Disabled Veterans Camp
Yesterday we had our third annual Disabled Veterans Camp. (Technically, it's a camp for Veterans with Disabilities and members of the Armed Forces with Disabilities.) The camp was 10AM to 1PM, with six players (all marines), five of them more or less advanced beginners who played at a military base. I was the coach, with local Steve Hochman assisting for the third year in a row. Here's a group picture. I'll try to put in names later – being bad with names, I discovered afterwards I wasn't sure about all of them, and so will have to double check. That's Steve on far right, me third from the right. Standing between us is Sergeant Marvin Bogie, who came to the camp two years ago, and is now about 1600 – and is a USATT certified coach!
Trying to do a three-hour clinic is like trying to recite all the digits of pi, the entire history of mankind, and jogging around the world, all in 180 minutes. So I did the best I could. I divided the camp into seven segments. Since there were six, I split them into two groups of three, and Steve and I took turns with each group. In my group, I'd work with one (mostly multiball), one would be on the robot, and the third was on ball pickup. Steve did both live and multiball, with the other two hitting with each other live.
- Grip and Stance. Five were shakehanders, one penholder. Most had reasonable grips, but two had their fingers nearly down the middle. Most held the racket too tightly. I went over the importance of a more neutral grip. Then we went over the ready stance, where I showed how a table tennis ready position is like covering someone in basketball, except with hands down.
- Forehand. Two of the players tended to hit the ball way off to the side, with no shoulder rotation, so we worked on that. In general, the players had decent basics.
- Backhand. Most had surprisingly good backhands.
- Footwork. This is where they learned that table tennis is a game of speed, spin, and MOVEMENT! We demonstrated various footwork drills, then went out and practiced them.
- Pushing. We taught both forehand and backhand. I went over the importance of doing everything pretty well – low, deep, heavy, quick, angled, and able to go to both corners. I also went over pushing short.
- Looping and Blocking. We didn't have as much time on this as I'd like, so we only covered forehand loop (feeding backspin with multiball), and demoed the backhand loop. We also taught blocking the loop.
- Serving. The focus was on spin and deception. I went over how to create great spin (grippy and bouncy racket; racket acceleration with arm and especially wrist; and grazing contact), and deception (sheer quantity of spin; semi-circular motion with varying contact; and spin/no-spin combos). I also demoed the various serving motions – pendulum, reverse pendulum, backhand, tomahawk, reverse tomahawk, and windshield-wiper. I did a demo on how backspin pulls the ball backwards, and the big curves you get with sidespin. I also went over fast serves. Then they went out and practiced.
And then we were done! Or were we? We had a little fun for 15 minutes as the players attempted to return my serves. Then I couldn't resist showing off demoing some trick shots – the bounce-back-over-the-net backspin serve; the fifty-foot serve; blowing the ball in the air; etc. Several stayed around for a bit to talk table tennis. Marvin gave a talk to the others about how they could use the GI Bill to go to college.
USATT bought and sent us rackets and balls from Zeropong. The rackets came in during the session, but nobody up front thought to mention it to me, and when I discovered them there after the session, all but one player had left. So I gave that player his racket, and am mailing off the others to the players this afternoon.
Thanks for setting this up goes to USATT Director of Para Programs Jasna Rather; USATT; MDTTC and Wen Hsu; Rachel Jordan (Warrior Athlete Reconditioning Program Manager at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center); and super-coach Steve Hochman!
Oh, but we're not done – that night I gave a private lesson to Marvin Bogie, the 1600 player mentioned above. He has a strong backhand – until recently he had short pips, and now with his inverted he can both hit and loop the ball from that side. His forehand needs a little more work as he's trying to transition into mostly looping on that side. He tended to take the ball too much in front, which leads to looping mostly with the upper body and arm, which costs you power and control. (The two often go together.) We spent much of the session focusing on various forehand drills. We also did some work on looping and then hitting with the backhand, and on serve and forehand attack.
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