ITTF junior tournaments. So there are really things involved in Team Selection - these two (who is on National Team, who plays in which events), plus the selection of coaches.

There's also the question of how much should be done by Trials, and how much by Selection. Many instinctively want it to be all Trials, until it's pointed out that due to injury, illness, or just having a bad day, the best player might not make the team, and then he's out for an entire year. So most agree that the High Performance Director (HPD), the High Performance Committee (HPC), or the National Team Coaches should be able to add perhaps one or two players. But then we start listening to the HPD and the HPC and they point out how a Team Trials isn't always realistic - it favors those who are good against other U.S. players that they are familiar with, it's a one-shot process that favors whoever is hot that day, and it leaves out players with great potential that are developing their game for the long term, while favoring those who play for the short term.

Plus, of course, who makes all these decisions, the HPD, the HPC, or the National Coaches?

President's Day
It's President's Day, the day we all celebrate all of our great presidents and try to forget the bad ones. (Or perhaps mock them.) It's a federal holiday, so I'm off today - though I'll be spending most of the day on a writing project. Meanwhile, to tide you over until tomorrow, here's the best 21-second rally in history - the Maggie intro scene from Balls of Fury. 

UTZ Day
Yes, it's Usa Team Zelection (UTZ*) Day, the day I start looking into how USATT chooses its National Teams. I blogged about this on January 22 blog, where I wrote, "However, right now I'm just too busy to look into it too much, but I plan to do so in February, probably after I run the MDTTC February Open (Feb. 10-11)."
[*Our High Performance Director Jörg Bitzigeio and our long-time National Men's Coach Stefan Feth are both German, and in really bad movies the Germans always pronounce "S" words with a Z, so I'm going with "Zelection" here. And I'm suddenly craving potato chips. Yeah, it looks more like a Pringles, but close enough.]

USATT Teleconference
We had a USA Table Tennis Board of Directors teleconference on Monday night, 7:00-8:31PM. Attending were all nine board members (including me), plus the CEO, the COO, the HPD, and the S&LC. (Give up on this alphabet soup? The first three are listed on the USATT Staff Page, the third is the Secretary and Legal Counsel, Dennis Taylor.) I'm guessing that I spoke less in this meeting than any past meeting, probably by several magnitudes. However, before the meeting I did do a number of edits to the minutes of the December 2017 meeting - once an editor, always an editor.

First on the agenda was the approval of the minutes of the December two-day board meeting in Las Vegas during the U.S. Open, and the January teleconference minutes. After some discussion, they were both approved - I made the motions. They are now both online for your reading pleasure in the USATT Minutes and Actions page.

Then came reports on SafeSport. We have lost almost 1/3 of our clubs due to this - from 263 to the current 183, though we expect a number of others to soon become SafeSport compliant - we'll almost for sure get back over 200. I blogged about this on February 2 when we were down to only 138 clubs (see second segment). The good news is the USOC sent us a note saying they were happy with our SafeSport compliance. They had given us some recommendations, which USATT had implemented. They wrote, "The review found that the recommendations were implemented and are considered closed. USATT was prompt to implement the recommendations in the SafeSport audit." Now if we can just get most of those 82 non-compliant clubs! (And yes, it's a big hassle that I wasn't happy about either.)

Tip of the Week
Focus on Performance and Fun to Maximize Your Chances of Winning.

$2700 3-Star Butterfly MDTTC February Open
February 10-11, 2018 • Maryland Table Tennis Center • Gaithersburg, MD
[Here's my write-up of the tournament I ran this past weekend. If not interested, then as usual skip ahead to the many segments afterwards!]

Top-seeded Wu Junhan from New Jersey, rated 2691 (but over 2750 most of last year, with a high of 2788), cruised into the final without losing a game, or even going deuce. As someone on the sidelines said, "He makes it look so easy." Yes he does, but that's why he's 2700. How many players that level make it look hard? Well, maybe Chen Alex Ruichao, the other Open finalist, who goes after every shot in ways that do not look so easy. (Here's a nice picture of the final.)

Alex was also over 2700 for a number of months the last three years, with a high of 2722 before dropping to a likely temporary 2615. The lefty Alex may have the best pure serve and forehand rip game in North America, and you could see much of the match came down to Wu trying to stop that, and when Wu serves, trying to stop Alex from counter-ripping winners. It wasn't easy - here's video of the shot of the Tournament (46 sec, video by Mossa Barandao of PongMobile) - Chen Ruichao's lunging, down-the-line counter-smash in the Open Final against Wu - at 12-all!

Three Coaches Moving In Downstairs
The three MDTTC coaches are moving into my townhouse this morning, and I'm helping them, and doing last-minute clean-ups and fixes. Has there ever been a higher-rated group of movers? Chen Alex Ruichao, Wang Qingliang, Wu Jiacheng, Cheng Yinghua, and Jack Huang? The first three are renting the first two floors of the townhouse I own; I live on the third floor. I'm compiling a list of damages downstairs - the people before left much of it a mess, with everything from damaged windows to broken drawers, so I'm calling a handyman probably today to fix things. So no blog today. Back tomorrow, likely with an aching back. 

Addendum, added Tuesday afternoon: Here's the Tip of the Week, Focus on Performance and Fun to Maximize Your Chances of Winning. (This will go up in tomorrow's blog as well.) 

I'm off today - I'm resting from the MDTTC February Open I ran this past weekend, plus I have a todo list from here to Mars, much of it table tennis stuff. Below is a quick rundown of today's list - fortunately, I have no coaching scheduled for today, "my day off." But here's a new video (9 sec) of a great behind-the-back counter-smash to tide you over.

• USATT Tournament Report - DONE
• Tournament Accounting - DONE
• Tournament Write-up, Results, and Photos (Results and Photos - DONE)
• ITTF Coaching Report for a Coach - DONE
• Create ITTF Hopes Camp Flyer - DONE
• Finalize ITTF Hopes Tournament Flyer - DONE
• Finalize Coaching Committee Vote on Coach of the Year Guidelines - DONE
• Prepare for 7PM USATT Teleconference tonight - DONE
• I own a townhouse with three floors, and live on the top floor. The people who rented the first two floors for the past 4.5 years left this weekend, and today I've got a cleaning crew coming in to clean up the place, and then three coaches from MDTTC move in tomorrow - Wang Qingliang, Chen Alex Ruichao, and Wu Jiacheng. So I have to get everything ready for them. - DONE
• Change locks on doors - DONE
• Fix broken doorbell or get new one - DONE
• New cable arrangement with Comcast - DONE

See you on Tuesday!

Tournament Prep for Butterfly MDTTC February Open This Weekend
I'm running the Butterfly MDTTC February Open this weekend at my club, the Maryland Table Tennis Center. We'll have about 80 players in the eleven events.

MDTTC normally has 16 tables set up, about half full courts, the others smaller courts. For tournaments, we use eight full-sized courts, with the full-time coaches using the others throughout the tournament. With the tournament set-up the coaches have six tables that they'll be coaching on throughout the tournament, which is actually a strain since we have ten full-time coaches - but I'm one of them and won't be coaching, and another is out of town. After lunch some of them stop coaching as they are playing in the Open. (We sometimes use some of those tables in the afternoon.)

I run the tournaments on Omnipong. It's great for running tournaments, very user friendly, and the creator, Craig Krum, is very helpful when problems arise.

We ran into a potentially serious problem with this tournament. I'd made some changes to the time schedule in December, but I didn't think to upload the new entry form to Omnipong until about ten days ago. Yesterday I discovered some players had the old version, and so would likely have shown up at the wrong time - either way early, or (worse) way late, and so get defaulted. But Omnipong has a feature that allows me to email the players, so yesterday I emailed everyone about the entry form, making sure everyone had the correct one. Problem averted.

Illegal Hidden Serves: Letter to the ITTF

Two years ago I had an email with a pair of ITTF officials over fixing the problem with hidden serves. Both said they were working on it, but nothing so far as happened. So yesterday I sent them the following email. If nothing happens, I may once again go to the USATT Board on this. Previously I went to the Board and asked them vote to ask our Umpires and Referees Committee (then the Officials Committee) to enforce the serving rules as they are written, but it lost 6-1-1 as they didn't want to handicap USA players, since to compete internationally they'd both need their own illegal hidden serves and be able to return them. This time I'd simply ask the Board to send a note to the ITTF, imploring them to take action on this issue. My email below could be the draft of such a note.

Dear [NAMES WITHHELD],

I presume nothing has happened regarding fixing the problem of hidden serves? Coaches still have to go through that uncomfortable routine with their top juniors and parents where we explain that if they want to compete on an equal basis, they'll have to cheat as the top players do by illegally hiding their serves. Nearly every top player obviously hides their serves, and umpires, who cannot really tell if the serves are visible are not, simply do not follow the rules that specify that if they aren't sure whether the serve is legal, they must warn and then fault the player.

How to Change USATT Policy or Ask Questions
People regularly contact me about various USATT policies with their suggestions on what they think we should do. There's nothing wrong with this, as long as they approach it with an open mind - often there are things going on or info that they don't know about. But there's also this mistaken notion that I can single-handedly change things, or even that the USATT Board of Directors (of which I'm a member) would be the ones to make some of these changes. So let's look at how things actually do get done in USATT.

You have to separate the day-to-day operations and policy issues. Day-to-day operations are done by the paid full-time USATT Staff, mostly at USATT headquarters in Colorado Springs, CO. Policy issues are done by the USATT Board of Directors and by USATT Committees. (These latter two groups are unpaid volunteers.) Deciding which is which is key to getting things done, but if you aren't sure, contact the ones you think most likely and ask. There is a large overlap between these issues, and it often evolves. Often the CEO makes policy decisions on issues that involve staff, day-to-day operations, or issues that the Board has given him authority - ultimately, he makes far more decisions than the Board or anyone else. (There is also the USATT Media Team if you have news to report, though most of that would go through Matt Hetherington, USATT Media and Communications Director, who is listed both here and as a Staff person.)