January 6, 2024

Tips of the Week (since my last blog)

2024 US Open
This was a strange tournament for me as it was literally the first US Open or Nationals since the early 1990s where I was primarily a player. Normally I’m coaching at these events and playing a few events on the side. We normally have around 15-20 of our junior players from MDTTC at these events – our record was 37 at one US Open. But this year we only had three, and they had coaches already, so I wasn’t really needed.

Readers of this blog know that I decided to make a comeback as a player back in August, but I didn’t expect it to be my main thing at the Open. But after 30+ years mostly coaching at these events, this time I was a player.

And I won two golds! I won both Over 40 and Over 60 Hardbat Singles. Normally I use sponge, but I play hardbat on the side. Two other events I hoped to do well in were Over 60 Singles and Doubles (with sponge). Alas, I didn’t play well in those events. But I now have a good idea of why.

I used to wear glasses for distance vision, but not for reading. Then a strange thing happened – as I got older, my distance vision got better and better, while my near vision got worse. I used to wear glasses for table tennis, movies, and driving, but I stopped about ten years ago. A year or so ago, when I last saw an optometrist, my distance vision was nearly 20-20. I even passed the vision test at the MVA without glasses with ease. But over the past year it’s gotten progressively worse, and things in the distance became blurry. Right after the Open I saw an optometrist, and found out why. My vision in my left eye is now 20-70, in my right eye it’s 20-150! This means that, for example, with my right eye what a person with normal vision can see from 20 feet is like 150 feet away for me. No wonder I couldn’t read spins! That affected me more in sponge table tennis, where there’s more spin, than in hardbat. But this will all be fixed – I’m having cataract surgery in February.

The net result was in Over 60 Doubles, where I played with Sung Yang (we were seeded #2), I played poorly, struggling to read both service spins and balls hit by an opponent with long pips, and so we lost in the quarterfinals. (A further complication is I’m told he had frictionless long pips. I won’t go into that here.) In Over 60 Singles, I also had trouble reading spins, as well as reacting to quick-hit shots, and also lost in the quarterfinals. During these matches, I remember feeling like I couldn’t read the spin but didn’t realize just how bad my vision had become.

But I also found another problem with my game to fix. I’m a forehand-oriented player. My backhand is steady but not very aggressive. I’ve worked on that these past few months, and in drills, my backhand is now strong and aggressive. But in games, both at the Open and in practice before, it was as if I couldn’t react to shots. Part of that was likely the vision problem. But I now realize a good part of it was my ready position. Over and over opponents would hit quick shots to my backhand, and I’d struggle to get my racket back in time to make a good shot, and so ended up just getting the ball back without much pace. Why? Because, for some reason, in my ready position, I’d started holding my racket too far out in front. Talk about a small thing that made a big difference!

So, I’m now working on keeping my racket closer in for my ready position so my backhand backswing isn’t so rushed, plus I’ll get the cataract surgery, plus I hope to lose another ten pounds or so. And then I’ll unleash the full fury of my game on the world! I think this news has leaked out – do you think it’s a coincidence that Ma Long and Fan Zhendong are suddenly semi-retiring?

Overall, the training I’ve done with Lidney Castro these past few months have really paid off – despite the vision problem, I’m playing much better, plus I went from 210 to 193 pounds. With the fixes above, I think I can get to 2200+ level, which will make me strongly competitive in Over 60 events.

I did have a few interesting happenings. In one match, an opponent said something rather sarcastic before a match, and somehow I let it bother me. Before the match started I discovered my pulse was racing at over 100! I had to focus on breathing to bring it down, but the result was I started out poorly before getting it together. I had another match where I played well for most of the match, but badly tired at the end and so had to struggle – again, my pulse shot over 100, this time from exhaustion from running about smacking forehands. I had another weird experience. In a hardbat match (games to 21), I was up 16-14 in the first but the opponent played well at the end, and I lost, 21-18. The opponent put the score down as 21-5! When I saw the score listed online, and someone kidded me about it, I went to the control desk and got them to correct it – I had witnesses to verify the score was 21-18.

There was an apparent record 1,485 players in the tournament. (There were about that many at the 1990 US Open, but reports only say there were “1,450 players,” which sounds like an estimate, so the exact numbers that year aren’t clear. So I won’t quibble with calling it a “record” this year.) Why so many? Because players were starved to go back to Las Vegas. People have been telling USATT that for years.

Since the Mandalay Hotel and Convention Center are all in one huge building that seemingly goes on forever, during my eight days in Las Vegas I literally went outside ONE TIME!!! That was when I joined Ryan Lin and his dad Hung to see magician David Copperfield. I also explored the Mandalay Shark Aquarium – I think it’s the third time I’ve gone through it.

And now it’s back to both coaching and training. I hope to be competitive in the Over 60 events at the US Nationals, both sponge and hardbat. However, I expect we’ll have a lot more of our junior players there, so I’ll have to find a balance between coaching and playing.

Weekend Coaching and MDTTC Party
I did five hours of group junior training sessions over the weekend. I spent a lot of it feeding multiball and acting as a practice partner. I had an interesting experience as a practice partner for one of our top players. I’d just spent 20 minutes as a practice partner for a younger kid, about 1600. Against him, I was super consistent. Then I was up against a much stronger player with a much stronger and spinnier loop – and for the first five minutes, my blocks were flying everywhere! It took time to adjust, but then it was like night and day – after five minutes of missing, the subconscious got the message and adjusted, and after that I was back to being a backboard, blocking everything back.

In multiball, the focus was on fundamentals, in particular footwork. I thought this was a good time to explain the specific purpose of each drill so the kids don’t think we’re just making up random patterns. For example, we did the 2-1 drill, also known as the backhand-forehand-forehand drill, also known as the Falkenberg Drill. In this drill, the player does three shots in succession, and then repeats: backhand from backhand side, forehand from backhand side, forehand from forehand side. As I explained to the kids, these are the three most common moves in table tennis.

Afterwards we had our annual club party. Lots of pizza and brownies! (When it was time for dessert I challenged the younger kids, saying, “Brownies are for frownies. No brownies unless you can frown for ten seconds.” They struggled, since most were suffering from the giggles and ignored my declarations that “There’s no smiling in table tennis!”, but all managed to get brownies. Afterwards we had “open play,” where I brought out my racket collection for them to use – five mini-paddles (with Tenergy on both sides), two over-sized rackets, hardbats, woodbats, and the “Ping-Pong Shabbat” book – see below. Most popular, however, was when I put two tables together, end-to-end, with a barrier in the middle as a net (held up by a chair on each side, with the regular nets removed). Playing on an 18-foot table is almost like playing tennis!

Ping-Pong Shabbat: The True Story of Champion Estee Ackerman
I just read it – here’s where you can get it at Amazon. It’s an inspirational kid’s book, 32 pages long, and took about five minutes to read – but reading time wasn’t the point. It told Estee’s story about the predicament of having a finals match scheduled during the Jewish Shabbat and how she dealt with it. It’s got a perfect 5.0 score through 65 ratings.

Estee normally uses sponge, but like me, she plays hardbat on the side, and at a high level. She and I won, and Hardbat Mixed Doubles at the 2017 US Open, and Hardbat Open Doubles at the 2021 US Open.

I’ve added the book to my table tennis book collection – 338 of them! But I’ve discovered a side benefit of the book – it’s hardcover and just the right size for chopping. I’ve been keeping it in my playing bag and taking on challenges from our junior players with it!

Virginia Tech Table Tennis Scholarship
Here’s info from NCTTA! Special thanks to Jim and Elizabeth Mossberg for the creation of this TT scholarship. (Jim Mossberg is a long-time player and leader in Maryland Table Tennis and a big help to me when I started playing in 1976.) Applicants must major in the College of Engineering (which includes computer science), Computational Modeling & Data Analytics, Mathematics, Physics, or Statistics. Here are two other links – I’m told there might be some updates.

2024 Coach of the Year Nominations Open for USA Table Tennis
Here’s the USATT info page.

Tribute to Mossa Barandao at the North American Teams
Here’s the video (3:26). Mossa (RIP) was a pillar of the DC/Maryland table tennis community.

Table Tennis History January 2025
Here’s the newest issue. Here are past issues.

Unpredictable Serves, Unstoppable Game: Malte Möregårdh on Mastering Serve Variation
Here’s the article.

Enzo Angles: The Table Tennis Adventure
Here are his coaching videos.

PPTT Podcast Episode #1 - Introduction + Rapid Learning Techniques for Table Tennis!
Here’s the first episode (14:08) of the new podcast from Peak Performance Table Tennis.

From Good to Great: Marcus Sjöberg on Building Your Game Around What You Do Best
Here’s the article.

Technical Coaching Articles

Calls Erupt Against World Table Tennis’ Rule as Support for Olympic Champion’s Decision Grows
Here’s the article from MSN. Since this article came out Ma Long has also withdrawn from the world rankings. Here’s the ITTF article on it.

Coaching and News from All Over
Since I’ve been for a month, rather than try to list every interesting article, here are links to some of the main news and coaching pages that have been active in that time, and you can pick and choose. I’ll get back to linking to individual articles next week.

Top Three Best Ways to Spend New Years
Here’s the table tennis video (21 sec)!

Head-Hunting Ping-Pong
Here’s the video (27 sec) showing the dangers of being a coach!

Santa Loses at Ping-Pong
Here’s the cartoon! (Here’s the non-Facebook version.)

Non-Table Tennis – Four Science Fiction & Fantasy Sales in Past Two Weeks
Three of them went to a pair of anthologies from Dragon Soul Press. Here’s my science fiction & fantasy bibliography, with links to many of the stories.

  • “As a Matter of Fact the Universe Does Revolve Around Me” sold to Dragon Soul’s Between Realms anthology. A teenage girl is literally the center of the universe, which revolves around her, and scientists cannot understand it. Then Galactic Citizens show up, and she begins a multiversal tour.
  • “Pretty Pictures at War” sold to Dragon Soul’s Between Realms anthology (same as the above). After a well-meaning 4-D being inadvertently humiliates him, a vengeful billionaire invades their 4-D universe with an army. Things don’t go as planned.
  • “Dragon Cuisine” sold to the Dragon Soul’s Dragon Flight anthology. A young dragon leaves home to seek his fortune, and battles with his food – humans. A wizard turns him into a huge, dragon-sized frog, who hops around smacking people with his tongue. Can he find a human princess to kiss him and transform him back?
  • “Endlessly Spinning in the Zero Gravity of Space” sold to Book Worms. In the future, criminals are sent to orbital prisons around Neptune, have their arms and legs amputated (care of sadistic guard Pete), their head and torso are strapped into life machines with supplies that keep them healthy and alive, and ejected out of the solar system - spinning, to make it worse - where they’ll live long, incredibly boring lives between the stars. But what happens when one of these criminals isn’t human, and cutting its arms and legs off only makes it angry and determined for revenge? Poor ‘ole Pete . . . and Earth!!!  

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