Tip of the Week

You Can Be Light on Your Feet. (Includes links to videos.)

Coaching and Other Activities

It's been a busy few days. Here's a quick rundown.

FRIDAY AND SATURDAY
I did little coaching these days, and instead spent nearly the entire time glued to my desk. I gave pretty much a grocery list of things I'm working on in my July 23 blog (before I left for my nine-day writing workshop "vacation"), and I basically jumped from one thing to another for two days. I also started work on rewrites of the three stories I had critiqued at the writing workshop. 

SUNDAY
It was a rather long day. It started with several hours of private coaching. We're doing some technical adjustments for one of my students, a rising junior, and so spent a lot of time on that. (Shorter, more forward stroke, and related issues.) Then came a junior class, where we did a lot of fundamental work, and then spent a lot of time on serves. Then came my Sunday night training session, where we had eight adults training together. It's pretty physical - lots of footwork and attacking drills. (But the attacking drills means that the other player is working on his defense and ball control, mostly blocking.) With Raghu Nadmichettu assisting as a practice partner and moving from player to player about every ten minutes, everyone got lots of good practice. We finished with serve practice, where I emphasized the smooth acceleration of the wrist and fine grazing motion, which leads to tremendous spin.

Yikes! I thought I was off this morning, but I just got called in to coach at our MDTTC camp. I'll be there all day, coaching from 10AM-6PM, plus some private coaching afterwards. So no blog this morning. The Tip of the Week will also go up tomorrow. (Normally, when I know I'll be coaching in the morning, I do most of the blog the night before.)

Capital Area Team League and Other Team Leagues

If you live in the Maryland/Virginia/DC area, it's time to sign up for the Capital Area Team League! Deadline is Sept. 7 (though the page currently still lists it as July 31). Season One had 73 players on 13 teams; why not join us for Season Two? There's nothing better than competing on a team, with your teammates screaming for you every point!  

As I've blogged before, I now chair the USATT League Committee. (I'm too busy during the summer to do much work on this, but will be getting very busy starting in September.) I'm working setting up a prototype team league, using my experience with the Capital Area Team League and learning from other team leagues (both USA and overseas, and table tennis and other sports) to create a league that can be set up in other regions throughout the U.S. I'm also taking over as webmaster for the Capital Area Team League – I'll be working on that much of today. (I'm on the Capital Area Team League committee, along with Stefano Ratti, John Olsen, and Richard Heo.)

Team Leagues are why countries in Europe measure their memberships often in the hundreds of thousands, with huge league numbers in countries like Germany and England. USA needs to follow in their footsteps, but it's going to take time to build it up. But it won't happen until we create such a prototype league that can spread to all regions.

But there will always be the naysayers who can't get imagine anything beyond the status quo.  

Top Ten Things if Donald Trump Were Running USATT…

A little fun with Photoshop this morning!

Tip of the Week

Get to the Root of the Problem. (Adapted from Monday, July 20 blog.)

Sometimes Small Things Are Big Things

I was coaching a player a couple days ago who tended to start his forehand loop drive with his upper body. This is a common problem, and leads to players "muscling" the ball, i.e. straining to create power with just their upper body. Large players often get away with this, as they can create sufficient power this way, but it means straining, which means they lose control as well as having only good power instead of great power. It also invariably leads to injuries.

But telling a player who strokes with just his upper body to use his lower body (legs, hips, waist) doesn't usually work. It's a big change, and incorporating all those lower body movements into a nice, smooth stroke throws the timing off, leading to all sorts of problems. What to do?

They key is to start small. Just have the player use a little lower body to get the upper body started. Once this is done, it all starts to fall into place – as it did here. After a few minutes the player was smoothly ripping shot after shot as I fed him multiball.

Non-Table Tennis: What I Did on My Vacation

Alas, I need one more day before I start blogging again. Stuff piled up while I was away and my todo list is currently holding me in a headlock and threatening to break my paddle if I don't attend to its needs. I'll start up again tomorrow - I put that on the todo list. Now, let's see what's next on the list . . . and then this . . . oh shoot, I think I forgot about this one . . . .

Last Blog Until Tuesday, August 4 Wednesday, August 5, and the Capital Area Team League

I'm going on vacation! When most people go on vacation, that means the beach, camping, an amusement park, or something like that. Me? I go to an annual science fiction & fantasy writing workshop in Manchester, NH – The Never-Ending Odyssey (TNEO). It's for graduates of the six-week Odyssey Writing Workshop – I went in 2006. This will be my sixth TNEO. I leave very early on Friday morning. (On a side note, I hurt my shoulder in a coaching session yesterday and had to have Coach Raghu substitute the rest of that session, and I'm taking today off as well, so maybe I need the rest.)

And if you live in the Capital area (Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia), don't miss the Capital Area Team League segment below – deadline to enter the Fall season is Sept 7.

Status Report

This seems like a good time to give a status report on all the things I promised to do when I was elected six months ago in January to a four-year term on the USATT Board of Directors – so I'm 1/8^th of the way through my term. (I'm one of nine members.) I ran on five big issues, and 12 smaller ones – see my Election Page, where I talk about each, including the goals of each, and a link to where I blogged extensively about each one. (Much of the below refers to what I wrote on the Election page.) Let's go through them, one by one, and check the status. (Note that this is all volunteer – I don't get paid a cent.) One complication is that I'm very busy in the summer as a coach, since kids are out of school, so I can't do as much from June-August. I'll be a lot busier starting in September.

FIVE BIG ISSUES

Ogi: The Life of Ichiro Ogimura by Mitsuru Jojima, translated to English by John Senior

I recently read the English translation of this book, which covers the life of perhaps the most influential person in table tennis history. Suffice to say it was a fascinating read. (It was also a great resource for my own table tennis fantasy novel, The Spirit of Pong, which features two chapters where the wannabe American trains with the spirit of Ogimura.)

Ichiro Ogimura of Japan was perhaps the most driven table tennis player in history, and then he became perhaps the most driven coach and then most driven ITTF official in history. He started late, at age 16, but was so single-minded in his training that by age 22 he won the first of his two Men's Singles titles at the Worlds (1954 and 1956). He also won Men's Doubles twice, Mixed Doubles three times, and led Japan to five straight World Men's Team titles. The book chronicles this and everything else about him in great detail, giving both the facts and the spice of his life.

USATT Board Teleconference

The USATT Board of Directors had a teleconference last night, starting at 7PM Eastern Time and lasting about 70 minutes. As one of the at-large members, I was on the call. Alas, only five of the nine board members were able to make the call – me, Peter Scudner, Anne Cribbs, Ed Hogshead, and Kagin Lee. But five of nine is a quorum, and so the meeting went as scheduled.

I spent perhaps an hour preparing for the meeting – going over the draft of the minutes of the previous meeting and suggested changes, and going over the budget figures from the Audit Committee Report. All looked fine. However, the real time-taker were a pair of two-hour phone calls, one before and one after the teleconference. One was with another USATT official where went over everything about USATT; the other was a more local call about everything about MDTTC, the club I coach at. So basically everything that could possibly be of importance to anyone was discussed on those phone calls. And I still managed to finalize the new MDTTC Newsletter, spend an hour organizing my notes on upcoming USATT plans, and cross off nine other things on my todo list.

Technically, except for a short closed session (to discuss a certain disciplinary matter regarding a member who had apparently done naughty things), the meeting was "open," and I could write all I want about it. But I don't feel comfortable doing that, where as soon as I get off the call I start writing about it, in competition with USATT itself, which also gives out such news. So as in the past, I'll wait until they publish the actions/votes, which should go online in a few days. The actual minutes, which are far more detailed, don't go up until they are approved, which will likely happen on August 22, at the in-person meeting in Chicago. But the gist of the meeting:

Tip of the Week

The Tricky Side of Table Tennis.

Get to the Root of the Problem

One of the things that always exasperates me is coaches or players who try to fix problems by fixing the symptoms. In many ways, this is what separates a good, experienced coach from, say, a top player who knows proper technique but isn't that experienced in coaching it. When you've coached over 35 years (yikes, that's me!), and pay attention, you learn all sorts of things.

Here's an example. Recently I've coached several players who tend to fall back as they loop forehands. The "simple" solution, of course, is to tell them to focus on rotating around and forward into the ball, i.e. "don't fall back." And I've seen coaches try this many times, and it doesn't work – because they are treating a symptom of a problem rather than the root of the problem. The real question is why is the player falling backwards – and the answer almost every time is that he's too far from the ball, with his left leg too far from the table. And so he's forced to reach a bit forward. The falling back is to keep his balance. Solution: Have the player stand closer to the ball, with the left leg closer to the table. Then he'll have a natural rotation into and through the ball, with no falling backwards and off balance afterwards.