Tip of the Week

How to Handle the First Loop Off Backspin.

A Commuting Weekend - Table Tennis and SF

I spent the weekend shuttling back and forth between coaching at the Maryland Table Tennis Center and being a panelist at the annual Capclave Science Fiction Convention. By great luck (or was it?), Capclave was held at the Hilton in Gaithersburg, about five minutes from MDTTC. I managed to cancel or postpone some coaching that conflicted with panels at Capclave. By simple good luck, my morning coaching on Saturday and Sunday were with beginners, meaning I didn't get all sweaty and so was able to just change into normal clothes and rush over to Capclave. So here's how my weekend went. (Panels are usually one-hour affairs where 3-5 writers or others talk about a topic in front of an audience.) Here's my online Capclave Bio - note the table tennis ice cube mention!

Panelists are allowed to display their books, and so I displayed on a mini-bookstand in front of me my collection of SF & Fantasy stories, "Pings and Pongs," and explained the title pertained to my table tennis background - which usually brought a few questions.

FRIDAY

Topspin Rallies

One of my beginning/intermediate students in a session yesterday kept pushing my topspin and sidespin serves, and of course they popped up or went off the end. This same junior is all over the ball in "normal" topspin rallies - he's primarily a hitter, though he loops against backspin. You'd think that he'd want these topspin and sidespin serves since he can use his regular forehand and backhand drives both to start and continue the rally, not to mention ending the point with his big forehand. Many players, especially juniors, are almost robotic (in a good way) once they get into a topspin rally, hitting and countering with ease as this is exactly what they do in most practice drills.

And yet, given the chance to immediately go into these comfortable topspin rallies, this student and many others choose to push the serve back. Why is this?

I believe it's the mindset when returning serves. They do get a lot of backspin serves, and so they find pushing the safest return. And so their mindset is to push the serve to get into the rally. Except, of course, when you push a topspin or sidespin serve, there is no rally. (At higher levels, of course, players can chop down on these balls as a variation, more of a chop-block than a push, but that's a separate issue.)

At most levels, when returning serves, you have to make a quick decision: Does the serve have backspin? If yes, then you can push it. If no, then you stroke it.

You don't have to push the backspin, of course. If it's short, you can flip it. If it's long, you can loop it. You can also drive it, whether it's short or long. And you use the same strokes if the ball doesn't have backspin, except you stroke mostly forward.

Placement of Loops

I coached a lefty junior yesterday, and was working on his backhand loop when he said, "I don't like backhand looping. Every time I do it, my opponents smash." I asked him to show me the backhand loop that kept getting smashed, and sure enough, it was a soft, spinny one that went crosscourt from his lefty backhand to a righty opponent's forehand. No wonder it was getting smashed!!!

Slow, spinny loops are effective if they go deep to the backhand, but only to the forehand side of a player with a relatively weak forehand. Soft loops to the forehand are easy to smash for many players since the body isn't in the way - you just hit through it. On the backhand side, however, if the slow loop goes deep, the body is in the way and so the player is jammed, and smashing them can be difficult. So slow loops that go deep to the backhand are usually just blocked back, and usually not that well. (Slow loops that go short to the backhand, however, are dead meat to any player with a decent backhand. They should be smacked away.) 

In general, soft loops should go deep to the wide backhand, aggressive loops to the wide forehand (since the forehand block is usually slower) and to the middle (i.e. the playing elbow, midway between forehand and backhand, so the opponent has to make a quick decision on which to use, and then move into position).

There are many exceptions to this rule. Some players, including myself, are looking to step around to use the forehand from the backhand side, and so even a soft loop to the wide forehand can often catch us going the wrong way if we over-anticipate or stand too far toward our backhand side. And others try to counterloop everything on the forehand, and are often too slow to react to a slow loop, especially if it lands short. It all depends on the opponent. 

Coaching in the Wilderness and Run-ins with Animals

I do some coaching each week on the road, including a trip out into Virginia. They pay me double to do this, otherwise I wouldn't want to leave the safe confines of the Maryland Table Tennis Center, which is eight minutes from my house. The kid I'm coaching in Virginia is five years old, and like most kids his age has an attention span of roughly from now to now. So I find all sorts of interesting ways of keeping him interested during our one-hour sessions - mostly with targets on the table (giant rubber frogs, stacks of cups, etc.) or by setting up imaginary scenarios where he has to do something or the world will explode. This kid lives in a mansion in the middle of woods - a great place to grow up.

Yesterday after I drove down their front driveway (about two hundred yards) and pulled into the street out front, I found myself surrounded by six deer. I'd driven right into their midst and then stopped my car, and rather than run, they all just stared at me as if they were used to this. I stayed absolutely still, and after a minute they ignored me. Four more joined them, and now ten deer surrounded me. As if that weren't enough, I very large hawk sat perched on a telephone cable just over the street, looking down on us like the specter of death.

After about five minutes the deer all took off suddenly as another car came by. (Apparently my car wasn't as scary.) As I drove out, four more deer came out onto the road, blocking my path. They froze for a moment, and then they too took off. A minute later, as I drove home, I passed a large horse farm with dozens of grazing horses.

Tip of the Week:

Training Cycles.

My Weekend

I'll tell you about my weekend, and then you tell me about yours. Mine was about evenly split between table tennis and my outside interest, science fiction & fantasy writing, along with some Baltimore Orioles baseball.

FRIDAY: Friday is ancient history now, and I only vaguely remember what I did after doing the blog in the morning. I was a practice partner for our junior program that night (5-7), and unfortunately set our junior program back ten years by going 5-0, with wins over a pair of 2200 players (both 3-0, though one wasn't a junior) and a 2300 player (3-1). As I told the 2300 player, "I'm going to get a swelled head." (I'm too old and stiff to compete at that level anymore!)

SATURDAY: I coached a beginning junior class from 10:30AM to Noon, coached two others players from 2-4 PM, and then went home. (I twinged my chest and shoulder near the end of this session, which is worrisome.) Normally we have a 4:30-6:30 training session, but with Coach Jack in China until the end of October (vacation) and with most of the club taken over by the local Coconut Cup tournament (a local mostly-Chinese event, over 100 players), we cancelled it. I spent the rest of the night reading "Behold the Man" by Michael Moorcock. Isn't that how normal people spend Saturday nights?

Columbus Day and Pongcast

Today is Columbus Day, a Federal Holiday. Who am I to go against Federal Law and work today? I'll be back tomorrow with both the blog and the Tip of the Week. For now, let's contemplate the surprise of the American Indians in 1492 who discovered their lands had been "discovered" by Columbus, who no doubt looked forward to rising economic prosperity due to trade in the worldwide economy with their new European partners, all of whom had properly stamped green cards and visas.

If only the Indians had foreseen the rise of ping-pong 400 years later, and counterlooping with tensored inverted sponge in 500, they could have set up training camps in their cornfields and among the buffalo, and gotten such a head start on the Chinese that they'd dominate the sport with their tomahawk serves and obsidian blades.

But for you diehards who absolutely need their daily TT fix, here's Pongcast TV Episode 16 (21:40), which covers the recent Men's World Cup.

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Value of the Backhand Loop

If I could go back 36 years and tell myself one thing as I was developing my game, I'd tell myself to develop my backhand loop.

Sponges weren't nearly as good back then as modern ones, and so it was much harder to backhand loop with great power without backing well off the table to give yourself time for a bigger swing. The thinking for many was that if you develop your footwork and forehand, you don't need as much of a backhand attack - i.e., "one gun is as good as two." And backhand loop? It was a nice shot, but not really necessary.

And so I didn't really develop a backhand loop until I'd played many years. The result is it's not natural or particularly strong, can be erratic, and is not a particularly instinctive part of my game.

With modern sponges you can loop just about anything, even balls that land short over the table (especially with the backhand, where you can wrist-loop it), and so players pick up the backhand loop early as a dangerous weapon. A good backhand loop gets you out of those pushing rallies (including pushing back deep serves to the backhand) that put you at the mercy of the opponent's loop. Meanwhile, I still struggle to get myself to backhand loop against deep serves (I can't step around and loop forehand every time), and against quick, angled pushes to my backhand, especially after a short serve to my forehand. You don't have to rip these backhand loops; consistency, depth, and spin are key. (You can often get away with a weak loop if it consistently goes deep.)

Just as difficult is backhand looping in a rally. These days many of our up-and-coming juniors backhand loop (often off the bounce) just about everything - or at least topspin their backhands to the point where, compared to backhands of yesteryear, they are backhand loops. This turns players like me into blockers, and not in a good way. 

Coaching Footwork

Someone posted on the about.com table tennis forum on how difficult it must be to coach footwork in the U.S., since most coaching here is done one-on-one rather than in groups. Because of this, he thought that coaches can't really see what the student is doing, and so can only coach strokes, not footwork.

It's a good point, but it's not really a problem for good coaches. You teach footwork one-on-one by having the student do it without the ball, where you often do it together, with the student matching the way the coach does it and making corrections as necessary. If you have a student shadow practice footwork this way regularly, they learn it. Then, when you get to the table, you can tell by their body posture and positioning if they are doing it correctly.

The most important aspects to stress are foot and body positioning; balance (which involves moving with your feet, not with your hands, i.e. reaching); and the idea that you don't decide whether you have to move, you assume you will always have to move. 

Yesterday Was a Bad Day (mostly non-table tennis)

Let's see, Obama didn't perform well in the debate, the Orioles lost, the Yankees won, two of my three TT students cancelled, I had a headache half the day, a new online video of our club got our web address wrong (see below), the sole of my shoe broke, and from my todo list I didn't update the "Celebrities Playing Table Tennis" page or work on the Codex contest SF story I started last night. Can we have a Groundhog Day replay?

MDTTC Video

USA vs. Belgium Clubs

Someone emailed me yesterday saying he was pretty sure Belgium didn't have 500 full-time clubs, as I'd quoted someone posting yesterday. There's no way to judge from here. But the key is that both seem to agree they have 500 clubs in an area about the size of Maryland with about twice the population. Maryland, the state with the highest percentage of USATT members among its population, has only six clubs. That's about an 83-1 ratio by area, or 42-1 by population. I think we're outgunned.

The writer also pointed out that clubs in Europe are organized differently and said there's no point in comparing numbers, but I disagree. People are people, and if we create a good product, they will come. Every time someone has opened a nice table tennis club in the U.S. and run it properly, the people have come. The limiting factor isn't the U.S.; it's the small number of people in the U.S. able and willing to create such clubs. Sure, Belgium and other European countries have more government support, but entrepreneurs in the U.S. have shown over and over that professional table tennis clubs can make it in the U.S.  Look no further than the San Francisco Bay area, where new full-time clubs seem to pop up every week.

Table Tennis Centers in Maryland, the U.S., and Belgium

On Friday at the Maryland Table Tennis Center I was wondering how USATT would be different if all their board members were required to spend a week at one of the "elite" training centers. Their perspective on table tennis in the U.S., and where it could go, might be a bit different from what they are used to.

There are about 50 full-time table tennis centers in the U.S. (Current count: 53; let me know if I'm missing any.) Of these, perhaps 5-8 can be considered "elite," i.e. ones with large junior development programs that consistently develop strong players. Key here is both the elite aspect and the large number of players they have.