November 25, 2024

Tip of the Week
How to Do a Relentless Three-Point Attack.

Teams, Coaching, and Foot
I’m rushing to get this blog out since I’m coaching at the MDTTC Teams Camp over the next three days, getting our players ready for the North American Teams, Fri-Sun, Nov. 29 – Dec. 1. There are currently 910 players and 226 teams – here’s the listing. There are 14 MDTTC junior teams. We’ll have seven MDTTC coaches working with them, including me.

I first played in the Teams in my first year of playing, way back in 1976, when I was 16. I’ve played or coached at them every year since – this is my 49th year in a row except for 2020, when they were cancelled due to Covid.

While coaching a junior group this weekend a couple of them had trouble hitting forehands down the line. They would often twist their arm around like a pretzel to get the racket to aim down the line, thereby messing up their stroke. The correct way is to either take the ball a little later while rotating the body and shoulders about more (often with back foot farther back) to line up the shot down the line, or to step in closer with the left foot (for a righty), which also rotates the body clockwise and puts you in position for that down the line shot.

I also worked with a group of advanced beginners on smashing. One of the best ways to do this is to put a box or some other object on the table, and feed multiball as they take turns trying to smash the ball into the target. Each time they hit it the target should move back some, until they finally hit it off the table, to great cheering. (We have a bunch of spaghetti collanders we use for this and to hold balls for service practice.) I had them do it three players at a time, each getting three forehands (from wide backhand, middle, wide forehand) as they rotated clockwise in a circle, taking turns, with a fourth player picking up balls and rotating in every two minutes or so.

Meanwhile, I’m still having problems with my right foot. I spent much of the weekend coaching, about half of it as a practice partner, and towards the end I was hobbling about. I saw a podiatrist last week and now have a new insole, but it’s uncomfortable. I haven’t tried it out playing yet.

Bill Lui RIP
Long-time Bay Area coach Bill Lui died on Nov. 13. He was one of the coaches that turned the Bay Area into a table tennis powerhouse, starting in the early 1990s or possibly earlier. For twenty years I regularly sat across table tennis courts from him, coaching our respective players. He was the 1996 USATT Developmental Coach of the Year.

Want to be a Coach or Team leader for World University Games Team in 2025?
Here’s the news item from the NCTTA.

US #1 Kanak Jha Has Youtube Page
Here it is.

Major League Table Tennis
Follow the action!

14 Must-Read Table Tennis Books
Here’s the article by Tom Lodziak.

Block Like a Pro – Top 5 tips from Craig Bryant
Here’s the video (7:18).

Butterfly Training Tips

New from Dr. Table Tennis

New from Beyond the Podium

New from PingSkills

New from Performance Biomechanics Academy Table Tennis

How to Play with LONG PIMPLES | Part 2
Here’s the video (3:06) from Pingispågarna. (Here’s Part 1.)

Backhand Shaving Technique (with Long Pips) with Yang Xiaoxin
Here’s the video (3:37) from PongSpace.

New from Table Tennis Daily

USATT Announces Election Timeline for Third and Fourth Elite Athlete Board Reps And Opens Nomination Process for USATT Athlete’s Advisory Council
Here’s the news item.

New from Steve Hopkins

New from ITTF

Furniture Pong
Here’s the video (7 sec)!

Building The Perfect Ping Pong Table
Here’s the video (8:06) from Pongfinity!

Non-Table Tennis - Even Yet Still More Pings and Pongs
My 22nd book just came out, “Even Yet Still More Pings and Pongs.” Nope, it’s not table tennis, it’s the newest collection of my science fiction & fantasy short stories. When I sell a story to a magazine or anthology, after it’s been published, I put them together in collections – and this is the fifth in the series. (Here are all my books.) As with my “Tips” series, I keep adding a word to the start, so there was “Pings and Pongs”; “More Pings and Pong”; “Still More Pings and Pongs”; “Yet Still More Pings and Pongs”; and now, just published, “Even Yet Still More Pings and Pongs” (156 pages)! Here’s the back cover description:

Here are 25 stories from the insane mind of Larry Hodges ... God and his pet squirrel are not happy with humanity ... What really happened when Neil and Buzz stepped on the Moon? ... How a silver bowl from Roman times destroyed and saved the world ... If a sentient computer is programmed to feel emotions, perhaps you shouldn’t put it at the highest setting ... Can a super-smart goldfish take over the world ... Meet the world’s first T-Rex superhero - but does he have humanity’s best interests in mind? ... A 4-D being collects 3-D beings for his wall - but runs into problems when he collects a vampire ... Aliens are poaching humans for their teeth! A dark allegory on the elephant and rhino poaching trade ... War is so pointless and endless that it might as well be played on a clock ... In a world of non-stop action, where superheroes constantly battle supervillains, watching paint drip might be the only break ... A human goes to war with the spiders under his skin ... A bullied werewolf boy settles all accounts on Halloween ... A family that eats grandma’s eyeballs, where virtue is the ultimate perversion ... And many more!

***
Send us your own coaching news!