Tip of the Week
React to Opponent's Swing.

Serve, Loop, and Follow Drill
Here's a basic drill I'm having a number of students do. It's a basic serve & attack drill, with minor restrictions. Starting at the intermediate level, the most common rally is where the server serves backspin, the receiver pushes, and the server loops. Let's take that one shot further.

The basic drill is similar. Server serves short backspin. Receiver pushes long to the side the server needs practice on (forehand or backhand). Server then loops, usually to a pre-arranged spot. Receiver's first block is also (not always) pre-arranged, often to the wide forehand. Then you POP – play out point. (POP is the shorthand I've used for decades.)

For example, server may serve backspin short to backhand; receiver pushes to middle; server loops forehand to receiver's backhand; receiver blocks to wide forehand; server moves wide and loops or smashes, and then POP.

There are endless variations. One important one is where receiver randomly pushes to either side, so server can practice looping from both wings (or all forehand if he's very, very fast), and learn to react to different placements. Receiver can also push quick to the middle, so server has to make a quick decision between forehand or backhand attack.

Other variations include the server's first loop going down the line, or looping anywhere. Sometimes receiver might throw in a short push so server has to react to that as well. There are endless variations. But before choosing which variation to do, ask yourself what exactly in your game needs work, and work that into the drill.

No blog today - while out of town this weekend (since Friday morning), I broke an old tooth filling, and so am off to see the dentist this morning. Plus I have a todo list longer than the Great Wall of China (which I visited in less busy times), and it didn't help that my three-hour car drive back from Williamsburg took 6.5 hours (due to 16-car pileup on I-95), and I had to then rush over to the club to coach, and so didn't get home until late last night...I'll be back to blogging tomorrow!

No Blog on Friday
I'll be out of town at Ravencon - see segment below under "Now the science fiction stuff…"

Happenings
First the serious stuff…

• I wrote about how Sameer had a great tournament this past weekend, going from 1528 to 1826. He dominated with his serves, but I see a great opening for him if he develops his reverse pendulum serves – which we're going to focus on in today's session. He also had some trouble with players who played aggressively with deader surfaces, and so I'm going to pull out a sheet of short pips for him to practice against. There's a couple of other things he needs work on, but I can't write about them here or others might tactically use them against him!
• Another student, Matt, is developing an inside-out backhand sidespin loop that you have to see to believe. Every time he pulls off this shot I practically freeze, as I'm not used to seeing it, and my muscle memory doesn't know what to do. I keep telling him this shot will make him world champion, and that the shot has no future. That way I'm covered no matter what happens.
• Recently a number of up-and-coming players at MDTTC have discovered the adjustable serving bar John Olsen had made for me a few years ago. You set the bar at various heights and serve under it, which forces you to learn to serve low to the net. (Here's a picture at a high setting, and here at a low setting.) Now they bring it out every day to practice with.

Now the funny stuff…

No Safe Lead
Here are some comebacks I've seen or heard about, including some recent ones. The key to a great comeback? Mental strength; good serve and receive choices; and general tactical play. You're near the end of a long match, so at that point if you don't know what serves, receives, and other tactics to use, you haven't been paying attention.

No blog today - as is my norm, when schools are out, I'm out! And today's election day here in Maryland. Let's all go out and vote for Donald Trump for the entertainment value, and so that in a few years, amidst the crumbling remnants of civilization, we can all smugly say to his supporters, "I told you so!" It's tempting, but I'm a moderate Democrat, so naah. 

Tip of the Week
Clean Your Racket.

Saturday Coaching at Cassels Giant Round Robin
I spent Saturday at SmashTT in Virginia at the Cassels Giant RR, coaching one of my students, 14-year-old Sameer Shaikh. Here's the tournament write-up and results, care of Director Michael Levene, who also runs and coaches at SmashTT. Sameer is featured in the writeup. The tournament ran well, and we had a great time! 

Sameer went in rated 1528, and looking for the breakthrough that he's been on the verge of for many months. The first step was getting into a good division. The format started with groups of four, with the top two going to Division A (two groups of ten players), and the next two to Division B. Sameer was seeded third, and so seeded for Division B. He faced a 1613-rated player to get into Division A. Complication #1 was that the player had short pips on the backhand, something Sameer wasn't used to playing. (How the sport has changed…) But with a few adjustments for these quick, dead shots, and a focus on keeping the ball deep (that's key when playing non-inverted surfaces), he won the match 3-1, and so advanced into Division A – where he'd be the lowest rated player. In fact, other than a 1650 player (122 points higher), the next lowest was 1813. So began his nine matches in Division A.

Things did not start well – in fact, after four matches, I was rather worried he was in for a disastrous day with his 0-4 start. Two of them were somewhat meaningless, against the top two seeds (both over 2200). Then he lost to an 1813 player who he had recently beaten at the MDTTC league. It was a match he thought he could win, so it was hard to get over it.

USATT National Coaching Program Update
Here's the USATT news item on these big changes to our national team coaching system. If you are interested in applying as a coach for one of the National Teams – I believe these would include Men, Women, Junior Boys, Junior Girls, Cadet Boys, Cadet Girls, Paralympic - you need to apply by this Monday. I'll blog about this probably next week. (I'm putting this first because of that deadline. I may move this down later on.)

USATT Board of Directors Minutes and Illegal Hidden Serves
Our long national nightmare is over . . . the minutes to the USATT Board Meeting at the USA Nationals in December is finally up – four months later! So are the minutes to USATT Board Teleconferences in January and April. They are all linked from the USATT Minutes page.

Readers of this blog and anyone who's been paying attention to the sport knows about the problem we're having with illegal hidden serves. Our sport has developed a culture of cheating, where umpires allow players to illegally hide their serves, making receive very difficult, and giving the cheating player a big advantage. (Yes, hiding your serve to gain unfair advantage is cheating, and if you don't see that, you are in denial.) Nearly every major title at the USA Nationals, U.S. Open, and major events around the world are decided by illegally hidden serves. Because players cannot fairly compete when the umpire allows an opponent to hide their serves, nearly every top player, and now nearly every top cadet (under age 15) has been forced to learn to cheat hide their serve.

Rather Rare Shots
Yesterday in a coaching session with 14-year-old Matt, while practicing forehand counterlooping, I sidespin looped one extra wide to his forehand, drawing him out wide as it broke to the left (his right). He counterlooped, I counterlooped back to his middle forehand, and he was out of position - so he improvised and ripped (!) an inside-out backhand counterloop from the forehand side! The ball shot out to my wide forehand, curving away from me for an ace. I've seen the shot before, but only rarely - but very rarely, if ever, this fast, and with so much breaking sidespin. I dropped my racket in shock and told Matt that he had reached the pinnacle of his life, that for the rest of his life nothing he ever did would ever be at such a high level so that his life was now ruined, with nothing left to look forward to. (At the end of the session he insisted on trying the shot again, so we did a drill where he "practiced" the shot, and he pulled off two more, though not as good as the first one.)

I've played 40 years, and I've done almost the same shot - but not with speed, just a spinny but soft inside-out backhand counterloop. Now I have something to look forward to trying to do!

It got me thinking about other rarely used shots. Here are a few. 

20 Things to Harp On
Here are some things I constantly harp on with students.

Trickshot Routine
Note to self: never, Never, NEVER spend an hour practicing a very physical trickshot routine (for the next ITTF Trickshot Competition) unless you are physically in great shape, and never attempt this at the age of 56. Oops, I just turned 56, AND I practiced a trickshot routine for an hour on Sunday night. Double oops.

I believe the next trickshot competition will be this fall, so I'm getting ready. I've worked out a top-secret routine that involves all of my best trick shots in one strange medley – balancing the ball in the air by blowing on it (sideways), tossing a ball in the air and smacking it in mid-air with another ball, backspin serve that comes back over the net, smacking objects from a distance, and the infamous 50-foot serve (from the side of the table, so the ball bounces on both sides). The problem is that the routine happens so rapidly that it's pretty physical – and you'd be surprised how tiring it is to do these same shots over and over. And then we get to the 50-foot serve – now that is exhausting. Near the end of the hour I couldn't actually do it anymore as my arm was just too tired, and I couldn't make the distance. So I continued practicing, but only faked the 50-foot serve for a time, though I got back to doing it at the very end.