February 23, 2026

Tips of the Week

Digging Holes and Table Tennis Junior Group Training
Imagine you’re a kid, perhaps 6-8 years old, and your parents sign you up for a class on . . . digging holes. At the first session, the coach goes on and on about how if you work hard, you can become really good at digging holes. He then has you dig holes, and keeps working on your hole-digging technique, and you gradually get better at digging holes. It’s hard work, but the coach keeps assuring you that with all this work, you’ll become a great hole digger. You keep improving at hole-digging. But after a while, you get tired of all this hole-digging and begin to lose focus. You still do what the coach asks and you still slowly improve, but your heart isn’t really in it as you don’t find hole-digging fun and you’re just not that interested in getting good at it. And so you never reach your potential in hole-digging nor do you enjoy it and want to continue as a hole-digger.

Do you see the problem here?

The coach has set up a dynamic where he’s focused on teaching the player how to become an expert in digging holes, and expertly teaches the student how to do so. But he hasn’t given the student a reason to want to dig holes or become good at doing so. And that is a primary reason why many junior programs fail to produce many top players while others do so regularly.

Many coaches are good at teaching kids proper technique. That’s the easy part. The hard part is teaching them to love the sport by showing them it’s both fun and something they want to get good at. And that’s what many coaches forget. Finding the right mix of serious and keeping it fun may be the most important aspect of a coach’s job, especially when dealing with younger, newer players.

It’s easy to send a group of kids under age ten out to the tables and call out drills for 90 minutes and work on each player’s technique. It looks like a serious table tennis program that’ll develop players. But until you’ve shown them that table tennis is fun and given the kids a reason to want to get good, it rarely produces great results. You end up with kids going through the motions because they are expected to, and they get pretty good. But they aren’t self-motivated and so their practice is sub-par, even if they are putting in the work, and so “pretty good” is their upper limit.

Now imagine the coach who shows them table tennis is fun and something they want to get good at, as well as teaching proper technique. He gives them regular breaks so they are mentally fresh throughout the session. In that 90-minute session, the last 30 minutes are games, designed for the age and level of the players. For younger beginner kids, it’s target practice games, where the coaches feed multiball and the kids aim for targets on the table – water bottles, cups, etc. They develop their stroking skills and accuracy while having fun – and they want to come back and get better!

As the players get older and better, they play more regular games, often with improvised rules to encourage them to develop aspects of their game, such as serve and attack. (The rule here would be you lose the point if you don’t serve and attack, where you might also require the receiver to push back against short backspin serves.) The varying improvised rules not only improves their game, but makes it more interesting. When a player shows interest in one aspect of the game – say, learning a certain serve, or flipping, or backhand loop – instead of going with the “schedule,” the coach stops and teaches the student what he’s shown an interest in. He also punctuates sessions with humor and table tennis flamboyance – demonstrating trick shots that shows the kids the “fun” side of the game and hooks them into becoming serious players.

When the players want to get better, the coach’s work is mostly done. Then he can do the easy part and teach technique. He explains the purpose of each drill so they understand how that drill will improve their game, and the now-hooked players work much harder at the drill then they would have if they were just doing it because they are expected to do so. As the hooked players get older, they gradually transition into more and more serious training – but now they are working hard on their own because they really want to improve, and so will reach their potential, and are likely lifelong players.

Ping-Pong Paddles Can’t Talk!
I had a long Zoom meeting last night with the illustrator for my upcoming children’s picture book, “Ping-Pong Paddles Can’t Talk!” She’s done rough illustrations for each page, as well as several cover options, and had a number of questions. We went over the pages, one by one. I hope to have a final cover in the next couple of weeks. The book should be out in April. It’s a humorous Seussian-like rhyming book for children. It introduces kids, roughly 7-10, to table tennis. It features a nervous boy and his talking paddle in their first tournament, where he meets and plays a girl who is really good, and they have an adventurous match. Along the way, kids learn about the sport, with themes on facing your fears, working toward a goal, honesty, and friendship. It’s about 3,000 words, 77 four-line stanzas and a few other miscellaneous lines.

If you’re a dealer and would like to sell this – or any of my other books – contact me and I’ll send you a wholesale price list.

2026 Classic Table Tennis World Cup
Here are some more links. I blogged about this last week.

Major League Table Tennis

New from Butterfly

New from MH Table Tennis

New from Pingispågarna

New from PongSpace

How Many Hours Should You Train for Improvement in Table Tennis?
Here’s the article from Tom Lodziak.

New from PingSunday
Here’s their video page – 16 new videos in the last two days!

Backhand Secrets 95% of Players Miss
Here’s the video (8:51) from Andreas Levenko

How 15 Days at Ti Long Club Changed Me – Indian State Champion Speaks
Here’s the video (4:32)

Seth Pech Sweden Division One 2026
Here’s the video (9:02) from Seth with tactical commentary.

Forehand and Backhand Push Roadmap
Here’s the video (26:10) from Drupe Pong.

Two GOATs. One Rule: Only Attacks Ma Long vs Fan Zhendong
Here’s the video (1:17) from Street TT.

Ma Lin: The Champion Who Wouldn’t Let Go
Here’s the video (5:01) from Beyond the Podium.

New from PingSkills
Ask the Coach

New from NCTTA

New from Steve Hopkins/Butterfly

USA Table Tennis Returns to Las Vegas for 2026 and 2027 U.S. Open Championships
Here’s the USATT news item.

ITTF News

Waking Up a Ping-Pong Player
Here’s the video (11 sec)!

Table Tennis on Ice
Here’s the video (12 sec)!

We Challenged The WORLD'S ULTIMATE TRICKSTER!
Here’s the video (13:07) from Table Tennis Daily, as they take on Romain Ruiz of France.

Non-Table Tennis
I just sold two science fiction stories. "Teeth: Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Into the Garden Again" (2,000 words), a darkly humorous story, sold to the Perilous Plants anthology from WonderBird Press. Humans accidentally commit speciocide by genetically creating intelligent carrots, and in the ultimate clash of species, vegetable brains won out over meat. With humans gone, carrots rule the world . . . until a rabbit escapes the zoo and terrorizes a local school. The main characters are Aei and Ua, a teacher and child who happen to be carrots. The other sale went to one of the big “pro” markets – but, alas, I’m sworn to secrecy about it until sometime in March.

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