It's Fun Hitting with the (Future) Stars!
Yesterday in our MDTTC camp I got to work with someone who I'm guessing you'll be hearing about in a few years – but for now, I'll just call him "Smash," since that's what he likes to do, and I started calling him that during the session. As he will carefully explain, he's not five years old, he's five and a half. He was in my multiball group for three hours, so I worked with him a lot. (I'd worked with him a few times before.) He's got nice strokes, can do footwork drills at a pretty fast pace without missing much, and is already starting to loop. How did he learn all this so young? Well, it helps living near a club like MDTTC. It also helps that his older brother is another fast up-and-coming junior (who you'll be hearing about even sooner), who, as Smash explained, has been teaching him to smash. He has good form, great focus, is very physical, and with an older brother to practice with, the sky's the ceiling.

Or perhaps I've just been hit in the head with a ping-pong ball one too many times. Or perhaps to me it's happened to two too (giggle) many times – yes, that's how many times I was smacked REALLY HARD in the head yesterday. It's part of the profession, but I probably get hit like this perhaps once a month. I got smacked twice in the forehead about five minutes apart by two very hard-hitting kids in multiball, and it left me with a headache.

But then ping-pong is a dangerous sport. One girl yesterday cut her finger trying to pry a broken ping-pong ball into two equal halves, and needed a band aid. The day before one ran into another during a two-player multiball footwork drill, and a player went left when he was supposed to go right, and they collided. And of course we spend a lot of time killing.

The Ping-Pong Apartments
Below is an essay I wrote in USATT Magazine in 1991. (It was then called Table Tennis Today.) Tim is including it in his latest history volume (see segment below). The state of our sport has dramatically improved since then – we have a much better product to sell. We've gone from 100 USATT certified coaches to 692; six full-time coaches to several hundred; one or two full-time clubs to almost 90; and from nearly all clubs using the "winner-stay-on" format to many or most clubs now offering regular leagues. (Note that the "Ec" in "Mr. Ec" referred to the USATT Executive Committee, which is now called the Board of Directors.)

The Ping-Pong Apartments
By Larry Hodges
(First published in USATT Magazine in 1991)

Mr. Ec bought the Ping Pong apartments in 1933.

The first thing he did was to take a tour of the facilities. He found the rooms were unheated, the plumbing broken, and there was no air conditioning. The building was drab and unkept, and rats and cockroaches infested the building. Paint was chipping.

Mr. Ec did not have the money for renovations, and so he couldn't fix up the building. He spent 52 years lamenting what he would do if he only had more money.

In 1985, Mr. Ec. received a grant from the Olympic Committee to fix up the Ping Pong Apartments. Suddenly he had more money than he knew what to do with!

It was a great time for ping pong. According to a Gallup Poll, over 21 million Americans had expressed an interest in the Ping Pong Apartments. Ping Pong was now an Olympic Sport. Yet, for some reason, few wanted to stay at the Ping Pong Apartments, once they saw the condition of the building.

USATT Board Meeting
The last few days have been a whir of activity. The main event, however, was the USATT board meeting in New Jersey on Saturday. Alas (or fortunately?), there were no fireworks, no one jumped on the table screaming political slogans, and against all expectations, we didn't vote to build a wall to keep out Chinese table tennis players, and make China pay for it.

I drove up (222 miles) with USATT lawyer Dennis Taylor on Friday afternoon. That night we had dinner with the board and all six USA Table Tennis Olympians – Timothy Wang, Yijun "Tom" Feng, Kanak Jha, Jiaqi Zheng, Lily Zhang, and Yue Wu. I had a long discussion with Cory Eider and Kagin Lee regarding what players should do about hidden serves.

Much of the board meeting the following day was reports followed by discussion. We had a roughly 40-minute discussion with new High Performance Director Cory Eider, where we had updates on the Olympics, National Team, funding, and (most important to me at the moment), the upcoming USATT Supercamp, July 10-24 at the Lily Yip TTC in New Jersey.

Regarding the USATT Supercamp, 22 of the best junior players from around the country will attend it, including the three Alguetti brothers, Allen and Amy Wang, Michael Tran, Klaus Wood, Tina Lin, and more. Regarding coaches, Cory will be there the entire time, and I'll be there for all but the last two days. Coaching for the first week will be Han Xiao, Wang Qing "Leon" Liang, and Richard McAfee. Coaching the second week will be Sean O'Neill, Lily Yip, and Samson Dubina. I plan to blog daily about it, both here and at the USATT page.

No Regular Blog Today…
Alas, just like last Monday, I just ran out of time. I drove up to the USATT board meeting in New Jersey on Friday at noon, and returned late Saturday night. After taking care of a pile of work, I went to bed at 2:30AM – and was up at 6:30AM so I could continue work with Tim Boggan on his History of U.S. Table Tennis by 7AM, as I'd promised him. We worked until 3PM, then I was off to the club to coach, returning at 9PM, just in time for Game of Thrones – which it's my Constitutional right to watch. (Fine, I admit it, I also watched Silicon Valley and Veep. Sunday 9-11PM is my weekly TV night.) At that point I was just too tired to do anything else, so I went to bed – and as promised, I'm back at my desk with Tim at 7AM, writing this as he taps his foot with folded arms and an icy stare that screams, "Will you gosh darn hurry up?" (But with slightly more colorful language.) The good news – while I'll be working all day and afternoons this week, I'll be free nights to do the blog, so no more missed blogs after today. (At least until I leave for the USA Nationals in July.)

However, I did the Tip of the Week in advance, so here it is!

Tip of the Week
Always Have at Least Two Options.

USATT and ITTF News Items
USATT has several more news items, as does the ITTF.

And here's a video of cats playing table tennis – set to music!

Cats Playing Table Tennis
Here's the video (2:54)!

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Send us your own coaching news!

Private Coaching
Despite the long hours working with Tim as well as all the USATT and MDTTC work, plus blogging and a zillion other things, I've managed to make all my private coaching sessions this past week. But coincidentally, five of my most regular students are now either out of town or about to go out of town, and we're starting our MDTTC summer camps on Monday, and so I will have no more private coaching for the next ten days or so. (However, this is offset because I'll likely be coaching at least in the mornings at the summer camps. I'm hoping to get some time off since I'm so busy right now.)

I had a session Wednesday night with "The Bionic Man," Navin Kumar, the man with the mechanical heart and Parkinson's. On Sunday he'd been taken by ambulance to the hospital with very bad flu. He spent the night, and was discharged on Monday – and we had a session scheduled that night. At first he planned to make it, but he finally decided (helped by doctor's imploring, no doubt) to postpone it, and so we did the make-up on Wednesday.

He's leaving on June 21 for Romania for a Paralympic tournament, so we're gearing up for match play. They are using Donic 3-star 40+ balls, so I'd told him to buy a dozen in advance – and that's what we used during the session. (For perspective, 11-year-old Daniel, another of my students, played two tournaments recently. In the first, he trained with regular training balls right up to the tournament – I didn't know until the last minute he was playing in it – and said afterwards he felt really uncomfortable with the very different tournament balls. I explained to him that you have to train with the ball you are going to use. So for the last few sessions before the MDTTC June Open this past weekend we only trained with Butterfly 40+ balls, the tournament ball – and he won Under 1700, his only event.)

Why Timmy Wore a Dunce Cap and Other Fascinating Stuff
As readers here know, I'm working with Tim Boggan on Volume 18 of History of U.S. Table Tennis. Tim had some old Executive Committee reports that he wanted in – but he'd unthinkingly underlined a number of passages that he wanted to focus on, forgetting that when I scanned them, the underlines would show. He asked if I could remove them in Photoshop, and I said yes, though it'd take about ten minutes. (I'd have to zoom in, and use the eraser tool at a very small size and go through it meticulously to avoid deleting any text.) I agreed to do it, on one condition. I rolled up a sheet of paper into a dunce cap and made him wear it until I was done with the corrections. He took it well. I think.

We've now done the covers, the four intro pages, and 13 chapters, totaling exactly 200 pages with 637 graphics. There will be 26 chapters, so 13 more to go. Figuring that the covers and intro pages are about as much work as a chapter, we're 14/27 of the way through. There's a lot of articles in this volume written by me, especially coaching articles and player profiles.

Here's the content, in order, of the last chapter we did, Chapter 13, pages 190-200:  

History of U.S. Table Tennis, Volume 18 – Status, Plus Other Stuff
We've been at it all day starting Thursday morning, excluding Saturday (when I ran the MDTTC June Open), so it's been five long days so far. We've done the covers, the four intro pages, and 11 chapters, totaling 169 pages with 421 graphics. There will be 26 chapters, so 15 more to go. Figuring that the covers and intro pages are about as much work as a chapter, we're 12/27 of the way through. (Alas, some of the latter chapters appear to be rather long.)

We're hampered by the fact that I'm putting in a good eight hours every day in addition to working with Tim from 7AM to 2:30PM each day. Mon-Fri I leave at 2:30 for the afterschool program, then private and group coaching, and then I return after 8PM or so to a huge backlog of work to do – last night I started work about 8:30PM and didn't finish until 2:30 AM – and went to bed right as Tim was getting up! (As I've mentioned, he keeps strange hours.) So we had a "late" start this morning, starting at 8AM instead of the usual 7AM. Tim was good about it, only smacked me across the face a few dozen times.

There's also the problem that on Friday afternoon I have to leave to drive to the USATT board meeting in New Jersey, and won't return until late Saturday night. Even worse, the MDTTC summer camps start on Monday – and though I might try to get out of them that week, I might be needed in the morning sessions (10AM-1PM). The good news? Four of my regular private students are all out of town (or about to do so), meaning I'll have more time with Timmy.  

Good news – last night was the first full night of sleep I've had since last Thursday morning – I got to bed at 11:30PM, was up at 6:30AM. There will be few of those in my future over the next couple weeks.

I mentioned "Other Stuff" in the headline above – and there's been a few:

Tip of the Week
The Difference Between a Drop Shot and a Short Push.

Will Shortz – 50 States, 1348 Consecutive Days!
On Sunday, Will Shortz did something we're pretty sure no one else has ever done before – he's now played table tennis in all 50 U.S. states! The final state was Hawaii, where Will played at the Aloha club. But it wasn't just 50 states – it also marked his 1,348 consecutive days playing table tennis! (That's every day for about 3.7 years.)

He's not through. Over the next three days during his Hawaii adventure he'll be playing in the Kona TTC, the North Kohala TTC, and the Waimea TTC. Accompanying him on this journey is Westchester TTC coach Robert Roberts.

There are pictures at the Aloha TTC Facebook page, including a nice one of Will with a cake commemorating both the 50 states and 1,348 streak. (Here's the non-Facebook version.)

What, you don't know who Will Shortz is? Yes, you, the one staring at the page in befuddlement? Shame on you, you illiterate klutz! He's the puzzle editor for the New York Times as well as the owner of the Westchester Table Tennis Center. Oh, and he can probably beat you – he's rated 1842, using the Seemiller grip.

Well, it finally happened - just too busy to do the blog this morning. I ran the MDTTC June Open on Saturday (here are the results), and got all the results sent to USATT for ratings that night, then on Sunday worked all day with Tim Boggan on the History of U.S. Table Tennis, and coached all night. (Yes, I also watched Game of Thrones, but who doesn't?) This morning I was up at 6AM, but have spent it all on publicity work for the upcoming Maryland State Championships. I promised Tim I'd be ready to work with him by 9AM today (we usually start at 7AM), and it's now past 9AM, and I haven't even been able to start on the blog or Tip of the Week. So let's skip today - but here's 45 seconds of four-table pong to tide you over! See you tomorrow. 

Day One: Tim Builds a Wall Around Me and Makes Me Pay For It
Tim arrived precisely at 9AM yesterday morning. I'd just put up my blog, and had about one minute of relaxation . . . and then it begins. Within one minute of arriving he's already handed me a stack of pictures that need scanning. 

Then we do the covers. The front are nice shots of the 1990 USA Nationals Men's and Women's Champions, Jim Butler and Wei Wang. The back cover is ten different pictures – Joe Ng, Eric Boggan, Bill Meiklejohn, David Zhuang, Lily Yip, Johnny Huang, Insook Bhushan and Pete May, Sean O'Neill, Diana Gee (with a Parisian backdrop), and Huazhang Xu.

Then we began the interior: Copyright, About the Author, Dedication (to Jim McQueen), and Acknowledgement pages. And then we did Chapter One, which ran from page 5 to 29, and was subtitled, "1990: USTTA Non-Tournament Potpourri." It started off with the political battle and exchanges between President Mel Eisner and (soon-to-be president) Dan Seemiller. There were a number of letters to the editor (published in the USATT magazine, then called Table Tennis Topics). Then came articles such as "Chinese Team Inspires Call for Renewed Ping Pong Diplomacy (by Sheri Soderberg Pittman); "Making Money at the Top" (by me!) and one on Confidence (also by me!); "What is Wrong with the USTTA and What Should We Do About It"; a column by Tom Wintrich where he criticized USTTA's lack of marketing; "Taking the High View"; "White Shirts, Anyone?"; Coaching Corner (by Richard McAfee); "Judge and Decide" (by Dr. Michael Scott); "Rub of the Green" (by Tim Boggan); "Celebrity Golf"; a few obituaries; and a lot more! My quick counts says we've placed 59 graphics so far – but believe me, Tim's barely gotten started!

So it's 29 pages down, about 420 to go….